Survivor: Tocantins, week eight

Coach (a.k.a. the Dragonslayer) figured the best way to help everyone deal with Joe’s evacuation was to tell them about how he was once kidnapped and held in captivity by natives along the Amazon River while he was on a solo kayaking expedition he didn’t allow National Geographic to tag along on.

Outside of the surreal fantasy land in Coach’s head, everyone else was dealing with the surreal fantasy world of Survivor. J.T. and Brendan won a reward together and ended up best friends. Brendan decides he doesn’t want to win himself and starts gearing his efforts to getting J.T. to the end. Which is… noble, I guess, but absolutely a foreign concept to me. I’ve seen players in the past who were legitimately happy to have a close ally win the game, and I’ve seen players who removed enemies from the game for personal reasons when it made no strategic sense to do so, but Brendan’s the first to actually say, “I don’t want to win. I want someone else to win.”

Unfortunately it was too little, too late. Brendan had done nothing to cultivate his Exile alliance, so while they all told pretty stories to his face they ended up going behind his back during the actual vote. Coach ate a couple of votes, but Brendan was blindsided and sent home. Should have re-assured your allies before they became uber-valuable swing votes, buddy! Have fun on the jury!

Coach and Tyson now believe they’re in control of the game. They’re not. J.T. and Stephen had a conversation down on the beach about it, and they’re absolutely right. Even coming in with such low numbers, the former Jalapao tribe is sitting pretty. The vote-splitting idea Coach suggested was the biggest power move in the game’s history (obviously Coach has never seen Survivor before — too busy getting attacked by sharks and learning karate from Tibetan monks) is going to ultimately work against them. If the current alliance takes out Sierra and Erinn next, that leaves former Jalapao with enough numbers to play their idol free from the fear of split votes. They can force a tie and play the idol, or they can approach one of the former Timbira members with that information to flip them.

The one crack in this observation is that Stephen knows he can’t win in the finals against J.T. Somewhere along the lines he’s got to figure out a way around him. Which brings me to:

Who’s gonna win? If it goes the way it looks like it will with Sierra and Erinn gone next, either Tyson is going to flip against Coach or Stephen is going to flip against J.T. The former is probably more likely, but the latter is the more powerful move. Given that, Stephen is still pretty flying under the radar with an immunity idol in his back pocket, so I’m going to stick with Stephen.