Survivor: Island of the Idols Episode 7 Recap

I Was Born at Night, But Not Last Night

Ianic Roy Richard
Nov 7 · 10 min read

On Survivor, I love when an episode can give me a nice, self-contained arc. Last night, along with the fireworks provided by the cast, we got exactly that. It was one of the better single-episode narratives we’ve seen in a minute and I appreciated production for putting it together.

The story started on Island of the Idols. Janet gets to go out and meet Boston Rob and Sandra. I’ll point out that Sandra’s bandages, which came from an allergic reaction she received from working on the shelter, is a point for the “Rob and Sandra are really living out there” crowd. Rob’s unshrinking stomach is a point for the “Rob and Sandra are totally not living there when the cameras aren’t on” crowd.

Anyways, Janet goes out to IoI and we get our lesson for the episode: calculated risks. We get a little montage from Chris Underwood, last season’s winner (which felt unnecessary, we just saw this happen and Chris isn’t on S40 so why bother?). In the game of Survivor, Rob says, you always have to be thinking about moves you could make, the risks involved in those moves and ultimately, whether you make it or not.

Then Rob offers a new Survivor advantage. If Janet plays a game and wins, she will be allowed to use this advantage once until final 7. It would allow her to leave tribal council, thereby not voting but also remaining in the game for at least another round.

After some thinking, Janet decides to decline the advantage. She reasons that while the advantage would save her once, it might put a target on her for the next tribal council. She also believes that by leaving tribal council, she would be taking away her vote, damaging her alliance and taking away some agency in the decision-making process.

In refusing to play the game, Janet earns Rob and Sandra’s praises. Rob celebrates that she heard exactly what he was saying. Janet calculated the risks of playing the game, realized it wasn’t truly advantageous to her, and refused to play. Sandra was impressed that Janet was the first person not to be influenced by Rob and Sandra. She may have been in front of her idols, but she didn’t let their presence fool her into making a dub decision to impress them.

It was also the show admitting to the audience that the game is not always about advantages. The right decision for Janet in this situation was depicted as not playing the game. Which means choosing not to receive a potential trinket from production. She is choosing the social game over a piece of paper and production was signing off on that. Good to see that sometimes, we can still have actual gameplay over random superpowers acquired through various means.

Fast-forward a little bit and Lairo has lost the immunity challenge. Kellee will be going to tribal council with an idol that will expire after this round. She knows she isn’t in trouble and won’t need it, but she also feels like letting it expire is a waste.

This is where we get a brilliant confessional from Kellee and production. It’s a moment where Kellee is explaining her idol situation to the camera and in real time, she has an idea. For a solid 5 seconds, she is silent, the entire program is silent, as she just thinks about a potential move.

In that moment, Kellee is thinking about giving her idol to Dean and what that might mean. She is in the process of doing her own risk assessment, as talked about on Island of the Idols. Rob told us, and the flashback to Chris showed us that winning players make risky moves, but they don’t make risky moves out of nowhere, they think about it beforehand.

There’s your full circle moment. Finally, the stars aligned and the lesson taught at IoI came into play in the actual game. For the first time in this season, IoI paid off as more than just a comedic element. It served a narrative purpose.

That’s why, regardless of the potential pitfalls from Kellee’s decision, this episode has me feeling good about her chances to win. She was literally shown thinking through the move she would end up making. To see Kellee putting in motion a lesson Rob and Sandra felt was important for a winner to understand is huge for her chances in the game.

After this episode, I’m also convinced a woman must win this season. It’s not even because of the discussion at tribal council, which was refreshingly real. After Janet left IoI, Sandra told Rob, “I keep telling you a woman is going to win this season, I’m just waiting for you to take me up on the bet.” To which Rob replies, “I was born at night but not last night.” If a woman isn’t winning this season, there’s no way we see this exchange. Doubly so because Rob’s quote was the episode title.

It also helps that Tommy, who has been having a stellar season up until being blindsided last episode, was shown leaning on Lauren for support last night. It helped give Lauren more to do in the episodes and showed that Tommy isn’t as infallible as we all see him. People have been saying his edit is too perfect to be the winner and after this episode, I’m pretty convinced he’s a decoy.

We can now go back and look at Kellee’s decision based on strategy. There’s no doubt that in a single round, this was a flashy and effective move. It’s one of the more brilliant maneuvers we’ve seen. It’s kind of like J.T. giving Russell his idol in HvH, only it worked.

There were a lot of moving parts in Kellee’s play. She had to get Dean to realize he was going home. Then she had to give him the idol without her tribe noticing. All while knowing Dean was a marked man and that she couldn’t be seen talking to him for too long, lest she arise suspicion. Then she also had to talk to Noura and get her to vote how she wanted as a backup plan in case Dean went rogue and threw his only vote on Kellee. And she had to make sure Noura didn’t somehow spill the beans before the vote was revealed.

That her move worked is impressive. It took a lot of engineering and Kellee pulled it off flawlessly. I love that she idol’ed her own vote, hiding her own move with some plausible deniability. Everything about this move last night was perfect. For the time being.

My fear for this move is in the longer term. It would help if we were told how much Noura knows. There’s no way Noura will be able to keep this a secret for too long. Did Kellee have Dean talk to Noura or did she do so herself? Also, can she really trust Dean not to reveal what happened down the line? He’s shown himself willing to do anything to stay in the game. I wouldn’t be surprised if he sells Kellee out to save his own skin later.

And why Jack? I think knowing the merge was around the corner had to be a factor. Jack looks so much like Joe and has performed so well in the challenges that I understand if she was a little spooked. Still, Kellee said herself that Jack was loyal and willing to go far with her. He’s not very worrisome strategically and, by all accounts, he’s fun to be around.

Still, those are worries for another day. Kellee has now gained Dean’s trust. She’s also managed to raise his threat level by having him play that idol. It could be a mark on his resume should he get to the end, but at that point, Kellee can reveal what she did and steal his thunder. As poet-laureate Lil Wayne once said, “real Gs move in silence like Lasagna.”

Kellee even managed to flush Jamal’s idol without even knowing he had one. Jamal’s decision to play his idol for Noura was astounding. She had just told everybody at tribal council that she sometimes hates him. If he thought Dean’s sole vote was on Noura, he should have let her take the bullet. The only reason to play his idol in this situation is if Jamal thinks he’s the sole vote. Which I thought he was. I thought Jamal was going to be voted out in the same round he played an idol on Noura. How insulting would that have been?

If we want to talk about going full circle, we can also mention how this vote went down. As it was, only Dean and Noura’s votes counted and they both went on Jack. Last week, Noura approached Dean about working together to split up Jamal and Jack and Dean basically laughed her off. This week, thanks to Kellee’s machinations, Dean and Noura did end up working together to split up Jamal and Jack. Let that be a lesson, you can run from it, you can hide but in the end, Noura always gets her way.

For the second week in a row, we got another episode with some very important discussion. I loved the entire talk about women’s alliances and their existence within the game of Survivor. It’s great that production is airing this stuff because it is very educative for so many people, myself included.

I understand Jamal’s fear of a women’s alliance because it’s been a heavy talking point in past Survivor seasons. In terms of all-time iconic alliances, the Black Widow Brigade stands alone. His fears were founded when Noura even confirmed for the group that she had entertained the idea over the past couple of days.

That said, I also understand Kellee’s point that there are far more alliances involving all women that fail or don’t even materialize. And that whenever men get together, it is rarely seen as a “man’s alliance”. People will align with those they feel most comfortable. Sometimes the familiarity is gender-based. Sometimes it’s personality-based or where you’re both from. Like she said last night, alliances are formed arbitrarily on Survivor based on a common point. Sometimes it happens to be gender but often, it’s not.

Janet expounded ever further on Kellee’s statement in such an eloquent manner. She’s right that society has come so far in terms of women’s rights, though we still have even further to go, and that support from both men and women has bred the change. When we see each other as simply humans, with our qualities and our flaws, and not as our genders or our races or our sexuality, that’s when we can say we’ve reached true equality. And the work on that will never be over. But by showing it on TV, Survivor is allowing for the discourse to reach a broad audience and that’s a wonderful thing.

Speaking of Janet, she had such a tour de force episode. I was ready to write her off as a potential winner because she had been so quiet for the last few weeks. Then, right before the merge, she had such a solid night that it threw her right back into the mix of things. Her stay on IoI was easily the most positive of the season so far. We had both Rob and Sandra praising her, with Sandra talking about how she had winner upside.

Then we got the boob flashing scene, which doesn’t move the needle one way or another but needed to be mentioned as one of the most awesome things to ever happen on Survivor. Janet is pure, unadulterated badass.

Janet’s episode was topped off by being given the final word on the discussion at tribal council. It’s obvious that this woman has lived through a lot, is very wise and great with her words. She was such a force of positivity in this episode that I can’t help but be excited for her prospects going into the merge. She’s peaking at the right time.

Going into tribal council, I was disappointed because we didn’t get much Noura content. Thankfully, she delivered in front of Probst. We got her crazy tribal council laugh again. Evidently, Noura is not great under pressure because when she gets nervous, she laughs like this. We also got Noura copping to wanting to get Jamal out, all while she’s finally been accepted into Vokai and they are trying to work together as a tribe. Noura is just too good.

At Lairo, we got a bit of post-Jason blindside content. Quick aside, I was shocked we didn’t get a reaction from Vokai when they saw Jason was gone. I thought Missy had a great episode in terms of relationship building. Like she did with Aaron, she quickly went to Lauren and reassured her. This was good from Missy seeing as how she’s been antagonistic in the last couple of episodes. I also thought it was interesting to have “now let’s win the game”, which was said by Missy to Lauren after winning the immunity challenge, captioned. Captions can be important in telling us what is relevant, so this was noteworthy.

It was less of a solid episode for Dan, who keeps touching people awkwardly. This man can’t help himself. I’m honestly surprised he hasn’t been caught in the Me Too movement because he works in Hollywood and so far, he’s been made to seem like a huge creep on the show. I hope he’s not this guy in real-life and I hope that if he is, watching himself is making him think about how his actions make people around him feel.

I’ll end by saying that we got very little Elaine tonight but the confessional about Vokai being “sour grapes and butt hurt,” made me audibly guffaw. So good on you Elaine.

Next week, no surprise, we’re merging. There’s going to be a lot of dynamics in play. On paper, there’s a 7–6 Vokai advantage over Lairo but we also know that Karishma has totally deserted her original Lairo tribe. Dean probably isn’t too keen on working with them either, outside of Kellee, he feels like a nomad. The Lairo 4 that went to Vokai seem tightly together after last week but then again, Aaron and Missy have been shown willing to flip. Noura is still somehow in play. A lot of things will need to be worked out so this should be a good episode next week, especially considering we are getting a two-hour time slot (probably two vote outs?).

A Tribe of One

The premiere spot for Survivor history and analysis ranging from Borneo to the current season.

Ianic Roy Richard

Written by

Sports fan and alleged analyst. Day one Survivor fan and reality television junkie. @atribeofone1 on twitter. For inquiries: ianic.roy.richard@gmail.

A Tribe of One

The premiere spot for Survivor history and analysis ranging from Borneo to the current season.

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