For two consecutive tribal councils, Anesu, Santoni, and Chappies have failed to/chosen not to break up the tight three of Tyson, Kiran, and Wardah. Their margin for error is getting slimmer and slimmer. Is this the week they finally pull it off?

• While the chickens just openly wander around camp undisturbed, Tyson lays out the hierarchy: he’s the head of the trio that includes Kiran and Wardah, with Santoni, and Chappies on the periphery, and Anesu on the bottom, but she doesn’t know it (I didn’t know it either until Tyson said it).
• Anesu says it’s time to take out Tyson. She has Santoni and Chappies are on board so it’s a matter of roping in the remnants of Zamba (Nicole and Smash).
• Reward challenge: Two teams throw coconuts into a basket until it topples a stack of puzzle pieces, then have to solve the puzzle. Reward is a test-drive in the all-new Mahindra Thar (which rolls out from behind some brush and parks next to Nico to semi-forced oohing and ahhing). The winning team also gets a South African braai feast, with chops, boerewors, pap, and chakalaka, which all sounds like Klingon food to me but I’m sure is delicious.
• The challenge is interesting mainly for the schoolyard pick, which will have repercussions later. The green team is Wardah, Tyson, Nicole, and Chappies. The orange team is Kiran, Anesu, Smash, and Santoni. The green team wins.
• Santoni is (wait for it) furious! This time it’s because during the schoolyard pick, Tyson chose not Santoni, but Nicole, their “nemesis”. Anesu commiserates, but she must surely know that you never only take your allies on reward (there was an object lesson in that just last week). But it’s in Anesu’s interest to keep Santoni mad at the power trio.
• This time there’s no drama about any hidden advantage at the reward (Chappies checks for everybody briefly). But NIcole spots something else on the table. We get the most perfunctory letters from home sequence I can remember seeing on Survivor.
• Not surprisingly, Nicole makes overtures to the other side and vice versa. She says there’s clearly two factions of three and it’s a matter of figuring out which side would vote her out first.
• Anesu tries to get Smash on side for taking out one of the Big 3. But then Kiran and Tyson tell Smash that they’re gunning for Anesu (Tyson is reluctant to give up the name initially), and Smash tells us that they’ve additionally promised him Final 3 ahead of Wardah. He also says that if he goes with Anesu, the blindside will look like her move. That’s really smart, but on the other hand it’s really dumb to believe that Kiran and Tyson will really take him to the Final 3.
• Immunity challenge: It’s the one where you have to swim out to a pontoon and then repeatedly run across it and swim back under it. I know this has been done several times in Survivor history, but the only one that comes to mind is Pearl Islands, when Darrah demonstrated why you don’t wear a Survivor buff as a tube top in a swimming challenge.
• Nico offers them spaghetti to sit out, and everybody except Chappies and Nicole accept. On the one hand, that shows a lot of complacency and Nico will berate them for it later, but on the other hand, who really believes they can beat Chappies (aka Aquaman) in a swimming challenge? Nevertheless, given that there’s an idol waiting on Immunity Island, I think one of Tyson or Kiran should have at least tried, and Smash should have too, just to keep up the appearance of being on the outs. Chappies wins, of course. As pre-arranged, he sends Santoni to Immunity Island.
• The Immunity Island challenge is the vertical snake maze, another old Survivor standby. Santoni just barely loses, although I think there was some editing trickery involved. In any case she retrieves the hidden idol.
• Prior to tribal council, we get a flurry of people telling each other real and false plans. The long and short of it is that both Vuna factions are pretending to agree to an easy Smash boot, but are really planning to blindside the other. The Chappies-Anesu-Santoni side want to vote out Tyson. The Tyson-Kiran-Wardah side want to lure Santoni into playing her idol for Smash, then vote out Anesu. Both sides need Smash and Nicole as numbers. It’s worth noting for later on that Anesu and Tyson are respectively seen as bigger threats than Chappies and Kiran.
• Tyson and Anesu meet up and talk about how they will probably both be the big targets when Vuna starts cannibalizing itself. In confessional, Anesu talks about how ironic it would be if both she and Kiran were attempting a big move at the same time, and that it might end up knocking them both out. Kiran talks about how Anesu has to go because her game is the same as his.
• Nicole and Tyson meet up and Nicole makes the case for going with the Anesu-Chappies-Santoni side and breaking up Tyson-Kiran-Wardah. Anesu tells Smash that the plan is to tell him the vote is on Nicole but the vote is really on him.
• Tribal Council: Lots of discussion of the sit-outs at the immunity challenge. Then talk about whether the six really view Nicole and Smash as threats, and about when it’s time for the majority to go after each other.
• Everybody except Santoni votes, Santoni doesn’t play the idol, Anesu doesn’t play the Tribal Council pass. The votes come in six for Anesu and only two for Tyson. Nicole and Tyson ended up siding with the Tyson-Kiran-Wardah trio. I wish we had been shown how Smash changed Nicole’s mind.
• I have to give all involved a lot of credit: If the Anesu-Santoni-Chappies side had gotten even the tiniest of hints that the vote was on Anesu, Santoni could have given Anesu the idol and/or Anesu could have played the Tribal Council pass (although the latter wouldn’t have changed the outcome).
• Anesu seems like a truly lovely person, which made it all the more entertaining that she played double agent throughout her time in the game. But it eventually caught up with her by raising her threat level and depriving her of any true-blue allies other than Chappies.
• Anesu slips the Tribal Council Pass to Chappies on her way out. Survivor SA allows this kind of thing (in Season 6, Toni passed an advantage to Annalize after being voted out by leaving her hat behind), but I’m pretty sure it’s against the rules in US Survivor.
• The last three boots were all players that the show had been presenting to us as highly viable winner candidates. I don’t think guess-the-winner is the most rewarding way to watch Survivor, but at this point I have to believe the chances of either Tyson or Kiran winning the season are quite high.
• Many have pointed out that Immunity Island is basically a better-executed version of Ghost Island, and now I think there’s another eerie parallel between the two seasons: a partnership between two extremely strong players who genuinely seem willing to sit next to each other at the end rather than goat-herd, abetted by a third person who brings them crucial information and sabotages uprisings, and seems hell-bent on finishing in third place. However, it looks like it will be a nine-person jury, so there won’t be a tie.
• Trinket watch: Santoni has a public idol. Chappies has the Tribal Council Pass.