Survivor 42: Episode 12 Recap

0:01 Welcome back to the nullified tank where we've got the tnt takes for you on survivor 42 episode 12. what a bombshell of an episode myself and jake have been talking back and forth today doing the good old dms having a look at how we've seen the season play out and boy oh boy that the survivor producers pull a fast one on us here jake welcome to the podcast because omar was that far ahead of everybody else it looked like could it be this obvious dominating win of the season and we kind of i guess preempted that there could be a move last week but i feel like still in my heart of hearts i thought omar had this thing in the bag welcome to the podcast jake overall how do you feel about this episode that we just saw i think it was a good episode i thought it was really good i am just kind of in shock that we're already a finale because this has gone by so fast this whole season and it's looking like it's kind of open for a few people now that omar is gone i think you and i kind of have one person in particular that we're looking at but definitely makes the game more open because omar just would have been anybody yeah 100 i mean let's do a quick screen share here of the

1:22 I guess looking at the this you know going into this week these were our top people it's a little bit smaller see if i can get a little bit closer there but i mean omar was running away with the competition like he was just running circles around everyone draya who's no longer in the game was in second place coming into this week the way we've been writing them lindsay was in third place jonathan is still hanging in there i mean he only i think he got all of his points in the first four weeks and then i gave him one point last week for winning an immunity but you know do you have to go down to mike and marianne after that they're like i don't know one two three four five six seven six and seven for something on the list right now i mean there's less players in the game than where we've got them ranked but to me i think this is a great example of where the producers thought and this is why i mean we're going to get into it we'll go back to the beginning of the episode but i want to talk about it a little bit here i think the producers pulled a fast one on us this season because they wanted us to know how big of a move marianne's move was going to be at this point in the game taking out omar and i think therefore this whole season i don't know if you felt the same way jake it sometimes it felt really predictable it felt like we knew the moves we understood what omar was up to at all times where that's not normally what survivor us tend to do with their edit they normally also try and fool

2:42 The viewer and we never really know the final plan there's always like two or three potential people that can go home this season i kind of felt like it was a lot more clear-cut who was going to go home almost like survivors of africa does a lot of the times like it tells you the full story of how the plan came together to blind someone blindside someone and i think the reason that they did this to us this season was because they really wanted us to know how good of a player omar was and how big of a move this was going to be that i think that totally tracks they definitely were going to omer a lot showing his thoughts they i think he had like the last confessional right before tribal council like you know like three or four times in a row just like is this the right move or like i could do this or this like i have options but like basically just letting us know like hey omar is in control of this foe he's in control of the game pretty much letting us know point blank that he's deciding what's going on but i gotta be honest i prefer that to [Music] i prefer giving us the whole story and making it maybe a bit more obvious than what they did a few times like one glaring example that i'm thinking of is in winners of war with ethan when he was voted out i swear to you they mentioned his name maybe one time in the end i was

4:02 Shocked absolutely shocked and i hate that i hate as a viewer i don't want to be blindsided by who's going home not that hard you need to know the two or three possible plans going into a vote and you need to be able to understand why someone lost because as fans we like to dissect what people did right and what they did wrong and we also try and learn from this i know there's very little we can learn from it being fans of the show if we're out there and we're playing the game in the actual island it may not translate as well but we still are trying to learn from these players that are out there and then hopefully apply something like this in the future if you know you get casted on the survivor ui so i might apply for one of the international versions i want to be able to learn where people make mistakes and i think you know i'm with dylan here and dylan and christian welcome to the live stream he's saying marianne is winning this game there's no buts about it i think jake the end of the season is going to be one of those seasons where it's going to be interesting to go back and look at marianne's edit from the beginning i can remember it pretty well i think a couple of weeks ago it may have been two episodes ago when we were recapping i said to you could marianne be the person who's in front of our face the whole time and we're just not noticing her because she's such a big character she's a little bit quirky a little bit different you know maybe we're not taking her seriously as a contender but she's always getting screen time she's always in our face as she may be

5:23 Like a little bit of an undercover assassin that could jump up at the right time and there is things that we can learn from this win now this win for me before she even wins it i know we're going to jump in ahead a little bit if she wins it's not going to be one of the most dominant wins we've ever seen in the game she's not going to be one of the most dominant winners either but there's a lot of value in her winning in the way that she did because there was periods in the game where she did not have the power to be able to become a dominant winner but she had to know when to sit back and let other people play and when to jump in and make a move at the optimal time which is what she did in this episode here so this is going to be a lot for us to go back and dissect as fans in regards to her win and you know even if it's not one of the most dominant winners i think it's a great lesson if you were out there if i was if i was out there i don't think i would ever be in a position like i'd either go early or i'd be running the bloody show because i'm too opinionated myself but if you're someone that's not very opinionated and you're more of an introvert or you can't you being like me is not good like you know i'm gonna be all in all out i'll be either out first or i'll go all the way i think this is better for a lot of players that play that type of game to know that even if you're this deep in the game you can still change the narrative about you as a player even very late in the game it's funny we're kind of just like having a coronation right now of like marianne is the winner which like i agree i think she's got

6:45 I don't know i don't want to look like a fool but like it's right there in our faces but we said that about homer so yeah i could be wrong again but i don't think so i honestly you know omar makes sense because i really feel like they needed to build him up so that when he goes it would mean a lot for the fans so we'd be like she took out sorry for swearing if you've got kids in the car while you're listening to the audio version here but you know they're looking at this and they're like man we need to make sense of omar cutting oh sorry marianne cunningham at this point this was her game winning move i honestly think she's winning it i think mike and we'll talk about mike is the other person who's got a chance in my mind to win this lindsay's got an outsider chance of winning it but if i had to do rankings right now i would go marianne number one based on the edit mic number two i don't think mike might not even make the final but even if he does make the final we've seen enough flaws within his game that i think people might crucify him and we'll talk about that a little bit later on in the podcast but let's get into i guess this episode as a whole right so they go back to camp they've just pulled off this massive move drears out everybody is shocked but this now creates animosity under some of the original taku tribe members and also mike because now they know that omar's got a case he just looked like the mastermind

8:05 In front of the jury and he's starting to peek at the right time he was playing behind in the shadows all the time everybody thought they were omar stream but now they know the level of deception that he's pulled off on the stage and damned if you do damned if you don't you can't crucify omar for playing the game at this point because you have to i mean you've got to take your shots at some stage to have a chance to win it at the end but it looked like this move really was the nail in the coffin for omar this episode yeah you look back you know we kind of spent a bit of time debating on what his right move was and i'm trying to think like even if he if he didn't take out drea you know and tell mike and you know and she steals the idol like he still knows about it he's still like everyone he gets exposed like it's it was just you were right it's damned if you do damn just you don't like it he just kind of peaked just slightly too early just slightly too early and people he was exposed and they realized there's no way in hell we're winning this game if we don't take him out and at final six i mean he killed it i gotta say he killed it but do you think that we ever like i mean you get

9:25 All types of winners and survivor you get winners that play front line they make big moves they're flashy you know like tony black was in his original season to a certain degree he played a little bit different in survivor student season 40. do you think that all our flashy player can still win survivor in the new age because to me it feels like there's just too many people now that are very aware of resumes that are very aware of jury perception and things like that we've now potentially in two seasons seen two female winners potentially i'm putting it out there because we don't know things could still go wrong i mean we're called the nullified take for a reason you know we don't really know what we're talking about but you know we'll take a stab at it we've got to take here but potentially we could have two female winners that kind of sat back for big periods of the game but make crucial moves at crucial times to win the game is that the new meta of how to win survivor and do you think that we're gonna get more and more players trying to play a passive game especially now with so much luck and with so much elements like do or die coin tosses or you know it feels like a gamble like it's a risk sometimes to be a big game player these days do i make sense i think you make perfect sense i was slightly disagreeing with you at first but then when you brought up the luck i think that's what where i was like oh yeah like

10:46 They're seeing like there are so many gambles and it's like gosh like am i going to get punished for playing the game hard like i think you kind of do even when you win like even if you win you don't win like you know hourglass another example like i cannot imagine how frustrated i would have been if i were on 41 or 42 and i won that challenge and jeff says nope i lied you didn't like that would discourage me for the rest of the game being like i don't even know what's happening at any point like what's what if i play this idol but then jeff is like actually the idol nullifier is back and then somebody has an idle nullifier like it's like yeah there's too much there's too much there's too much like i think it broke when jeff basically lied to the contestants in 41 said gear yeah if you win this challenge you are emerged you are on the merge tribe and you are safe and that was a lie yeah well going back to the episode here right so we've got omar talking to us the audience and he says that you know he's pulled off this big move his next move now and the game is going to

12:06 Be he's got to get to a point where he can drive a wedge between mike and jonathan and he's got to let them fight it out with each other and he also goes and gives mike the idol back we spoke about it last week on the podcast we said there's no way now that he didn't vote mike out on the spot that he can hold on to that idol like it would have just been in my opinion suicide he would have burned mike there would have been chaos that would have left a bad taste i think in the mouth of the jury if mike was the next one out i just felt like he kind of cornered himself he could have made that move but i don't think that's the kind of move that wins you the game i think that's the kind of move that leaves animosity and hurt feelings in the game especially because it's not a clean blind side you know you want to you want to clean blindside if you're stealing someone's idle vote them out immediately and say that was a clean blind side you're out i now have to idle that's the move for me there so he kind of went down a different route in the game what's interesting to me is i think omar was starting to drink his own kool-aid in the game and that is something that happens when you are extremely successful in the game you believe you've got the mightiest touch you can do no wrong and i think like he said he became survival confident throughout this episode he really believed that he could turn mike and jonathan against each other and there's a lot of it's interesting it felt this whole episode both omar and lindsay severely

13:26 Underestimated the relationship that both mike and jonathan has and they also underestimated how jonathan and mike perceived them in return it was it was very interesting this dynamic i felt like it went to his head a little bit here because he's had so many successful blind sides in a row leading into this episode i think yeah the big thing with like jonathan i think omar got jonathan at the beginning of the episode is like the taku4 is still together at the final six but that's it that's as far as we're going we're done i don't think omar knew that knew that he was thinking that at all i think he still thinks like jonathan wants him there and he can kind of you know control the taku4 as he has been for pretty much the whole game and that just wasn't the case marianne pulled off this move when he was pretty much her closest ally in this game and i was very shocked to see that like omar thought really thought that he could break up jonathan and mike i just don't i just that wasn't happening and maybe it was just a good acting job by mike i think he is he's good at like when specifically when mike and lindsay mike is very good at like acting kind of

14:46 Panicky and like am i going home am i going home yeah and she's like no as long as jonathan doesn't win you're fine you know and i think that diminishes this great level i think it diminishes because if he if he had that russell hans or tony blackwell's nature to him he already kind of looks like him he's got a bold hedge you know he's a big burly guy so if he had that level of bulldoziness towards this game i think it would not have gone down well but it is that you're quite right it's that nervousness when he talks like am i going home and i at risk you know you could screw me in the game so he doesn't come across as like threatening in those situations i think when he's talking to other people within the game but christian's got an interesting question here he does say do you believe that drew dreyer blew up and exposed omar's game what's your thoughts i think we kind of addressed it in the beginning right she definitely did because she made everyone aware that omar was the only one who knew that information so in return people who were not a plant are not a part of that i guess immediate plan to blindside drea like a jonathan and potentially i think of marianne or romeo the people that were like on the outskirts all of them knew that omar had this information and he didn't tell them like jonathan obviously at this point would have known listen omar's not playing with me yeah and also even if drea doesn't

16:06 Say what she said mike still knows that omer orchestrated this and you know went to him and told him give me your idols she's trying to steal it then even if that happens and drea doesn't say anything mike is still going to go back to camp and talk to marianne and say hey did you know that ulmer completely orchestrated everything last night with the whole knowledge of power and marianne would have had the same plan and came up with it so but here's the crazy thing it wasn't even omar's plan it was lindsay she was the one who brought it up and she got away without any blood on her hands can she get to the end now and claim it if she gets to the end to say you guys all thought that drea one of the biggest threats in the game was taken out by amar omar took a bullet for me but in the meantime i was the one i had the murder weapon and nobody knew they went for the decoy you know she did think of it but omar i think had the better relationship with mike to actually go to andrea to convince them to do what they did and get the idol from mike i'm not sure if lindsay could have been able to do that with mike so it was wasn't that erica's game plan like last season where she said hey i forgot the older lady with the blonde hair

17:26 From that season she was quite forgettable because i didn't give her a big edit but erica said she heather there we go so she said heather was the person with all the social capital i used heather to build these relationships with a lot of people that i didn't have like i remember using that as a pitch so that in itself is a gameplay now is lindsay the kind of player with the level of understanding of how to pitch this to the jury at the end i don't know and that's another reason why i think marianne's winning the season because marianne is a super fan now for people that have watched australian survivor season one i don't want to say more than that but people who know what happened in that final tribal council we had a very big super fan who was extremely good at pitching to the jury who watched all of the ramp content out there and years and years of knowing what to say and not to say i think marianne will be that at the end i think marianne gets to the end she's a bigger threat than people think because she has watched and studied this game i don't think lindsay's got that yes i agree i gotta say i have not seen australian survivor season one in a long time so i'm not sure i never really connected the dots between those two but i guess i can kind of see it i'm sorry something just popped into my head do you think there is a

18:46 Chance that the idol nullifier could come back in the finale well here's the thing christian says i didn't know this because i haven't checked out any i haven't checked any of the exit press yet but and i don't know if this is true so we're just going off what christian's saying here in the live stream for those that are audio listeners on the show he says omar had an idle nullifier in his exit press so maybe there was another advantage we know sometimes reward challenges doesn't get shown certain advantages don't get shown i am extremely surprised that they didn't show that because seeing one of the bigger players in the game go home with something in their pocket that just that you know that's satisfying for a lot of people to see someone flying out like that so i'm surprised that if he did have it that we didn't get to see it as an as an audience yeah that's very strange that kind of reminds me in winners of war parvati got a idle nullifier i think in the same episode that she got voted out and it's like well if you're not showing homer getting his why did you need to show parvati getting sent one from the edge of extinction like who cares that didn't end up doing anything at all so it's poverty people just wanted to give poverty any reason to give us screen time basically at that point but yes going into the reward challenge here it's

20:06 An interesting one they have to spin and unspool a coil of rope get a key to unlock block puzzles and i was writing down as i was watching i was like what have we really learned in this challenge we learned that jonathan and lindsay are great at doing the physical stuff but when it comes to the puzzles they both struggle which we already knew so nothing new learned there and then we saw omar and marianne go up against each other and really compete for the win here with omar edging it out and winning it was quite funny on read when i watched it for the second time mike went up to omar to congratulate him and said oh and i had it but he only had like three or four pieces of this and he thought he had a chance like just funny as hell to watch but what did you think of the decision here for omar because you know with all that power comes great responsibility and he has to choose one of two options here either take you know three people with him so that's four people of the final six to go and eat cake and cookies or he can choose two people to have some sustenance some chicken and veg which obviously being out there that long i always when i look at survivor i never understand the appeal of sweets or chocolates or ice creams like i think i would be disgusted by it personally if i had an eight for that one that would be exactly now too fast sorry what did you think of the choice what did you yeah what did

21:27 You think of the choice here do you think he made the right choice i do even though he went home right we can't be too results-focused there's this wasn't this had no factor in his vote-off in my opinion i think when jeff was explaining the you know choice to either do sustenance or sweets i was like i think it's pretty obvious to choose sweets because specifically to leave lindsay and jonathan out of it because i think they'll understand it's like come on you guys are far and away the best challenge competitors like you don't need it let's just you know keep it with us i think that was that's that was what i was thinking when jeff was explaining it but i do think that it continued to drive that wedge between the likes of jonathan and omar i think it explains also why we haven't seen much of that relationship between jonathan and omar because omar really after the merge realized that there's other people he can work with that is loyal to him that's not as much of a physical threat i still find it really interesting though that this episode jonathan remains the biggest target for everybody that is playing the game because i don't see jonathan as this big threat going into the end to win it yes maybe he'll take a spot away from some of them to get into the final three if he does go on a run but is that really

22:47 A problem if you're omar and if he wants to work with you that's maybe the one thing i don't fully get like i feel like if i and again maybe we need to listen to exit press here to get omar's view but i feel like he was sloppy with his relationship with jonathan like they were very tight pre-emerge but he kind of let him go and as the numbers became less and less in the game jonathan should have been more of an important number for him because one person is a lot more valuable and six players left in the game than what they would have been at 12 right so i that's the one relationship that i will listen to exit press i will listen to interviews to understand what happened there that he didn't keep his midshield close to him despite the game because it would have been perfect for them to stick together and it's interesting because omar and lindsay kind of became the duo of the taku4 we didn't we like never saw omar and lindsay interact with each other at all pre-merge so very interesting we didn't really even get a lot of scenes of omar and mariana but apparently they were fairly close and you yeah especially when it's a relationship that you make pre-emerge you can't just let it go like that because it's going to hurt or it's going to become like more apparent in the other person's mind like hey we used to talk a lot more than we do now

24:07 Like we don't really we're not really working together much anymore and it's gonna like kind of linger in your head a bit more than somebody that you met right at the merge so i do you think that was definitely a mistake on homer's part and one thing i will say about jonathan i think that you know he could go on he could still go and win two amenities now but we know he won't equal the record and he won't break the record because he's had two immunity wins even if he wins the next two ammunities he's got four he's not even in the discussion of top 10 challenge beasts on survivor in history so he's not all that when it comes to it like physically he looks like a beast i want him to go there's rumors that he may go and play season 38 of the challenge i want that to happen so badly because i can see him become a champion on the challenge it's all about challenge it's all it's all about physicality it's all about taking other people out on eliminations and i think he could do really well on that show that show for me the alpha male survivor isn't a show for alpha males anymore like it's really moved on the diversity and cast which you know i'm not saying it's good or bad means that now if you're one and we said it from the beginning of the season if you're one of two alpha guys out there like mike and jonathan was or maybe roxroy would have been seen in that same category as well each tribe had one of those people you may be three of them in the whole season you're too big of a threat so i mean i'm not i'm not trying to say this to discourage

25:27 People that are like alpha males to go and play the game still go and play it i just feel like your odds are less but in a game like the challenge it is literally all about your own ability to win stuff you know so i think in a season like that he could do extremely well but the one thing i do want to say about jonathan is while we're on the topic of him is that he is extremely socially aware and i think that his flaws have been played up by the camera because i do think that when we get to the final dylan here says that he said two weeks ago that jonathan is like xander fans absolutely rioted when xander lost that season even now still people feel like it was rob and it's gonna happen regardless but i think the producers are playing up like the little you know little fights that we see out there that is bound to happen like for instance i'll bring up two that i can think of and you can let me know if there's anything else so actually i can bring up three so there's the fight between him and marianne early in the season because he was busy chopping something marianne got close to her and nearly got cut and they had a little bit of a spat then you see lindsey and him disagreeing about a vote and who's right and who needs to vote what way and then you see draya and him having an argument about the fishnet right but these kind of arguments i think happens all the time and it also happens between other players that we just don't see because you're hungry you're malnutritioned you're sleep deprived you can't tell me that other people out there did not have fights but i do think that the editors

26:47 Are painting a picture for us that this guy can't win the season but we're seeing enough from jonathan to know that he is socially aware he knows when people are voting against them he knows how he's being perceived i do think and i know this is going to be a hot take here i do think jonathan is a better player than what a lot of you know people half the people love him half the people hate him the half that hates him i think they're overplaying some of the stuff that he's done wrong in the game i'm not saying he's the best player this season but also don't think he's the worst if that makes sense i think i agree yeah i think the online survivor community can be fairly anti-alpha male anti-challenge oriented type players so i think that they definitely underrate jonathan particularly because yeah he does have some confessionals where i'm like okay he's awake yeah like you kind of understand like especially this episode he was like i think lindsay's coming after me and i was like and it was a fun scene that was one of my favorite scenes and again and it shows how lindsay isn't like lindsay in my opinion is not the same level of players jonathan she's good at the physical stuff but she did not read her at all she thought that he was definitely focusing on mike yep yeah for sure i think she i think they maybe were underestimating

28:08 Him that he was just gonna blindly follow what they were saying yeah now it's interesting i know i had a bit of a rant there but me personally i do personally gravitate towards seeing alpha guys go out there and play this game i don't want survivor to become a thing where if you're an alpha guy you're not welcome on the show i think diversity should include everyone you know but there's always going to be a threat like that you know because just because he's physically big in the game people are always going to see him as a threat just based on that alone but i don't think he's in my mind a threat to win this game right now but he's still the biggest target for a lot of people going into this specific vote and i wonder if some of that had to do with the fact that christian said here that omar apparently found the idle nullifier on day eight but it was unaired on the season which is crazy to me but it kind of explains why he was never really worried about marianne because he knew marianne had an idol so if he kept that idol nullifier for another round she wouldn't have been able to use it but that to me is crazy because it shows that maybe he didn't even tell anybody about this idol nullifier at all marianne i don't think he knew about marianne's second idol oh yeah that's true he didn't you're right no one knows about it so great gameplay by marianne that's like one person that's actually kept the secret in

29:28 The game which is survivor 101 you even though she told people about her first idol she knew when she got the second one that one has to remain a secret and she didn't need help or silly phrases to activate it so it made it a little bit easier to actually you know keep the knowledge but the nullifier and the knowledge is power twists when you have to go and say phrases and other people know about it to me it's just too overpowered it just again it becomes a gamble you almost don't want to have that advantage in the game at that stage now let's move back to i guess camp you get just prior to the immunity challenge here you've got all these different conversations happening mike is informed about the fact that marianne has an extra idle not actual extra vote she tells him about the extra vote which makes mike say listen let's make this move this round on omar and marianne is excited because finally people are wanting to make that move but she's also petrified by this because she's played with the taku tribe from the beginning and she doesn't really want to go against him but the real i think carrot for her here is the fact that mike is saying he's willing to play an idol on her the next round and then she's potentially got two idols she can play with so there's the slight likelihood i don't think mike is ever playing this idol on her next round i think he's playing it on himself but there's the slight likelihood you want more options in your back pocket if you can that if mike did

30:48 Play the idol for her she could effectively blindside everyone and play the second idol on say a romeo to keep him safe in the game because we all know romeo's he's drawing dead at this point he's the goat going to the end that would be i didn't think about that i was thinking yeah what was mike saying why did he say that i don't think he's doing that at all no he won't he won't i don't know but i think he's trying to he's trying to like yeah like he doesn't know she's got an idol so he's trying to make her feel safe to come over no yeah so it's good strategy but no for sure but like yeah if she didn't have an idol like and then that next round comes and he's like no like i don't know it's just for some reason it just seems very awkward to me but i don't yeah i don't i think there's no chance that's happening that would be really cool if she could because think about it let's say mike does plays idle for himself and marion obviously play is going to play for her for herself someone else is going to be immune then it's let's it's probably going to be jonathan to be honest or maybe lindsay but then it's gonna be between romeo and someone else it's probably not gonna be romeo because people are realizing that he i want him in the end romeo is like

32:08 Solid he's gone all the way to the end but by the way while we're on the subject of romeo one note that i just saw that we kind of talked over when the reward challenge happened and omar said romeo is the only person who hasn't eaten anything yet admittedly took me back to that scene where he was sitting by the pot and he's like scraping the rice but i was thinking i've got more empathy for that now because everybody else has been on a reward this guy's been out there the whole time and now they're begging him for starving out there i know you shouldn't be more than your fair share but come on give the guy a break especially when he looks like a freaking skeleton i mean oh my gosh like poor guy he's probably just dying out there i think romeo's punched his ticket to the final three at this point i think but here's the crazy thing here's the crazy thing like i mean there's not many players for us to choose from right at this point for our top three right we both know marianne's going to be number one are we are we doing a top three this week are we gonna let's do it let's do it we'll do it we'll do it but it's gonna be a quick one because marianne will definitely be number one but i think i think there's a case to be made for romeo to be number two this week even though we know that he's not gonna win the season like in this specific round did he play the best hand that he was dealt with and going with marianne and i kind of feel like he did because you know

33:29 Omar is going to win against everyone he needs to also claim at some point he's made a move or he was involved in a strategic blind side and this was even though it wasn't him leading it was him making a move now the way for romeo to go out and win the next one is in his mind he needs to blindside the person who blindsided the biggest player and he actually goes to go against marianne i don't think he's going to do that and i don't know if he's got the social capital to do it but in this round i feel like there's a lot of other players that did a lot more wrong than right like even jonathan and mike we'll talk about them in a bit like in their reasoning and how scared they were to make this move going into this thing more so mike than jonathan i was a little bit amused by that you know because jonathan was at serious risk of going home if one person changed their vote so i get jonathan's reluctance to make a move or to throw two votes on someone that potentially like in romeo that wasn't going to go home you know what i mean because if romeo changed this vote jonathan would have been gone in that spot i think people were like overreacting a bit about jonathan's reluctance to go going along with this makes 100 sense to me man if i was out there i'd be like okay like one person change a vote i'm out and romeo specifically romeo like he's wrong so why shouldn't romeo like romeo might find

34:49 Out jonathan's voting for him and then he might be like well screw jonathan i'll be petty yeah i'm not winning this game any case i'll just vote out jonathan it's a legitimate reason to be scared of this vote in my mind definitely yeah geez man it's starting to buckle down with rain over here at the moment i just hear it on the outside i almost feel like i'm out there in survival i can tribal council they had all the rain coming down on them dude i freaking wished it rained here it's like summer in arizona's hell yeah i can imagine well we're in the opposite sides of the world right so when you guys experience summer we've got winter and when you guys got winter we got summer you know it's the weirdest thing when i when i first went over to london from south africa for like i lived there for about two years i actually had snow in the christmas which was what we always saw in movies because all the movies in south africa were yeah american movies right and you're like always like you ask your mom and dad as a kid like why doesn't snow why can't i build a snowman when it's like you know christmas because christmas for us in the southern hemisphere is you go down to the beach you know so that's completely different you know so bizarre i can't even like i remember hearing as a kid like did you know in australia that it's winter right now and it's like in the middle of summer i'm like what are you talking about like are you saying that like during christmas it's not snowing it's not like cold

36:09 Well most places in australia doesn't really snow it's well yeah it's a massive desert you know like with a few green areas and patches well it doesn't really yeah there isn't snow here either but yeah it's pretty dry so america's the same like it only snowed on the mountains normally anyways completely off topic back to back to survivor we get into the immunity challenge i like this immunity challenge they had to run over some hurdles table platforms that they had to jump over then they needed to untie ladder pieces and they had to fit them in as they climb up the ladder and then at the top they had the table maze with a ball on it that they had to land within the holes again it comes down to jonathan and lindsey the two challenge beasts for this season but this time lindsay does take it out which poses a massive threat for a lot of players in the game because they're now aware she's got an idol she potentially could play this on omar and she doesn't end up using it let's talk about that like what do you think about her reasoning here now i understand that you can be afraid of something being put back in the game but this idol was supposed to be used at final six like if you're replacing the same advantage that you've just used in the game common scenes would sort of say it's not going to be back in the game because it was valid until final six right chris

37:30 I was so confused when i was watching hearing her saying it's like if i don't even i can't even rationalize it to be honest like if it's expiring at the final six then and you think that when that if you play it they're gonna re-hide it wouldn't they be hiding it re-hiding it anyways even if you don't play it because it's gone it's it doesn't do anything it's dead so wouldn't they re wouldn't they hide it again supposedly even if you don't play it doesn't make any sense that doesn't plus it wasn't an idol it was the amulet you know it wasn't even a full-blown title they wouldn't they wouldn't put the amulet back on christian is saying that he doesn't think lindsay's amulet is transferable but i don't think that is the case i what the cruiser becomes an idol so an idol is transferable within the game so i don't think that's the case and you can play it for anyone right yeah and i gotta say i'm a bit surprised that they kept it that you could only play till six i was i would think that they would be i prefer that i prefer final six opposed to final five like i think final five is just one tribal council too deep for me personally yeah i would i would have expected them to say

38:50 If you have a steal a vote then it can be played at final six but if it's an idol then you can play it at final five but they kept it at final six which it was refreshing to see something expire earlier than final five because then we could potentially have three idols and then advantage getting all over again here's the craziness of all of this next time on survivor they go to a new beach why can we just have a vent about that like why what do we as viewers and you know people let me know in the comments when you listen to this at a later stage do you in fact i might put this up as a poll just because i want to actually understand how much of the community really enjoy this last minute twist of going to a new beach i don't understand the entertainment value that we're gonna get out of this outside of just again making their lives miserable out there and i'm not saying give them cushions or put them in a villa for the last couple of days but it's just i just feel like it's so unnecessary but they go to a new beach now they have to rebuild the camp they're not going to build a camp what's the point they're only going to be happy last season this happened last season they built like the crappiest shelter known to man and then it rained and they were just miserable and it was just like what's happening here just sleep on the beach get right i think that's i think that's what they ended up doing yeah

40:10 Yeah there's just no there's no point for me to go out there and they don't have rocks roy there to build a shelter within two hours if rockstar was there that they would have been they would have been sorted but you know so they're going to go to this new beach and there's going to be some sort of an advantage in the game because we see them running around like last season it's the challenge advantage coming in this late in the game right and i don't know even if we need that like i don't understand why we're so top-heavy with the advantages yeah so late in the game yeah it's just they just need they just feel the need to it's like we need something every episode there's something happening some sort of advantage going out there some sort of twist it's like it makes even less sense with the challenge advantage or the new beach it's like just too many things here's an idea they want something exciting for next season you know get a previous winner legend of the game you if you go for the reward challenge you get an advantage to video call with a legend of the game and tell them like kind of like the coach thing you know what i mean like that and island of idols you know so imagine you know you're out there they're like which winner you know you get an opportunity you can talk to any

41:30 Of the previous winners we'll get them on the dial you know and you're like i want to talk to vlakos you know and he gets up there and he's like doing the llama talk you know but he gets you like focused in you know for the end like do something else that's exciting that the fans will like more than whatever they're doing at the moment but anyways i don't want to bag too many things like we'll get into it because i do want to talk a little bit about the season 43 cast that is out and some of the rumors that have been dropping around that we might be able to spare five or six minutes towards the end of the podcast to talk about that as well we at this point find out that marianne wants to make a move on omar she set her sights mike is getting scared he's trying to pull out of this thing jonathan's trying to pull out for good reasons on jonathan's end i think mike still a little bit amused by that but marianne stands firm she tells them what to do you guys put your votes on romeo and myself will use my extra vote and we're going to blindside omar so the backup plan so and that scenes you know while we're thinking about should we give romeo second place i'm a little bit worried for romeo here because what if omar did get that idol romeo's gone because they had the split off the votes right so who would have been

42:50 Between jonathan and romeo so it would have been a re-vote so romeo might have still been saved on the revoke because it does look like next episode marianne wants to go for jonathan so maybe he's okay so i was just trying to think and problem solve through this like is it a good move for romeo but i'm sure marianne would have said listen worst case scenario you're going to get two votes we're going to put three on omar if omar does play the idol it's going to be a split between you and jonathan this is where the votes are going to go but on the re-vote no one will vote you out over jonathan it just doesn't make sense right so that's probably why romeo was calm enough to continue to put his vote on omar but she really comes forward here in this thing she puts her foot down and makes an extremely ballsy play by taking out omar hats off to her right like i mean i feel like this is the cherry on the cake for the season and this is why i'm so adamant she's probably gonna win this season based on this one move like she's gonna continue to pull a few moves now out in the next episode but omar was the move of the season definitely i've been a bit of a marianne fan this season i think she might be you might be the type of white guy that she's into i don't know if abby is the chat but he might put that put that profile oh my gosh no zach is the only one for her

44:11 You frazzled me with that comment that's what i do it's what i do here i don't want to get you in trouble at home you know i'm just i'm just joking i think she was a bit much at first but she's really mellowed out and she's still like herself like you can see like the quirkiness and the like just how lovable she is and but we can see that like you know she knows her place in the game like she needs to make something happen and i just love that she didn't back down to mike you know so many other players would have just said damn like mike's not in on it we got it we gotta fall back and just let romeo go but no she just put her foot down and said this is going to work you have to trust me let's do it and it worked yeah and i think it's you know it's one of those things like she said she's like half both mike and jonathan's size so she's going to get underestimated erica had the same even though both her and erica are you know small and stature they stand their ground and they're good at knowing when to make moves and strategically maneuver themselves through the game i think with marianne it's just it's so gratifying to see a fan out there play this game and not screw it up like a lot of fans do and actually understanding

45:31 What it is she's got all the information she needs she knows the move she needs to play she knows if she doesn't take omar out here she is going to be a goat because she what resume would marianne have had going into the final against an omo even against a mike or a lindsay at this point or a jonathan or anyone if she didn't pull this move off and one of the most endearing things for me of this episode is she pulls off the move omar looks at her sees the two idols coming and he's like you played it didn't you and he's good enough to know it's coming and she owns up to it but she looks over to the jury and she seeks the acknowledgement from them about the move and i found that very interesting you gotta play the jury like i know a lot of people hate rick devons but that was one thing that holy he was crying did they love rick devins the jury and abby's commenting you got to play to the jury like you got to know what the jury's thinking and like how they're going to react to your moves in the game and if you read them wrong you could be screwed at the end yeah 100 and i think that's the thing for me when you look at a game like survivor instead of hating on people that are doing successful in the game learn from

46:51 It like see what can you learn from someone like rick devins and add to your own game not that marianne is the showman that he was but she understands the value of the jury seeing her in a positive light because the jury at the end of the day there's two things they need to like you as a person and they have to have a reason to vote for you so you've got to make it easy for them going into the end you've got to sell your game to them and i think she did it here this episode all right jake let's get into the meat and potatoes of this episode let's talk about top threes here who do you have as your number one two and three and are you gonna shock us with your number one because i feel like it's a foregone conclusion mine's marianne i'm pretty sure for all the reasons we've said you're probably gonna go down that same path but let me know who's number one two and three for you i'm shocking the world and i'm putting romeo at number one [Music] i would have been kicked off the show if i did that now obviously marianne's at number one you just wouldn't have gotten an invite next year jacobs but like suddenly you're like who's this new person that's on the marian oh jake i would have i would have gotten zach would have been on the podcast next season yeah just get the other typing the white guy the other skinny white guy i gotta say i think you might have convinced me that romeo's number two and

48:12 Jonathan number three like i that's what i'm going with yeah i mean one definitely marianne for all the reasons we said tune romeo he needed to make this move here it is the best move to go after the biggest player in the game he's got he's drawing dead he's not winning this season but i mean he's got to at least try right he's got to try and this is the right move to make here and honestly chris i can't give it to lindsay yeah go for it can i say something about romeo to a certain degree i almost kind of respect that he's just kind of like yeah i'm not winning this am i and like you know he's not like laying down and dying like he's not just it may seem that way but i don't think he truly is you know he like is actively like taking part in this move whereas someone else might just be like whatever like i'm losing he's still playing the game he's not he's not like that kid like it reminds me of cartman from south park you know where he's like screw you guys i'm going home whenever he doesn't get his way he's not like that kid you know he's still playing the game until the end and he's still trying to get as far as he can in the game and that's admirable you know in its own so yeah i think romeo is my number two marianne she was the mastermind behind it but she couldn't pull the move out without romeo and her side doing this and i can't give it to lindsay

49:32 Even though she won immunity that's awesome she just got outplayed romeo got outplayed mike i felt like made the right call and trying to go after someone like omar seeing that [Music] i kind of i think i'm going jonathan as well here i think i'm going jonathan for this move just because of his awareness of where he is in the game lindsay and omar pulling a fast one over him it would have been easy for him to stay with that group of taku and with omar but he knew he needed to you know cut it and run basically at this point in the game and i think it was the right move for him as well yeah can i say it's just kind of interesting when i went to go re-watch the episode mike is the one who brought up elmer first like right at the beginning like it's like okay we see omar he's the front runner right now and he goes to mary and he almost like kind of has to convince her like yeah but you see i think this i think this is the thing right i think marianne and omar were very close throughout this i don't think mike and marianne have had this working relationship throughout the season when it comes to playing so i think that's why he said you could screw me in the game right now putting my life in the game in your hands is because he's going out on a leap of faith and i think that marianne probably at that point had to think about it and be like i could go the safe

50:52 Route where i'm guaranteed to potentially somehow make it to the final four in final three with lindsay because she thought she was a lot closer with lindsay than what she was and omar i think she saw a way for her to get there with lindsay and omar but she then realized that's not the winning game at this point so she ultimately i think gets the points over mike because she kept it but yeah i mean there's a there's a case for mike in fact there's a case for like to be number three there's a case for mike to be number three here yeah what i was what i was going to say it's just interesting that like the roles kind of flip after the immunity challenge because it's like marianne it has to convince mike to do it where it's like well you were the one that wanted to do this and i know that it was because that's the bizarre that's why i can't go for mike because to me it was just mind-blowing that he's scared i guess it's easy for us to tell because we're outside of the game right it's mind-blowing that he's scared when he knows the votes are coming to jonathan it's not on him he's safe but he's still scared of making that move just in case omar plays an idol yeah if he was if he was truly scared then he would have played he would have played his own idol you know so yeah now my reason that i don't think like i mean if i had to look at this going into the finale week next week who's the best chance to win this season marianne head and shoulders above everyone else

52:12 Mike like this is where it gets tough like mike has got a chance because everybody loves him he's a great social player but i also think that's going to be his biggest weakness when it comes to the finale because people are going to feel extremely hurt by him that he betrayed them and it's interesting because i spoke to jesse from survivor australian survivor blood versus water in an interview after the season where he mentioned that you know i think it was with jesse that he said that you know your strengths become your weaknesses and your weaknesses become your strengths when you play survivor and mike's strength is his social game in life i think he's a great guy outside of the game i think everybody wants to be his friend i think in survivor that you know it cuts deeper when you create these very real bonds for people outside of the game and they then go and betray you afterwards i think people are gonna i think they're gonna be hurt by mike going into the end and they're gonna say you shouldn't have cut me like high's gonna say i was never coming for you know what i mean that type of conversations are going to happen i could definitely see that happening i mean because we know he's in the final four unless he doesn't plays idle for some reason gives actually gives it to marianne that would be weird but we'd always in the final four who's he gonna i

53:33 I just feel like if jonathan is not gone at five he is winning the final immunity challenge just whatever it is like he's i feel like he's just going to win that and then it's going to be probably mike going to fire with someone it's i think it's time it's going to be good it's going to be good i mean i'm excited for the end of the season overall i think this has been a great season i'm still a big fan of the season i have a lot of issues with the game mechanics that are being used in new school survivor but that's for a different discussion christian here brings up that marianne will only be the second female black female winner to win survivor obviously the first one being for sepia all the way back in season four but you know this could be two for two for canada in the new era of survivor and then you also have two from three because canadians have only been on three seasons of survivor if she wants this one it's two from three and i think this sparks the conversation when do we get survivor us versus international and will the likes of you know erica and someone like marianne potentially in the future be in the international team if we had a season such as that to go up against the u.s or are they automatically you know i mean the u.s and canada are pretty close maybe they do fall under the u.s umbrella but i found it very

54:53 Interesting jake that you know a cast has been dropped for season 43 we won't go into specific names or anything like that but there's no canadians do you think it's amazing i think i think the common or the consensus at the moment is that there's a reason why and it's because that there were two canadian winners in a row and they're like okay maybe the playing field isn't so level which is so funny to think about because we had i know you said that there's been three seasons but like come on there was one canadian on 39 i think it was tom yeah older guy he had no chance of winning he was joining but still there was canadian representation there was a canadian yeah it's just yeah it's interesting it's a high success rate no matter how you look at it two from three is not bad either but two from two very i think similar types of winners potentially marianne probably being after this move in my opinion a slightly stronger winner than someone like erica yeah definitely but i mean overall this is interesting for me because this kicks off a whole new era we haven't had any female winners for so long we potentially will have two female winners back to back here like i said i mean it's interesting how the game is sort of shaping up and then we're finding out that season 43 will be the exact replica of what we've been seeing it's 26 days

56:13 Some other type of season similar to type of show we're not going back to 39 days this is the new survivor now did it did that did redmond reveal that i believe so yeah so all i've seen all i've seen is the cast but then i saw that there were three tribes again but yeah disappointing i knew i knew they weren't going to go back to 39 days it's just it's just lazy jeff's lazy he doesn't want to be out there for any longer than what he needs to you know it's well that's why they do all these tough things you know you know i honestly i kind of get it for jeff because he's away from his family a lot if he could reduce that in any way possible i understand but purely from a show standpoint it's worse for the show it need it's just 39 days which is so iconic that was that was the thing it was 39 days but now 26 it's just that it's just not the same christian let me know in the comments i almost feel like you're canadian i can't remember so let me know if i'm wrong or not but yeah it's an interesting era of survivor that we're ahead of but i guess you know that's it kind of for this week it was it was a great episode i'm very happy to see marianne you know she called omar being the cocoon and then becoming the butterfly

57:33 And i think that's really more her this episode and what she became on the show and becoming a crew a real contender yeah christian saying he is canadian so yeah well done christian you've got to be proud and i think personally i've met a few canadians i feel like canadians are very easygoing people and they get along with everyone and survivor is about getting along with people where americans are a little bit more polarized from what i see in the media in any case like i've lived in america as well for about nine months and people had strong opinions so maybe there is something called you're in texas you're in texas you're kind of in the extreme but yeah i think overall i love the british but yeah overall i think you're right yeah it's interesting i wonder if culturally there's like something there but i mean who knows anyways that's it here for this week if you got to this part of the podcast thank you so much for listening so thank you so much for watching here today please leave a like on the video it does help us get recognized in the youtube algorithms if you're listening to the audio version you've never subscribed to the youtube channel even if you want to continue listening on spotify or apple podcast or google or whatever you listen to the podcast please consider jumping on the youtube channel search the nullified take and subscribe to the channel we're getting closer and closer to 700 subscribers when we get to 750 i'll do another

58:53 Type of giveaway potentially with some caps i do need to give one out to jake first otherwise he'll never let me hear the end of that but we'll do some we'll do a little bit of a giveaway and then when we get to a thousand subscribers we'll do another buff giveaway as well so that will happen in the near future if you are also a challenge fan we've got challenge content dropping tomorrow i believe at 8 pm eastern standard time on friday evening we will be talking with chantal and drew about the latest episode of the challenge all-stars three episode three so looking forward to that one as well guys thank you so much for watching and catch you next week when we'll be crowning a new winner of survivor can't wait for that to happen jake catch you then