Survivor Episode 4 Recap: Dirty Deed

This week, Survivor opens with the JT trying to do some serious damage control after his plan to vote out Sandra backfires in a major way, resulting in his closest ally on his tribe voted out of the game.  But Nuku isn’t the only tribe experiencing drama.  Over on Mana, Debbie is wreaking havoc on a seemingly peaceful tribe, making for one of the most notable moments of this episode.  As always, consider yourself warned, spoilers ahead!

Top Moments from Survivor Episode 4

1. Debbie’s major freak out:  Debbie has always been a quirky character, but this week showed both the audience and Brad Culpepper an entirely new side of her.  A major component of this episode’s reward challenge was balancing across a beam carrying a ball on different objects.  Debbie immediately tells her team that she has excellent balance so Brad naturally suggests that she do the balance beam portion.  Makes sense, right? Apparently not.  Once the challenge is underway all the teams are pretty evenly matched until it’s Debbie’s portion of the challenge.  To say it was a disaster is to put it lightly.  Debbie could not make it across the beam balancing a ball with a handle and she loses the reward challenge for her tribe.  Instead of bowing out gracefully, she proceeds to yell at Brad, saying he was a dictator who just tells people what to do, implying that she didn’t want to do the balancing portion in the first place.  In what I think might be the first Survivor flashback ever, we see Debbie telling Brad she’s great at balancing.  The producers must want to really make clear how delusional Debbie was being because based on her freak-out the audience could very easily get confused about what actually happened.  Debbie had apparently rewritten history in her mind.  She argued that Hali cost them the challenge by taking at least ten minutes on her balancing portion while Debbie zipped across the beam in two minutes, which was just flat out false.  On the opposite end of the spectrum, Brad kept completely calm and even apologized to Debbie for no reason.  This included maintaining his cool during the immunity challenge, where Debbie was straight-up heckling her very own team!  If anything, this episode made me respect Brad even more for keeping his cool in the face of the Debbie explosion.  I suspect if Brad wasn’t already favoring Hali over Debbie, he definitely is now and Debbie should be very thankful that the Mana tribe wasn’t the one at tribal council that night.
2. Sandra’s clever manufacturing of conflict with a jar of sugar:  If you doubted that Sandra is one of the best Survivor players of all time, just watch how cleverly she utilizes something as small as a jar of sugar to cement her allies on her tribe.  JT is already annoyed with Michaela during this episode and doesn’t bother to hide it when Michael makes a ridiculous request for JT to bring her seven drops of coffee with a spoonful of sugar.  Sandra, seeing a way to further drive a wedge between JT and Michaela, decides to eat the rest of the sugar herself knowing JT will blame Michaela.  She masterfully shares her plan with Jeff Varner, simultaneously strengthening their bond because what bonds people more than shared secrets?  Her plan works perfectly, and in the words of Sandra, the queen stays queen!  JT blamed Michaela for the missing sugar and Sandra was confident there was no way Michaela and JT would ever get along, bringing Michaela even closer to her.  At the end of the tribal council, she maintained her solid alliance of three, leaving Aubry on the outs on the Nuku tribe.  The only mistake Sandra made was revealing at the end of the tribal council that she was the one who ate the sugar.  She outed herself to Michaela and the rest of her tribe as someone who can create chaos at anyone else’s expense, and a player as sharp as Aubry can use that to her advantage going forward.
3. JT finds and idol! Going into this episode, no one seemed to need an immunity idol more than JT.  Despite maintaining to his tribe that he didn’t tell Brad who his tribe was voting for, a bald-faced lie, he was still rightfully paranoid that his tribe would be gunning for him.  This suspicion was not misplaced as Sandra was not buying JT’s story and wanted to seek revenge of JT for Malcolm’s boot.  JT makes it his mission to find a hidden immunity idol to keep himself in the game, and he did so fairly easily.  I’ve never before thought the producers of Survivor meddle with the game itself, but this time, the clue for the hidden immunity idol almost seemed too easy to spot.  Regardless, JT found the same clue Tai found in the last episode back at his beach and easily dug up the idol at a crucial moment.
4. JT doesn’t play the idol!  It seems that even if the producers did make it easy for JT to find an idol, it wasn’t enough to save him from himself.  JT once again finds himself at tribal council when the Nuku tribe loses the immunity challenge.  In a huge display of over-confidence, JT doesn’t even bring the immunity idol to the tribal council! This was either a sign of his strategic ignorance or a sign that Sandra and the rest of Nuku did an incredible job convincing JT that he was safe and that the tribe would be targeting Michaela.  Even still, given that just a few days prior to the tribal council JT was so convinced he was going home that he made it his mission to find the immunity idol, it blows my mind that he didn’t even bring the idol to tribal council.  It also was a huge mistake that cost JT his game, as the tribe never stopped targeting him and JT found himself as the fifth person out of the game.

Next week, we see another tribe swap, the return of Exile Island, and the return of a former Survivor player.

Photo Credit: Inside Survivor