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[While my reviews of Survivor are normally behind the paywall, this feels like a particularly important episode, so I’m making this free for everyone. Conveniently, comments remain restricted to subscribers, which will hopefully keep the discourse free from the toxicity this is no doubt inspiring online. If you wish to spend $5 to join that conversation and be racist, I will ban you from commenting and donate that $5 to a racial justice charity.]

I forgot until I turned on my TV at 8:10 that my CableCard is busted on my TiVo—yes, I have a TiVo—which meant I missed the first act of tonight’s episode of Survivor. Conveniently, the first few minutes were on Hai’s Twitter, and subscriber Annemarie filled me in on the rest, and jumping in at the end of the immunity challenge meant I could fill in the gaps: random chance determined the two groups of five that would each be going to tribal council, shrinking the merged tribe to 8 and sending us hurtling toward the endgame of Survivor 42.

Initially, I thought missing this time would be crucial, but “Game of Chicken” had other plans. The talk of an all-male alliance bandied about in the preview was apparently—as I expected—shot down by Hai and Omar, and it was moot anyway given how the twist stranded most of the men on a single tribe. And honestly, the all-male half of things didn’t create interesting television in its own right: yes, it was a strategic move to vote off a member of the majority alliance formed at the merge, but Rocksroy has been dead weight strategically all game, and choosing to remove him now was one of those cases where an absence of gameplay sometimes seems more dangerous than the chaos Romeo tried to seed by voting for Hai and then lying about it. All it really established was that if they were to vote out Rocksroy instead of Romeo, it would create shockwaves for the men when the game resumed, which they clearly decided was worth the risk.

What they were less clear on was how it would immediately change the game when the other five players showed up at tribal council and realized what had happened. And what happens from there is an example of the players effectively wresting control of the game from Probst and the producers. The “split into two tribes double elimination” twist is built to threaten core alliances and force situations like the one Jonathan tries to orchestrate: in the absence of having to work with larger numbers, it’s a great chance to target players like Drea who are playing the game hard and might think they’re still safe. But it also pushes players to think about making themselves as secure as possible, inherently driving them to shelter themselves in alliances they feel comfortable in, and naturally bringing forward the unconscious biases that lead to black players struggling within the game of Survivor.

When Drea brings this conversation to the forefront, it harkens back to a similar conversation that emerged in Survivor 41, and the fact this has emerged twice since CBS began mandating diversity in their casting process showcases the importance of that decision. The Season 41 conversation between Liana, Danny, and DeShawn, though, felt like Probst and the show patting themselves on the back for it, as though the game deserved credit for creating space for this conversation as opposed to being held responsible for making it necessary. But in this case, Drea and Maryanne both work to articulate the pattern they’re seeing, and show an awareness of how this would be perceived that basically takes Probst out of the conversation. What they were in effect saying is that this twist has heightened the unconscious racism that inevitably works its way into Survivor strategy, and the only option they have to confront it is to turn in their immunity idols and play the game with a clean slate from there.

The most telling moment is really from Maryanne, who embraces her role as a key narrator of the game after having been kind of undercut by the edit with regards to her over-enthusiasm. After she initially abandons her attempt to whisper to Tori and just says outright she cannot vote for Drea even in a split vote situation to flush the Idol (which had clearly been the plan), she makes a striking observation: if she doesn’t use her immunity idol, then some viewers (read: racist viewers) will claim that the only reason she wasn’t voted out was because she played the race card. While the conversation in Season 41 was about the burden of being black and making hard decisions within the game knowing they could fuel such narratives, Maryanne here verbalizes the very specific burden of being the person talking about these issues, and knowing the ramifications it would have on social media without even knowing how fans reacted to the conversation last season. It reminds us—and Probst—that the burden of representation is not an abstract feeling one has, but rather a lived reality one takes on, which you can already see clearly in the replies to Twitter conversations happening about this tribal council.

To his credit, Probst largely stays out of this conversation—he sits back until he decides to interject to ask whether the players would prefer if they cut out the “pomp and circumstance” and simply let the vote become a conversation. I appreciate his willingness to allow Drea and Maryanne’s labor to control this dialogue, even if—as always—the fact they had to do so is part of the problem. Lindsay (because she seems like a decent person) and Tori (because listening is a natural instinct for a therapist) also understood their respective assignments, keeping out of things until there was an open window to express their respect for the conversation and their inability to relate to the core of it.

And then we have Jonathan. To date, the edit has been framing him as a benevolent meat shield who has insecurities that you might not expect from someone with his build, but this episode does a lot of work to undo that. It starts when they return from immunity, and the security of winning one of the two necklaces goes straight to his head: deciding it means he can finally start playing the game, he hatches the plot to either eliminate Drea or flush out her idol, believing it’s a good time to start removing threats. This is, to the point Drea tries to make at tribal, not a racially motivated decision: while we can talk about how Jonathan might instinctively find it easier to imagine working with all men (as he wanted to in the early parts of the episode) or people of his own race, there’s a logical argument for targeting Drea given the sheer scale of the advantages she holds (which actually goes beyond what Jonathan is aware of).

The problem comes from when he starts concocting his plan that involves putting Drea’s vote on Maryanne, and Lindsay tries to talk him through the potential consequences. Lindsay is immediately right: why would you put Drea’s vote on a member of your own alliance, whose advantages you’re relying on to get further in the game, as opposed to the player outside your alliance (Tori)? Jonathan, though, refuses to listen, constantly interrupting her and explaining that she’s the one who isn’t listening to him. It’s classic gaslighting, and while he eventually does sort of clue in to what Lindsay is saying (and the vote split was intended to be with Tori), he does so without acknowledging the way he was treating her.

And so it’s no shock that when the conversation plays out at tribal council, the very mention of unconscious racial bias playing a role gets Jonathan’s back up. Now, I feel strongly this is not a conversation Jonathan has ever been a part of, and given that he was the one most strongly orchestrating Drea’s exit, I can actually understand how he might feel her pointing out the pattern established with Chanelle and Rocksroy being eliminated was in some way an attack on his instincts. But as always, the real tell is when someone objects to the very idea of race being relevant to a conversation, and things get particularly telling when the white person claims that a black person is being “aggressive” in pointing it out. Chanelle’s face at that moment is the point where the producers completely gave up on pitching Jonathan as one of Jeff’s brotestants, and where it became clear that his edit will never recover from how he reacted to finding himself on this half-tribe with these players and in this situation.

What happens next is, frankly, where I get a bit confused about how this played out. Jeff sort of unilaterally decides based on Tori’s comment about how awkward it would be to just start voting that they should skip the formality and just make the vote part of the conversation. However, this creates a scenario where Tori immediately realizes that it’s her, asks the players to justify it, and then announces she intends to play her shot in the dark. What’s unclear to me, though, is why Lindsay doesn’t also play hers—her vote doesn’t matter, given that everyone’s voting for Tori, and giving herself at least a CHANCE of being safe if Tori’s shot-in-the-dark did come out Safe seems like it would be a better use of it than holding onto it for a rainy day (and would have created a scenario where everyone was safe). Still, the fact we don’t even see her think about it makes me wonder if Tori announcing her shot-in-the-dark prompted some type of production conversation about the logistics of doing something that Lindsay normally wouldn’t know she did, and whether that meant Lindsay wasn’t able to play hers if it hadn’t been her intention. To me, the abandoning of the game’s structure created more chaos than it was worth, even if it kept the players in a moment that was obviously important for the future of the game.

As always, the thing about these conversations is that it’s hard to really gauge how much change could come from them. It would seem that Survivor 43 has not yet started filming, meaning that the players who head out to Fiji this summer will likely have been able to see both of these important conversations play out. Does this mean that the white contestants, faced with a similar threat to their security, will be more aware of their privilege and in the unconscious biases that dictate who they naturally want to work with? Is there anything that black contestants can do to change the narrative other than taking on the burden of educating and managing the emotions of their white counterparts? And will Survivor do anything to address these issues structurally in the casting process, beyond simply mandating diversity and letting the chips fall where they may?

The poise that Drea and Maryanne showed at the end of “Game of Chicken” was one of the most impressive moments in tribal council history: shivering in the cold rain, they reacted to a shocking situation in ways that showed how the game of Survivor breaks you down, and leaves behind a version of yourself that makes you consider your priorities and how you want to both play the game and live your life. And while it was disheartening to see how Jonathan reacted, and disappointing—but not surprising—to see how the discourse is already playing out online, it took an episode that was going to be a very producer-driven shakeup of the game and turned it into a very human disruption of that narrative, one that takes two advantages out of play but leaves behind a group of players whose emotions are bare, and whose allegiances are shifting more rapidly. And while Probst will likely still take credit for the idea that “the game” and decisions by producers made this happen, there was a very different version of this conversation without Drea and Maryanne’s choices within, and the episode and the season are better for it.

• Survivor’s greatest defense against the idea that the game itself is “racist” is not simply that it comes down to the choices of the contestants, but also that there’s so much random chance involved in stuff like tribe shakeups or the division of players like we see in this episode. And it’s here where they should be asking themselves whether diverse casting without some type of education on unconscious bias is going to address or amplify the role that racism/sexism/etc. plays in the game. Leaving it to chance that black contestants will step forward as they have in these two seasons strikes me as only extending the burden they face when they step foot on that island.

• One bonus of that conversation was that it forced Rocksroy to skip what would have either been an extremely banal or annoyingly self-important exit interview and instead focus on how proud he was of Drea and Maryanne. Easily the most I liked him all season. (He did get out the “I hope they freeze” to give us a vibe of what that exit speech would have looked like).

• By framing Romeo and Hai’s relationship primarily through the lens of Romeo’s envy toward his younger counterpart’s ability to be out and proud, the way Romeo has pivoted to focusing all of his energy on either voting Hai out or “making him squirm” has a really dark undertone to it that I can’t recall seeing this clearly. Rocksroy’s “kids these days” vibe was similar, but there’s a real queer-on-queer violence to the edit that I don’t care for.

• Romeo also claims Mike is “100 years old,” and I feel like that’s not something a 37-year-old is able to say about a 58-year-old with a straight face?

• While I do think that Drea was very much speaking from an emotional place, I do think there’s also a strategic note to make, which is that having the Knowledge is Power Advantage means that she can take Mike’s idol whenever she needs it, and Lindsay and Hai are still the only ones (as far as she knows) that know about the amulet. I do think that allowed her to more freely make the decision to announce she was playing the idol, although again I’m not suggesting it was a “performance” like say Maryanne’s emotion when she gave up her chance at immunity last week for rice.

• As I have discussed previously, I want to glue their butts to the seats at tribal, so I appreciate the tribe’s choice to chain message their way through the post-Drea discussion of what to do, instead of getting up and walking away.

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