Survivor Recap: Not My First Bro-deo

Survivor
The Girl at the Prom
Season 51 Episode 7
Editor’s Rating ★★★★
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It’s a whole new day in America, and we are looking at a bright future where villainy is dead and we can go back to enjoying the once-proud thing we have always loved. No, I’m not talking about the midterm results (though those were great too); I’m talking about our imminent future, where we never have to hear the word Brody on network television or its attendant streaming services ever again. I don’t want to make this too political, but the Tribal Council in this episode was a bit like the past several presidential elections: We didn’t know where the vote was going, neither candidate was especially appealing, the polls were wildly misleading, the normal coalitions were crumbling, there were major implications for what the landscape would look like coming out of it, and it was an absolute nail-biter up until the very end. After this vote, unlike in some of our recent elections, I was cheering from my seat.

Let’s be clear, I loathed Brody in every single episode. Okay, fine. First, I was attracted to him in his tight galaxy-print underwear because I have a soft spot for big, beefy guys who look like they would have beaten me up in high school. (This explains my continued crush on West Wilson. I know, I know. I can’t help it.) The difference between West and Brody is that Brody definitely would have beaten me up in high school, whereas West joined the Gay-Straight Alliance to score points with chicks. And though Brody drove me crazy — as do Kilby, Eric, Mike, and Devin — this is exactly what I wanted when I asked for more villains on Survivor. The cast can’t all be about people who love the game (Eric’s tearful embrace of his grub made me want to retch for more reasons than one); you need to have some people we’re going to root against as well, and this season has them in droves.

Brody, however, is the worst of the worst. He shows it all episode. It starts when Jeff gets the three tribes together and tells them they’re merging into one. I was a little sad because that meant losing my favorite tribe so far: Dina. I was confused about whether they had to “earn” the merge, as they had in the New Era, and whether there would be some kind of twist or challenge and exactly how the merge feast would play into all this. Jeff answers my questions immediately. He says there will be a feast, everyone has to earn one of ten spots (for 13 players), and that the way they will earn it will go back to the origins of the game. They all have to eat two grubs, and the first ten will get to feast. I love all of this. It is a new, fresh twist on the New Era, it is rooted in the history of the game, and the eating-disgusting-things challenge has more or less disappeared in the past decade or so. Great job, Jeff and team. 

Predictably, when you have 13 people all trying to choke down two live, squirming bugs, it is absolute carnage. All you can hear is chomping, squelching, slurping, vomiting, gagging, and moaning. It sounds just like a Berlin sex club up in there. Kristin gives up immediately, Cristain taps out shortly thereafter, and Sharonda loses out on the last spot to Kilby as the two try to choke down their dinner in a head-to-head battle. And in the middle of all this, you have Brady the Brody who just volunteers to chew on grubs. Even after it is done, he eats Cristian’s leftover grubs. This is Brady in a nutshell: showboating, proving his toughness, centering his arrogance, taking up the most possible room both literally and figuratively. It gets even worse at the feast, where he starts pounding brewskis, eating slabs of watermelon in one bite (including the rind), and talking with his mouth full. At one point, he even says, “Brody. Brody. Brody. Brody,” like he is calling attendance at the Duke chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon. 

I could not hate this man more and then we get to the first immunity challenge. Jeff unveils the individual immunity necklace and it’s cute and all but has a severe lack of whales. I’ve been loving the Moby-Dick motif all season, and here it’s just some teeth and a little doohickey in twine. Where is Shamu? Because he is pissed. The challenge is a twist on a Survivor classic where they stand on a balance beam and hold a long pole. Instead of balancing a ball at the end, this time they’re balancing a whale statue. Isn’t the whale adorable? Just put a string on one of those and call it the immunity necklace. Brady is standing there, hunched over, thinking he’s going to win it, with a toothpick in his mouth. When Jeff asks him a question, he just grunts away, like he’s better than Jeff, like he can’t be bothered with this at all. He does well in the challenge but loses close to the end and throws his stick in the sand as he trundles back to the losers’ bench. You know Brady thought he had it in the bag. Oh, I hate this guy.

The challenge initially lacks a bit of tension because we have no clue where this vote might be headed other than that Mike, who has flipped more flops than the CEO of Havaianas, is in trouble. As it gets to a showdown between him, Kristin, and Lewis, it starts to take on a bit of shape. Mike eventually wins, thwarting the No. 1 plan of just about everyone on the beach. I get why everyone wants him gone — even more so by the end of the episode — because you can’t get a read on the guy; he seems desperate to work with everyone but also doesn’t seem to want to work with anyone at all. 

With Mike removed as an option, it is hard to see where the votes are going to go. As Devin says at Tribal, it’s not like there are sides at the moment; it’s like an interconnected web where old tribal alliances mean nothing and everyone is trying to get the majority. As new plans pop up, everyone wants to bring a “plus-one,” and that ends up ruining the plan. The politicking starts when Mike tells Eric he wants to work with the old Savu tribe. (Dina slighted once again!) He says the heads of the old Toka are Brady and Kilby, and they should target one of them. Eric initially wants to go for Kilby because he can’t trust him. After Mike talks to Jelly, whom he was close to earlier in the game, she wants to get rid of Brady because it’s a big swing and she doesn’t trust him. Meanwhile, Brady gets a group together with Maggie, Thien An, Jelly, Devin, Carter, and Lewis to get rid of Kristin because Maggie thinks Kristin has an idol and doesn’t want to work with her. The problem is, Brady brings in Mike at the last minute, after they already had the majority, and Mike then goes to tell his “No. 1,” Kristin. 

There’s something crazy about this season where there aren’t really any tight groups (except for Jelly and Devin) and everyone thinks their enemies are actually their allies. Kilby thinks Eric will vote with him, though Eric is trying to get him out. Kilby and Brady trust each other even though Brady voted to get rid of Kilby. And Mike is trying to protect Kristin, and she’s the one who blows up his whole plan. Mike approaches Kristin when she’s with a group and tells her that if they don’t vote Brady, then she’ll be next. She sees this as a threat because Mike’s delivery is worse than an Amazon box left outside your doorstep in the rain. Kristin goes and tells Brady that Mike & Co. are gunning for him. 

This leads to one of the worst confrontations we’ve seen on Survivor since Russell Hantz left. Brady sits down with Mike to let him know the jig is up and it’s all veiled threats, unearned superiority, and sneering disregard. He tells Mike, “It comes down to who Kristin is going to trust. You wanted her to trust you, and she didn’t. She trusted me.” But now that Brady and crew know the Kristin vote is bust, they’re all going back to Eric. Who will it be, Eric or Brady, Brady or Eric?

My first inkling that Brady is going home is when Maggie talks to Jelly and says she can’t work with these people because they can’t keep their mouths shut. She specifically singles out Brady for ruining every plan they’ve ever had with his temper tantrums. Even as everyone is talking to Jeff at Tribal, there are whispers back and forth, and the only words emerging are Eric and Brady, with a lot of I don’t knows thrown in for good measure. As the Tribal goes live, Maggie gets in another good one. Jelly tells her, “We’re dealing with man-children,” and Maggie says, “I didn’t sign up for that.” No, she did not. All the man-children are the villains, and finally, with Maggie, we have a hero. Not only did she create the amazing vote where Linnnneeeaaayyyyahhhhhhh (as Kilby spelled it) went home, she also created both the plan to get rid of Kristin and the plan to get rid of Brady. She’s just lying in a hammock, running the whole game while Brady is throwing his toys around in the sandbox because people won’t listen to him.

Maggie gets her way as the vote is less close than we thought it might be. Only Brady, Carer, Lewis, and Thien An, an unlikely coalition, vote for Eric, with the rest deciding that Brady, whose strength carried them through the tribe challenges, was just too volatile and annoying to take any further in the game. Unsurprisingly, he is a sore loser, picking up his torch, not uttering a word, and shuffling across the bridge to Ponderosa. As his feet touch each of the planks, in the background he can hear the wind rustle in the palm trees, the soft beat of the ocean against the sand, the scurrying of hermit crabs to and fro in the darkness, and in the distance, below it all, a group of monkeys cackling out, “Brody. Brody. Brody. Brody,” as they recede into the darkness.