Come for the Survivor South Africa recapping, stay for the Santoni stanning.

• After a fiery tribal council, Smash can’t believe he got Tribal Council Passed into the next round by Chappies, whom he’s betrayed twice. Chappies and Tyson continue to beef. Tyson reassures Smash that he slots into Wardah’s spot in the power trio, now renamed the League of Shadows. Nicole is only along for the ride for now while they get rid of Chappies and/or Santoni.
• I swear I’m not an unfeeling monster, but I’m going to yada-yada the loved ones visit simply because there’s so much to get to. Tyson’s friend made him look happy for possibly the first time the entire game. Chappies kissing his wife’s baby bump was very touching. Kiran’s sister is attractive. Nicole’s brother is as huge as Nicole is tiny. Chappies wins the reward challenge, but he of all people doesn’t really need the reward (choose two people to participate in the immunity challenge, AKA exclude the three strongest challenge performers). He chooses Santoni and Smash. It was nice of production to not send away any of the loved ones. Kiran spots an idol high up in a tree and had the gall to ask Nicole’s brother for a boost so he can reach it.
• Immunity challenge: Use a grappling hook to pull a ring and drop a ball, then use the ball in a rope-and-pulley table maze. Chappies of course hooks the ring on the first try. Santoni then hooks hers, while Smash takes forever to hook his. Santoni maneuvers her ball around the table maze with all the finesse of Tony Vlachos solving a slide puzzle. Smash catches all the way up to Chappies and almost lands his ball in the notch, but it falls through a hole. Chappies wins his third immunity necklace in a row. But he doesn’t get to send anyone to Immunity Island, and Tribal Council will be tomorrow night rather than tonight, giving the castaways a full day and a half to stir the pot.
• Since the League of Shadows + Nicole can’t go with plan A, they’ll vote out Santoni instead. Simple. In Santoni’s presence, they pretend the vote is on Tyson because he’s too big a threat. In private, they joke about having to endure Santoni’s yap-yap-yapping for another day. Nicole says everything is smooth sailing. That’s the kind of thing someone says on Survivor when all hell is about to break loose.
• Kiran floats the idea of voting out Nicole to Tyson and Smash, since if they get rid of Santoni now they’ll inevitably face a challenge beast (either Chappies or Nicole) at Final 4. Tyson raises the issue of Nicole’s Fire Idol, and Kiran says she won’t play it. Kiran clears up some confusion about when it expires (at this Final 6 vote, not Final 5) and when she can use it (before the votes are read, not after). I’m glad the castaways are just as confused about it as me.
• Smash balks at this idea, mostly because it would be Kiran’s move and not his (this sounds familiar). Kiran tells Smash that if Chappies wins the next immunity challenge they would have to get rid of Nicole anyway, so it’s just bringing that move forward one round. Smash wants to keep his hands clean, so Kiran considers letting Smash vote for Santoni and playing his idol on Tyson, which would make his and Tyson’s two votes enough to get Nicole out. The problem is that Nicole could play the idol, and if she wins fire-making they have an enemy.
• Santoni is getting bad vibes from Tyson and Kiran. She expresses her misgivings to Smash, then asks if he would tell her in advance if the vote is on her, since there’s nothing she could do about it anyway. He says yes. Then she just asks him straight up if the vote is on her. He says he just promised to tell her if it was, but he didn’t, so it isn’t. This exchange reminds me somehow of the “My next sentence is true. My previous sentence was false” paradox. Santoni’s paranoia grows.
• Tyson tells Kiran that he understands the logic of voting out Nicole, but he just can’t stand having Santoni around any longer. Kiran reminds us in confessional that he’s still playing double agent, telling Santoni and Chappies that the vote is on Tyson and telling Nicole that the vote is on Santoni. Tyson is worried about Nicole playing the Fire Idol since it’s expiring. Kiran says that if that happens, he’ll immediately play his idol for Tyson.
• Smash, looking to make a move, talks with Nicole and they agree that neither wants to sit next to Kiran at FTC. He tells Nicole that Kiran is planning to play his idol for Tyson or not at all, which leaves him wide-open to a blindside. He also tells her that Kiran and Tyson are actually gunning for her, not Santoni. But even if Smash and Nicole vote for Kiran, it would be a 2-2-2 tie, so they need a third vote.
• Smash approaches Chappies on the beach and brings him into the plan. He waits until Tribal Council is approaching to pull in Santoni, to minimize the chances of her blowing it up. She’s says that if he saves her, he’s got her “for life”. We’ll see about that.
• Smash, Nicole, Santoni, and Chappies convene under the shelter and Santoni says that instead of putting all four votes on Kiran, they should split the vote between Kiran and Tyson to generate a 2-2-2 tie, then on the revote get rid of whichever of Kiran or Tyson isn’t protected by an idol. This is a good modification of Smash’s plan, since it accounts for the possibility of Kiran playing the idol for himself and not Tyson.
• Smash says that he’ll go along, but he thinks they’re overcomplicating things. That’s enough to set off Santoni, who was already wary of Smash’s propensity to flip. This seems overly paranoid to me, but…
• …it’s actually not, because Smash says in confessional that by changing his plan, Santoni made it her plan and not his, and he wants full credit, so the deal’s off. He goes back to Kiran and confesses everything, including that he told them about Kiran’s idol.
• This is fucking jaw-dropping. In the span of four minutes, Smash has managed to make an all-time great move and an all-time terrible move. Even Kiran is perplexed. He tells Tyson, whose diagnosis is that Smash has played an “anybody but me” game the whole time and now suffers from Big Move-itis.
• What Smash should have said was NOTHING; he should have just quietly switched his vote back to Nicole. He could even have claimed it as his own move later, creating a 3-2-1 vote.
• Tribal Council: Kiran ignores Nico’s question and goes straight to blowing up Smash’s game. Smash says that the plan to blindside Nicole didn’t work for him, partly because Nicole has a lot of friends on the jury, so getting rid of her risks losing their votes (this is something we should bear in mind when assessing the last few players’ odds of winning). He says that blindsiding Kiran would be a much better notch on his belt, but he retreated because he’s playing with his heart over his head (only half-correct, if you ask me). Nico rightly points out that a move is only a move if you carry it out, and asks Smash what went wrong. Smash goes around in circles a bit, then Kiran interrupts and runs him over with the bus a couple more times. Santoni says that Kiran was equally as underhanded as Smash because he presented her and Chappies with a fake plan to vote out Tyson. Kiran says that Santoni has been deceiving people all game long too. I think his point is that deception is an integral part of the game and nobody should be playing the victim, but of course Santoni takes this very personally. They get each other riled up, but it’s clear that the jury is on Kiran’s side on this one (although Anesu very cutely mocks Kiran’s gesticulations). Nico gives Santoni the last word, and Kiran puts on his idol.
• After the vote, Kiran plays the idol for himself, Nicole plays the Fire Idol. The votes come in Kiran, Santoni, Tyson, Santoni (signed “from Tyson”), Tyson, Santoni. Because of the Fire Idol, Santoni and Tyson go to a fire-making duel.
• Santoni and Tyson start making fire and Shaun provides theater criticism from the jury bench. Santoni’s method is sounder than Tyson’s and she gets fire first. But so does Tyson soon thereafter, and it’s a race to get it higher. We’re seeing some emergent Survivor gameplay even in fire-making, because once Santoni and Tyson get a stable fire going, they both dump all of their remaining kindling on top to get the fire to really explode (just as Dani and Emmett did in Australian Survivor). The wind plays havoc with their now huge fires (seriously, I thought their flags were going to catch on fire instead of their ropes), but mostly Santoni’s. It’s neck-and-neck, and my pulse is literally racing, then Tyson’s rope breaks. Santoni is out of the game.
• For all that Survivor SA has been letting the players bend the rules, they’re clearly prohibited from getting up and whispering, because it would have been dead easy for both sides to huddle up and agree to just give Smash the Christy Smith/Will Wahl treatment. I’m a bit surprised they didn’t just do it anyway. But this way is more exciting. The whispering in US Survivor was fun the first few times, but I think it’s time to rein it in.
• I cannot stress this enough: The final six should be the penultimate episode of US Survivor. Of all the ways US Survivor has been getting in its own way in recent seasons, this is an overlooked one. Imagine everything that happened in this episode, except it’s stuffed into 15 minutes at the beginning of the finale.
• Trinket watch: All idols and advantages have expired. However, everybody seems to be assuming that because nobody went to Immunity Island this time, it’s done for good, but Nico most definitely did not say that’s the case.
• Oh, Santoni: Unless something goes very sideways, this season will end up being one of the greatest Survivor seasons, period. And when people think of this season’s incredibly deep cast, they’ll think of Santoni first. Everybody has resources they bring to the game, be it challenge strength, social skills, super-fandom, a precision BS detector, or sheer will to win. In Santoni’s case, chaos was a ladder. Every older (by Survivor’s insane standards) woman who’s less fit than Marisha is in immediate danger (“She doesn’t fit in with us cool kids, and we need to stay strong in the challenges.”), and Santoni damn near drowned in an early water challenge. She went from a near-certain early boot to in many cases the decider of who goes home, mostly because she kept everybody else off balance, and in a position where they had to go along with her wishes. Not all of it was intentional, and much of it looked emotion-driven, and yet in most cases her decisions were strategically sound. And in contrast to many, maybe most, others in the Wild Card character archetype, she was always a Chaotic Good.
• It seems likely that if Santoni had made it to the end she would have lost the jury vote no matter who she was sitting next to. It’s clear from the other players’ comments and the jury’s faces that playing Survivor with Santoni is A LOT. But I’m not playing the game Survivor, I’m watching the TV show Survivor, and Santoni was TV gold every single day she was out there. Most of all, she clearly loved the game. I can’t wait to see her again in Survivor South Africa: All-Stars.