Survivor 50 has crowned its winner and it was a very fun finale tonight including a spoiler right in the middle of it. LOL. Thankfully, it wasn’t the winner but we have a winner for Survivor 50 and it is Aubry! I’m very happy with this win with Aubry getting her redemption story win. I’ll talk more on Aubry later but I’ll recap the happenings of this finale first.
We start with Night 23 with the Cirie vote out. Tiffany doesn’t want to talk about it at camp after being upset with how it all played out. Aubry offers to talk to Tiffany but Tiffany isn’t having it. Tiffany says she knows she was going home if she hadn’t won immunity and Aubry says it’s true. Joe doesn’t understand why Tiffany is mad while I myself watching still doesn’t understand what game of Survivor that Joe is playing all season. LOL. We move on to Day 24. Aubry and Jonathan ponder about the fire making challenge possibly upcoming. Rizo and Jonathan talk and Rizo says that if Tiffany wins immunity that they’ll take out Aubry instead. Jonathan says that whoever loses between Tiffany and Aubry is who they’ll take out. We get to the immunity challenge and what a challenge this was. Jonathan gets out ahead but starts to struggle with the puzzle at the end. I was watching this thinking I feel good about Tiffany with a puzzle feeling like she can definitely pull this out. Tiffany, Jonathan, and Joe are all even with 9 pieces of the puzzle left to complete. It comes down to the absolute last piece of the puzzle. Jonathan beats Tiffany by what looks to be just the smallest of seconds. I was so sad for Tiffany. She got soooo close. In confessional, she knows she’s in the biggest of trouble on the vote. Back at camp, Rizo tells Tiffany that he can’t sit next to her at the end cause he’ll have trouble winning against her. Tiffany tries to work Joe on voting out Aubry saying that the jury would love to give Aubry the money for her own redemption story. Joe tells Aubry that Tiffany was telling them what a threat that Aubry was to win the game. Rizo also tells Aubry this info as well. Tiffany makes a big pitch to Jonathan saying if he keeps her that she won’t put Jonathan in the fire making challenge if she makes the decision on it. Tiffany is doing everything she possibly can to stay in the game. Jonathan does talk to Joe and says that Tiffany brings up great points on Aubry being a threat to win. We move to tribal council. Tiffany goes full power and just vents everything. LOL. She says “my mood tonight is spicy but we’ll see how I feel tomorrow when I’m on the jury”. Rizo does finally play his idol although he wasn’t in any trouble but this was his last tribal that he could play it. Tiffany is voted out on a 4-1 vote. Tiffany got a standing ovation back at the live show when she is brought out which I loved to see. She got teary over it.
On to the final four with Day 25. Aubry speaks on how she knows she may very well be done if one of the guys wins immunity. We get to the immunity challenge and it’s a favorite of mine which is the Simmotion, rolling ball challenge. It was voted in as the challenge here for final four. Jonathan is the first out followed by Rizo at the four ball level of the challenge. They add a fifth ball to the challenge. Joe goes out and Aubry wins immunity and her first immunity of the season who immediately falls to her knees in tears sobbing that she won. What a moment! Aubry reveals in confessional that when she saw that Simmontion was in the running for the fan vote that she bought a Simmotion to practice on at home in case she needed to win this. Great move! Jeff reveals how it will go from here as 60% of the fans vote for fire making to decide the final three. Back at camp, Aubry tells Joe that she is leaning toward putting Rizo into the fire making challenge. She tells Joe that she is going to take him to the final three. She then tells Jonathan and Rizo that she will be putting them into the fire making challenge. Rizo says that the two people that lost their previous games due to fire making are now going to go against each other. Jonathan talks of how he’s been making fire every day since he’s been there. Rizo not so much. Jonathan is shown practicing and is looking rock solid. Rizo breaks down in tears talking of his struggles with this and how he wanted to keep this possibility of a repeat exit due to this from happening again but here he is. Joe watches Rizo struggling to get fire started as he tries to practice. We get a flashback of Joe helping Eva on Survivor 48 and he does a repeat performance here helping Rizo. Joe’s reasoning is that “in a sword fight, everyone should have a sword”.
Then, we have quite the moment. We are about to go to the fire making challenge when we get Jeff at the live show. He brings out Rizo to talk about it which I thought was kind of odd. They’re going to have Rizo preview it??? He talks to Rizo and then tells him to have a seat….as the final member of the jury. Wait, what? You hear the crowd react along with the jury up there on set. Jeff says he must have missed something with how people are reacting and there is an awkward exchange with the jury and Cirie where she tries to softly tell him that it hasn’t aired yet. LOL. I even backed up my live TV a few seconds to see it again cause I was thinking, wait, what just happened? So, Jeff accidentally spoils the upcoming fire making challenge. When we come back from break, Jeff acknowledges what just happened and owns it jokingly tells us we’re now going to watch Rizo lose the firemaking challenge. One of the thoughts I had was is this redemption for all the fans that hate firemaking and he ends up ruining what he loves so much and pushes back on those fans. LOL. He made jokes about it through the rest of the night full owning his mistake. We see the fire making and it’s just domination from Jonathan who wins easily. Rizo goes home the exact same way he did in Survivor 49. Stephenie during the challenge says on the jury that Rizo hasn’t made fire all season. So, this is my question on Rizo. He said he was doing everything possible to where he didn’t end up in a fire making challenge again where this could happen. My question is how are you not doing fire making through the season to practice in case this happened again. I just did not understand that at all. Rizo goes to the jury. We have our final three of Aubry, Joe, and Jonathan.
The final day of Day 26 is here and the final three get a surprise breakfast from their arriving family members. Loved that moment. We get to the final tribal council. This was a very good final tribal council with the back and forth with the jury. I’m just going to go over some of the bigger moments from this. Joe owns to Coach that he had to break his whole integrity thing to try and win the game. Jonathan admits that it was his idea to take out Ozzy and he held the secret from there. Aubry talks of how she had to finish off Ozzy once he shared all that info with her saying she had to get that going and had to play quiet the rest of the day so he didn’t play his idol. Jonathan debates her on who was more responsible on the Ozzy vote out as he wanted the credit for it. Tiffany gets Joe to answer the question on what made him go for Ozzy ultimately and he says it was the information from Aubry. Stephenie didn’t ask a question but more turned it into a hype pitch on Jonathan winning the game. Dee spoke up saying we need to be careful with how we’re asking questions here instead of it just being a statement. We had several in jury where it seemed like it was more pitching for their favorites to win. Stephenie and Chrissy were hyping a Jonathan win. Cirie and Tiffany were pushing hyping up Aubry for a win. Cirie questions Joe on “Joe-tation” saying that everyone had to babysit Joe on every vote to keep him locked down on a vote. Joe defended himself on that. Aubry talks of her big move where she said she found out that her, Emily, Christian, and Devens were being targeted in the middle so she distanced herself from them to keep herself out of danger. Ozzy questioned Jonathan and Joe on them always saying to take out the middle while adding here they are and they weren’t on either side of the middle. Jonathan talks of his move of getting Dee fired up to get a target on her to get her taken out. That gets us to the vote. But we get a very old school moment where the fans have voted for a live reveal of the votes. I loved this. I also must say that just having a live studio audience again was just so fun too for my old school fandom. The votes are revealed. The votes are split between Aubry and Jonathan. The votes for Jonathan to win are from Stephenie, Chrissy, and Coach. The votes for Aubry to win are from Dee, Christian, Emily, Ozzy, Devens, Cirie, Tiffany, and Rizo. That means Aubry wins on a 8-3 vote! Just such a powerful awesome moment and I was teary watching Aubry celebrate. She also won a prize of a new car along with the $2 million prize. The Sia $100,000 fan favorite prize vote went as expected to Cirie. Awesome moment for Cirie and well deserved. She also had a moment earlier in the live show where Jeff brought her out to a standing ovation from the crowd. A tearful Cirie spoke of how much love she had received from everyone and how thankful she was. Jeff gave her a one time Survivor award which was the Spirit of Survivor award.
Seeing this win for Aubry is just so incredible. I was so teary watching her winning reaction knowing what she’s been through. I remember watching her on a RHAP podcast back maybe two years ago and it was the first Survivor anything she had done for a very long time. Rob and T Bird were doing a series of catching up with previous Survivor cast members that we haven’t seen in a while. Aubry had completely bailed out of the Survivor community for a while and a lot of it was her trying to heal from how things had went for her with her Survivor journey. It was so good to see and hear from her on that podcast. You could tell that she was still dealing with it all. She said that she had needed to get away from it all and she was slowly starting to dip her toe back into the Survivor community. They asked her that night if she would consider going back again if she got a call. She gave a middle ground type response that basically said she wasn’t sure. Months later, the cast list got out of who was going on Survivor 50 and we were all surprised to see Aubry on the cast list. She’s back! Early on in Survivor 50, you could see her PTSD showing of her previous games and admittedly so cause she spoke on her struggles of being back. This season was basically the PTSD season with so many of the cast dealing with the fallout of their previous seasons and trying to correct what went previously wrong and it often led to overcorrecting by some. It’s fitting that Aubry wins this season that was so heavy on that topic. She comes back and gets her redemption story. She wins the big Survivor 50 season and wins the biggest prize in Survivor history. Congratulations Aubry! Soooo happy for her!!
This was her final speech and it was so fitting!
“So my story is, there was an anxious, nervous girl on the Brains tribe, who came in and had a panic attack on day two. She was supposed to go home that night but somehow she gets to the final three. Some say she should have won. Some say she had no social game. She didn’t care what they said. She comes back right after that for Survivor Game Changers, and somehow, she gets to the final five. She came back for Survivor the Edge of Extinction. Everyone loved her, she was the underdog, and then she fell from grace and left the Survivor world completely. And then she really took some time to work on herself and she came back for Survivor 50. She played this game for 137 days. She changed who she was. She changed how she played. She did everything to get to the end. I just want to show people that it doesn’t matter who you are, your brain, brawn, your beauty. If you believe in yourself, you can outlast more than you ever thought you could. You can push, and you can get to the end, and you can evolve just like Survivor.”
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