Review: Survivor, "Stop With All The Niceness" | Season 43, Episode 5
My kingdom for the return of a pre-merge tribe swap
When you give three different tribes the same basic task on Survivor, there’s a risk of sameness. The “social skills” twist to the Beware Advantage essentially ensured that three episodes of the season featured the same conflict: how does a player convince their tribemates to give them a bead from their bag without raising suspicion?
On the one hand, there was a sameness to the stories, as they all achieved their task without a whole lot of difficulty. But the thing about Survivor is that there is always space for nuances, which was in this case provided by the dynamics of how many other players were aware of what was happening in each given tribe. When Jeanine finally finds Baka’s Beware Advantage, she’s with Elie, and Owen stumbles upon them, forcing them to let him in on the details as someone they’re pretending to work with. That was understandable, but then Elie tells Sami while they walk down the beach, which means that in the end literally everyone but Gabler is comple…