It’s been a long wait but we’re all finally here with the premiere of Survivor 50. So much promotion. So much hype. Tons of press this week and events going on to promote the premiere. I absolutely loved this premiere. When it got to the halfway point of this three hour premiere, I looked at the clock and I said geez, that is a lot of things that happened in 90 minutes. This premiere had a ton of emotions all across the board from happy and fun and on to sadness with how the premiere ended. I’ll get into the recap of events tonight.
First off, that first five minutes was AMAZING! They did release the first five minutes early as a preview tease. When I watched that yesterday, I had such goosebumps and emotions from it of this show that I have just absolutely loved for 26 years now. An incredible edit and I’m glad they released that early cause it got me so pumped up for tonight. The cast arrives on the beach after that with Jeff doing the intros and going around talking to different people. After that, he takes the wrapped buffs for them to draw where we’ll get our reveal of who is going to be on which of the three tribes. We have Vatu which is: Colby, Aubry, Kyle Fraser, Q, Rizo, Angelina, Genevieve, and Stephenie. For Cila, it’s: Cirie, Joe, Ozzy, Savannah, Christian, Emily, Devens, and Jenna. For Kalo, it’s: Dee, Mike, Jonathan, Kamilla, Charlie, Tiffany, Coach, and Chrissy. Jeff also announces the first ones of the fan vote results. Will they get rice first thing? NO. They will have to earn it on a 53% to 47% vote. Will they get tribe supplies first thing? NO. They will have to earn it on a 60% to 40% vote. We get to our first challenge of the season. Stephenie showing the Stephenie we all know as she looks impressive right out of the gate. When we get to the boat part of the challenge, I laughed and said geez is the testosterone going here with all these alpha males all hyped to go. LOL. Vatu ends up winning the challenge and gets flint. We get our first twist of the season with each tribe having to send one person to go compete for supplies. Tiffany basically volunteers Coach who says he’ll go. LOL. Q and Ozzy go for the other two tribes. Back at Vatu, Stephenie and Colby talk on their Survivor history and get back on the same page. Colby talks of how tired he is of Rizo already. At Kalo, Mike talks about wanting to be more goofy and lower his threat level with the tribe. Meanwhile, the tribe is so excited to have him there. At Cila, Savannah gets asked immediately about Survivor 49 to which she reveals that she won the season. Jenna and Savannah talk with Jenna already going full power on wanting to take out Cirie. Jenna then pushes it hard to others as well. Bold strategy here.
We join Ozzy, Coach, and Q on the journey. Coach and Ozzy talk their South Pacific history from their season where Ozzy was a big push on jury against Coach winning previously. They talk it out and apologizes are made. Their peace offering is short lived though. They compete in a challenge for supplies with Ozzy getting way ahead really fast. Things get difficult though when he has to build a long pole to reach a key. Ozzy struggles here as does everyone as keeping the pole straight enough to knock the key down is trouble. Things get tense when Ozzy finally knocks down the key but Coach jumps in and steals it from him getting the win. Ozzy says in the confessional that Coach’s word means nothing. The peace offering is clearly off. Coach leaves to go back to his tribe. Q and Ozzy are left to read the next message which reveals they are on Exile Island and will have to spend the night there before returning to camp. Coach returns to camp and everyone celebrates his win. Jonathan celebrates him big saying Coach loves to be the hero so he’s going to pump him up as such. We get an early look at who this tribe might push to vote out as Chrissy pushes Dee as a possible target to Coach. Over at Cila, Devens and Christian immediately form a bromance while out looking for idols and are excited to work together in the game. Devens then pulls in Emily who is excited to have social alliances this early in the game which was opposite of her previous game. Back at Vatu, Colby and Kyle bond. Kyle also talks of how he wants to work with Genevieve and she is all for it. She is also another player that their social game messed them up from the beginning so we have Emily and Genevieve both looking to pivot and fix that with this new game. Kyle and Genevieve bring Stephenie into the group. Genevieve then goes to Aubry wanting to work with her. However, this convo gets full awkward immediately as Aubry doesn’t trust Genevieve at all and tells her this basically. Back at Exile Island, we see the not fun night that Ozzy and Q had. The next morning, they prepare to leave but get another twist thrown at them. Supplies are for sale. But it will cost you your vote. Ozzy works Q on wanting to get an extra vote and hoping Q would take the supplies. Q decides to take the supplies and Ozzy gets the extra vote. As Q arrives back at camp, he tells Coach the story but leaves out the losing the vote part. Q, however, does confide that in Kyle showing trust there between the two. Back at Cila, Ozzy arrives back with no supplies. Fun moment here with Christian of course using science to get a fire started. He has Jenna and Ozzy help him with targeting the sun on to glasses to start a fire. It works and it was a fun moment! The next day at Cila, Devens reveals to Cirie that Jenna is throwing her name around hard. Cirie and Ozzy talk wanting to work together and they are on the same page. Ozzy gives her a trust moment with him revealing the vote story to her. Earlier, we had Colby ready to vote out Rizo but now we see that Rizo has won him over. The two have a bonding moment with Colby saying that he’s taken to him and how Rizo is 25 which is the same age of Colby when he first played. Back at Kalo, the pitches to get Dee out keep coming as Jonathan pitches Dee to Mike. Jonathan and Coach also lock in with being locked in together. Dee and Tiffany talk and are excited to work together. They pull in Kamilla with Kamilla saying that she played honor and integrity on her first season and now she wants to play the game a different way.
We get to the first immunity challenge of the season. We had two major stories in this one. The first one is Cirie struggling in her part of the challenge putting the tribe way behind. The other story was Kyle getting injured on the wall climb up. Whew, when he hit that wall with a thud, my whole body reacted of a jerk of ouch that had to hurt. Seconds later, he shows up hobbling. He tries to walk it off and then sits down on the ground with Jeff calling for medical. Oh no. The challenge is stopped. Medical checks him out trying to check his pain level. He is allowed to continue but are told they’ll have to find a way to get him up cause he can’t climb. Kyle says they’ll figure it out and they do indeed with doing a human ladder to pull him up. Cirie never quits and finally gets the toss done but it isn’t enough as Cila loses meaning they’ll go to tribal council. Back at camp, the tribe is disappointed and it was a sad emotional Cirie confessional interview on how disappointed she was. I got teary too watching her talk on it. Jenna is continuing to push for Cirie to go. She talks to Ozzy on it who is clearly hesitating on the thought of committing to Jenna on it which Jenna easily picks up on. Ozzy starts pushing for Jenna to go. Christian says Jenna is playing too hard too fast. Joe spots Cirie and Ozzy together and his PTSD of Kyle and Kamilla working as an unknown duo that messed his game up is coming back here as he fears of the same thing happening with Cirie and Ozzy. Emily and Devens discuss taking out Ozzy with one another.
We get to trial council. Full circle moment as we get the flashback of Jenna’s first tidal council as she speaks about it along with footage being shown. Fun nostalgic moment there. Tribal itself has Joe continuing to talk about how he’s afraid of another Kyle and Kamilla situation. Cirie talks of her disappointment of the challenge. We get to the vote and it’s between Cirie and Jenna with the edit. The vote goes full on to Jenna with it being a 7-1 vote against Jenna with the only Cirie vote being from Jenna.
Day 4 starts and I’m noticing here that we have 45 minutes left and I’m thinking how does this episode close??? It has to be an immunity challenge cliffhanger or an injury??? We see Kyle up on his ankle getting around. Stephenie and Genevieve go looking for idols. Genevieve finds something and tells Stephenie. Rizo is starting to walk up so Stephenie hides it on Genevieve. Genevieve tells Kyle about it too. The message reveals the boomerang idol. The power has where she has to give it to someone on another tribe. If that person gets voted out, the idol boomerangs back to her. So, the decision is do you use it to form a bond or do you put it on someone that you think will be voted out with an idol in their pocket hoping it comes back to you? She picks Ozzy cause he has a history of this happening. Ozzy gets the idol surprise and his excitement is that he now has an idol and an extra vote. A boat arrives where each tribe will have to send one person on a journey. Can’t be the same person from previously. Mike wants to go. Colby decides to go when no one else wants to. Savannah goes after they pick numbers. When the three arrive, they compare notes on the previous challenge there. Colby spills on the steal by Coach. The twist here is that only two can compete. They draw rocks and Mike is the odd one out. He goes back to camp. So, it’s Colby vs Savannah in a stacking competition. It’s for a keep your vote or lose your vote. The one that knocks the stack over first loses. Colby ends up crashing the tower leaving Savannah as the winner. After the challenge, Savannah talks of how Colby is someone she looked up to growing up and how excited she is to be there with him. Colby returns to camp but we have a twist for Savannah as she gets a message of an advantage that she has now gotten which is a steal a vote. With the fallout back at the camps, Mike tells his story but the bigger story is that he tells Coach that Ozzy was really bothered about the steal earlier. Coach goes into a panic saying how this ruins his honor word. Colby revealed the truth to his tribe. Savannah revealed the vote but didn’t reveal the steal a vote. The rest of the tribe say they don’t buy her story of that she didn’t get anything. Things go sad here as we see medical arrive and you can just see the sadness on Kyle’s face of this could be trouble for him. I just felt every bit of empathy with that look on his face of that oh no. The medical do several tests on him to see how his ankle is and it’s reveals that he has an achilles injury that they can’t risk getting worse. He is told he’ll have to leave the game. They reveal it to the tribe with a bunch of tears. He leaves the game as the episode ends.
Overall thoughts. I really liked this episode a lot. It sure rode a lot of emotions on it though. I just hate seeing Kyle have to leave the game that way. Gotta protect his health obviously. It’s always sad when someone has to leave the game on something not game related. He had done a good job getting several social alliances going so it will be interesting to see how those others pivot with him gone. Season one is gone in the first episode. Jenna just went too hard against Cirie. Bold strategy from her to go that route and it did not pay off in the least. On another note from that tribal, that music playing with the votes just brought back all the feels. My goodness. Goosebumps. That was awesome. Looks like the Ozzy and Coach stuff is going to go another level next week before a challenge. I like the trio of Tiffany, Kamilla, and Dee. That is a very fun trio to see working together. I’m hoping Dee can get through this stretch of her tribe coming after her. I liked the divide of the tribes. I thought it was pretty evenly matched. Very little of Charlie in this episode. Did he just get maybe one confessional??? The three hours felt like I got so much content out of it. It didn’t feel like it dragged at all and the flow of the episode was really good.Â
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