As Survivor 47 episodes go, Episode 11 didn't have a ton of mystery - once Rachel won the IC, it was pretty clear Kyle was headed to the jury, although he at least put up a decent fight. Despite that, there was still fun to be had, particularly from of all the places the journey. It was also an episode that dramatically raised Rachel's profile as a player - she now has an idol AND an advantage, plus she beat Kyle in a challenge, enabling everyone to dispatch him to the jury.

We were also shown an obvious-seeming "underdog" alliance forming among five of the final eight players. To be clear, Rachel is far from an actual underdog, but we didn't make up the name. As Teeny pointed out, if all five hold tight to this plan, they have a clear path to the final five. Such plans almost never work out that way on Survivor, so hold your "Yes, but..."s for now. They voted together once, that's probably as far as it's going.

What does look likely in the near term is one of Rachel, Genevieve, or Andy trying to make a big move, perhaps one that blows apart that already too-big group of five. With just three votes remaining this season, the production shackles have finally come off, and people are starting to play. Let's hope they give us a strong finish.

Rachel's big episode

So again, Rachel now has an important challenge win under her belt, along with an idol and an advantage. But is that enough for a win? Juries generally aren't all that enamored with idols and advantages, unless they're used to make a move. They *should* be impressed when she explains playing her SitD to read the reactions and gauge whether she needed to play her idol or not. But at this point her idol and the vote block advantage seem fairly superfluous to her game, because (1) she's in a clear majority, so there's no reason to play her idol, and (2) she's in a clear majority, so there's no reason to block anyone else's vote.

Things could easily change over the remaining three votes, though, so it's useful to think about possible plans involving the new block-a-vote. With Kyle gone, Sue is now the biggest challenge threat, with a 74% Mean % Finish, a full standard deviation (~16%) above the next-closest players (Teeny at 57%, Rachel at 55%, Genevieve at 52%). To be fair, the challenges thus far have been uniquely Sue-suited: almost all stationary balance/endurance challenges. There hasn't been a single balance beam or puzzle in an individual challenge yet, both of which could trip up Sue's challenge dominance (see, for example, Sue's blowing the lead for herself and Caroline in the pairs/individual Ep9 RC/IC, "Pairy Feral").

Sue is technically Rachel's ally in the "Underdogs" alliance, but Sue's very obviously *much* closer to Caroline than to Rachel. That should be worrisome to everyone without a tight #1, which is everyone other than Sue and Caroline. Meanwhile, Sam is more or less working with Rachel, and feels like less of jury threat than Sue. Sue has a great story as a 59-year-old (even if she's currently "45"). Just getting to the end and performing well in individual challenges is an accomplishment. She's 16 years older than the next youngest player! That's two-thirds of a Sam or a Teeny! In contrast, Sam hasn't really been a target except as the decoy on the Sierra vote, has been second-worst in challenges, and while he did control Gata in the pre-merge, it was for just two votes, since they rarely lost. He's been powerless since Sierra joined the jury. It's better for Rachel to keep Sam around than to let Sue slip through.

So Rachel could use her (surprisingly secret) vote block to switch things up if she wants to, and final six might be the best time to do that. If she lets Genevieve leave at F7, that elevates Sam to the prime target at six. Key to any move is the vote block - despite Rachel having told half the contestants about it - it's deployment actually can't be foreseen, because Rachel gets to play it back at camp, before leaving for Tribal (see instructions below).

Rachel and Sam would then need just one other voter to pull off a 3-2 blindside of Sue. Andy seems like the logical fit here: his bond with Rachel has gradually been repairing, as the edit keeps reminding us, and the three Gatas working together has some appeal to it. The risk there is Andy wants to think he's pulling the strings, so he might be less inclined to go along with someone else's plan at this point. (Teeny is a better choice for this plan than Andy, but does Rachel know that? Among the Underdogs, Teeny seems to be at the absolute bottom of Rachel's allies list.)

The only real risk is that being blocked from voting will almost certainly induce Sue to play her idol (which the Gatas somehow still don't know about). There's limited downside there for Rachel, because if Sue plays her idol, Rachel then plays hers in retaliation. That sets up a likely zero-valid-votes situation, but then on the revote, if Andy and Sam stay strong, they could at least take out Caroline, who could otherwise be a sneaky jury threat, especially if Gabe and Sue are both jurors.

Of course, the other problem is that making a big move, whether at F7 or F6, turns Rachel into the biggest remaining target, with the F5 vote left. If she can pull something off without playing her idol, she'll have that idol safety net for that vote, and to this point, she's still the only person who knows about it (a very wise choice). That still leaves F4 fire, but hey, maybe Rachel can get past that with another well-timed challenge win. (Please ignore the repeated shots of Rachel's glasses with fire reflected in them ... unless it was because she wins at fire-making?)

Rachel's journey task appreciation thread

Journeys are mostly tedious, often unfair time-filler. It's either "Congratulations, you have to risk your vote! Reach into this bag, in which your odds of losing your vote are 2-in-3," or "Here's a complicated puzzle, solve it within the time limit or else." (In both cases, reading the instructions aloud chews up at least a couple of show's 90-minute episode quota. Time well spent.) This time around, though, things were different.

Rachel's task was a mostly harmless-looking table on a raft, smack in the middle of the ocean (okay, seems kinda cool already). But then the timer mechanism sold it: Rachel threw a weight overboard, which started rope uncoiling, gradually pulling additional weights down with it into the murky deep, and eventually, if she didn't finish in time, the puzzle table itself. (Also, satisfyingly, if she did finish in time.)

Was it perfect? No. Rachel did not have the option to back out in order to preserve her vote. Apparently production yanked that choice away after Emily selected it in 45. That's not great. The puzzle itself was a simple color-sorting game (meh), the prize a probably-useless Vote Block advantage (also meh) - although, again, it's a fancied-up vote block that has to be played before leaving for Tribal, so it's completely anonymous (interesting-ish).

Despite all those reservations, how cool was that timer? And we got the satisfying payoff of the table getting yanked into the drink as well! Whoever thought this up deserves a raise.

Moral: If you're going to arbitrarily rob people of their votes to fill time, at least make it entertaining to watch. We can forgive unfair and fun, but not unfair and boring.

Kyle's MPF record

It's a small, fairly unimportant thing in the grand scheme of overall Survivor successes, but Kyle's challenge prowess is officially the top ever in a single season, at least by the measure of average individual challenge placement, or Mean % Finish (MPF). With a minimum challenge appearance cutoff of four challenges, Kyle now has the top percentage ever, with 93.8%, finally surpassing Joe Anglim's 92.5% in Worlds Apart.

There are a lot of caveats to this, but in general, it's a more impressive accomplishment than the whole five immunity wins thing. Also, with fewer individual challenges in general in modern seasons, it's one of the few Survivor stats that's even approachable for New Era players. Nobody who first appeared after Winners at War is ever going to top even 78 days played (two full old-school seasons), let alone Boston Rob's 152 days played. Russell Hantz and Natalie White voted out 14 people in Samoa. Ricard Foyé and Kenzie Petty both were on historically awful starting tribes, and even they were only able to cast a vote 11 times total. Only six New Era players have even hit double digits in votes cast.

So it's striking that, despite the New Era reduction in overall game stats, there are now three New Era people in the Top 10 in MPF - in addition to Kyle, Frannie Marin from 44 is #6, Ricard is #8. (Yay, percentage stats! Boo, counting stats!) If you're hoping to see history made, it's probably all we're likely to get in the foreseeable future.

Could the amulet three be the final three?

Way back in Episode 4, Teeny, Caroline, and Andy took a post-IC journey, and hurriedly agreed to take the amulet idols (with Teeny giving up her vote), rather than all three losing their votes. The editing of Teeny reading the instructions was intriguing, with a series of important-seeming cuts:

At the time, it seemed like these shot-framing choices might be foreshadowing the three's order of elimination. The amulets, after all, haven't really worked out for anyone so far (best finish is Austin's 2nd place in 45). Seven episodes later - with a live debunking of the amulets as "advantages" by Rome from Probst's chair at Tribal in the interim - the three amulet-holders are now three-sevenths of the Final 7, and part of an allegedly unbreakable majority alliance. Not only that, but nobody's really coming for them (yet). So it's highly unlikely they'll be voted out in that order (unless we start seeing that next week).

The same three would, however, make up a very plausible final three, particularly in that same order: 3-Andy; 2-Caroline; 1-Teeny. Could this trio have truly broken the amulet curse? And in doing so, did they curse the audience with seven more seasons (or, gulp, years?!) of the stupid amulets?

Shorter takes

Andy's hit list: Last week, we saw Andy give his "spider web" monolog, in which he (inaccurately) claimed he could wander over to one player, bite off their head, then march over to another, rinse, repeat, etc. But the three victim heads that flashed over the web were Gabe, Kyle, and Genevieve. Andy made a thwarted attempt at getting Genevieve this time, but she seems in a really bad spot next episode (we heard Teeny saying it was fine to get her next time). Did the editors accurately foreshadow the next three boots?

How is the two-part finale going to work? On the one hand, having a finale night that's only 30 minutes longer (instead of 90) than a normal episode is a bit of a relief. Hitting the always-awful Aftershow at the 2.5-hour point is always a coin-flip for "Uggggh, should I bother to keep watching, even if I'm just watching for the preview of the next season at the end?" On the other hand, the show created an extra "episode" out of thin air for this, and it's unclear how that's going to work, because as you also know: There are no vote-offs after Final 5.

That's the problem: We have next week's Ep12 = Final 7, then pre-finale-week's Ep13 (clocking in at two hours) = Final 6/5 (?), and that probably leaves the finale as just F4 fire and Final Tribal. That's pretty thin: One challenge, one elimination by fire, zero votes (except the jury's). Do they include the F5 Tribal in Ep13, then cut it off right before the vote reveal, leave that for Ep14 as a cliffhanger? They kind of have limited options otherwise, right? They can't cram the normal finale circus of two challenges, one (F5) vote, firemaking, Final Tribal AND the Aftershow into two hours.