Survivor: Island of the Idols Episode 13 “Just Go For It” Recap

A warm and fuzzy penultimate episode gives way to another icky #MeToo lesson on Survivor and, finally, a resolution

WELL THAT WAS CERTAINLY A WEIRD EPISODE. And isn’t that really the theme of this season of Survivor: Island of the Idols? The Dan #MeToo storyline has cast a pall over much of the season and become its overarching story — I’d say for better or for worse, but it’s only been for worse. What started as a promising season with a robust cast of characters has been stained by Dan’s ongoing sexual harassment of multiple cast members and now, apparently, production too. Most of us are just ready to put a fork in this season and move on to Season 40.

But let’s rewind for a few minutes, because this episode was not about Dan at all until the final minutes. We’ll get back to Dan eventually, but the rest of the episode was actually fun and emotional (in a good way) and worth our attention.

Our fearless leader Ianic Roy Richard is a proud new father of Baby #2, so for one week only, this Tribe of One has become a Tribe of Two. Two of us wolves, running around the desert together in Las Vegas, watching Survivor.

Spoiler alert from here forward obviously, and a trigger warning on the Dan incident too, which we’ll leave for the end.

“Just Go For It” opens with a bamboozled and frustrated Noura fresh off a wild tribal council in which Dean out-goated the goat alliance and sealed everyone’s fate. A vengeful Noura “hides” Dean’s shoes up high where he can’t reach them, which I guess is cool if you’re too much of a chicken to take a dump in them and set them off to sea.

We get a quick idol hunt at the top of the episode. Dean and Elaine go hunting while it’s still dark, and we have to assume they’re together at this point since they’re on the outs of the five remaining Vokai. Janet wakes up Tommy and they go idol hunting, too. The hunt itself isn’t interesting, but it’s fascinating that Tommy is the one person Janet shows she is closest to in that moment. Tommy may not have any huge moves, but it sure seems like he’s the closest confidant to every remaining Vokai member — Lauren, Dan, Janet, and Noura. That’s why he’s the favorite. Oh, and Janet finds the idol.

At this point, it sure feels like Noura is a sitting duck. With seven castaways left and a strong Vokai alliance of 4+1, why bother keeping Noura around? She’s nothing but a wildcard, and she’s not needed. Keep Noura and she might become a swing vote in a girls alliance or take your place in the finale as a goat. The Vokais know Noura lied to them.

This episode is clearly going to see one of Noura, Elaine, and Dean go home. As Dan explains later at tribal, we already saw the Vokai four pushed to their limit last tribal council. If they can withstand that, they’ll be fine the next couple votes. We get a few scenes of Elaine trying to convince Lauren she’s a threat and Tommy talking Lo down at the beach, plus threat of a Dean-led (?) boys alliance, but all that really does is show how smooth and relaxed Tommy is in all his social interactions. He has these players in his pocket.

This looks like a fairly dull and uneventful episode… right until the Island of the Idols boat pulls up.

Dean Finally Gets His Episode to Shine

We draw a random name to send one final individual to the Island of the Idols, and by “random” I mean there’s absolutely no way production didn’t fill that bag up with tiny Dean scrolls, giggling over their prospects.

One final time, we see a castaway arrive at Survivor Easter Island and marvel and the giant dumb heads before fawning over Boston Rob and Sandra.

And then… gold.

Rob nonchalantly asks Dean how he’s doing in the game, and crazy old Dean reaches into his pocket and pulls out the legacy advantage — you know, the legacy advantage that isn’t real, the result of a prior Rob and Sandra lesson to Jamal?

I genuinely can’t believe Rob and Sandra held their composure through this scene. And remember, while this is a tape-delayed show, Survivor happens in real time. Rob and Sandra can’t react to Dean’s legacy advantage reveal, which, remember, they haven’t even seen yet. Does these guys have production in their ear telling them what they can and can’t reveal? They handle it masterfully, telling Dean they can’t confirm or deny it, but Sandra’s face tells the camera an entirely other story.

An incredible moment, and really, we’ve had a few of them. Since this is our last lesson on Island of the Idols, it’s worth reflecting on what seemed like a wonky, forced idea, shoehorning Rob and Sandra into the season just because they’re Rob and Sandra. Against all odds, this has worked beautifully at almost every turn. I wouldn’t mind these two reacting as Statler and Waldorf at every tribal council going forward. They’re legends for a reason, and they’ve honestly been champs this season, whether they’re living the true “Survivor” experience out there or not.

The lesson is on jury management, and like most of the other lessons, it’s pretty flimsy. Don’t forget to manage the jury, Dean! After all, these are real people that know what a complete moron you are and how you’ve done nothing to advance yourself in this game other than be a goat. Oops, too little too late for that lesson.

Dean’s “test” is nothing but a coin flip. The coin flip is supposed to represent Dean taking his game into his own hands. If he wins the toss, he can choose an extra vote, an idol that has to be played on someone else, or an idol nullifier. If he loses, he forfeits his next vote.

Dean chooses the nullifier, and this sure seems like the worst possible choice. Remember, Dean has a legacy advantage he thinks is good at six, one tribal away. At six, Dean’s legacy advantage plus an idol played on Elaine keeps those two non-Vokai safe and splits up the Vokai four, possibly causing chaos and giving Dean a huge resume move. Or six is an excellent place to play an extra vote, since three of six becomes a majority.

His choice of idol nullifier tells us Dean definitely doesn’t feel like he’s working with Elaine, or that he’s even on the bottom. We saw Dean talking with Tommy and Dan earlier, and it’s clear Dean thinks the boys alliance is real. Remember, Dean saw Janet find the idol and show Tommy. Choosing the idol nullifier is a direct swing at Janet, and it’s only a worthwhile swing if you have enough votes to take Janet out — which means you need more than Elaine on your side.

There’s a giant wonky coin labeled “yes” and “no” and, you’ll never believe this, but Dean wins the coin toss. You know there’s absolutely no way he was losing that toss. Production is just peeing themselves in anticipation of Dean possessing an idol nullifier and a fake legacy advantage at this point.

Dean gets back to the island and of course has to tell his tribemates what happened, and in typical Dean fashion, he chooses about the dumbest explanation possible. He says there was a coin flip game and that winning would let him get an idol or an extra vote. And he says he lost, so he has no vote.

The only problem? THIS IS SO DUMB. First of all, why would you ever admit to the only six people left in the game that you are powerless and don’t have a vote to use? Second, because that would be such an insane move, the others can only really believe Dean is lying and actually does have an idol or extra vote now… and since the Vokai five are clearly together, this is all the motivation they’d need to throw a few votes on Dean to flush his idol out, inadvertently voting him out.

Dean. You moron.

Dean then comes clean to Tommy, Dan, and Lauren because, again, Dean is an idiot. Knowledge is power, and Dean just gave his away. What exactly does he think he’s accomplishing? Locking in fifth place? I suppose if you want to be optimistic, he hopes to get to final five, ride with the boys to final three, beat out Dan, and take home a second-place check? Fine, not a terrible strategy at this point. I’m just not sure I give Dean credit for it.

Sure enough, the only thing Dean accomplishes with this move is putting a target on his back. We get a confessional from Tommy saying as much. Before, Dean was just a goat dumdum. Now he’s a dangerous goat dumdum, and there are two other dumdum goats to keep around in his place if they so desire. Great job, Dean.

Of course, Dean ain’t done yet. He ends up winning the immunity challenge, and we get robbed of a confessional of him bragging about how he’s safe now for the next two tribals with his legacy advantage.

We also get Dean at another tribal guns blazing. As Rob points out, this time he’s man-stretching to pre-game before he puts the guns out on display.

Oh, Dean. Good on ya. We deserved this Dean episode.

Elaine’s Tearful Goodbye

Of course, this was also an Elaine episode.

Elaine was a fan favorite before the season even began, and it genuinely sucks that her heartfelt goodbye was upstaged by the episode’s final moments.

We get all sorts of Elaine in this episode, and it’s clear early on that production is giving us our fill before she’s gone. We even get a little Elaine strategy for the first time all season, in Lauren’s ear early and making the case too late at tribal.

“Oh no… Words!”

Who else but Elaine could exclaim that as they arrive at the immunity challenge? Too bad that wasn’t the episode name, though of course that too was Elaine shouting “Just go for it!” to herself before faceplanting on the balance beam.

“Son of a buck!”

Elaine again, upon losing the challenge. It looks like she genuinely knew the puzzle phrase and just couldn’t put the pieces together in time. Shame, really, and a game changer. You gotta believe Dean is gone without his immunity win, now that everyone thinks he has an idol and a legacy advantage.

Instead, it’s clearly Elaine.

We get some extended strategy talk with Lauren, and she’s right to be thinking about a move here. Lauren has to feel like it’s her, Tommy, or Janet winning the million dollars at this point. Tommy certainly looks like the big threat, and it feels like this is Lauren’s chance to take a shot. How many times have we seen this play out? An alliance 1B waits too long to take their shot at 1A and never gets it. How bad does Lauren want to be Stephen Fishbach?

This is Lauren’s chance to take a shot at Tommy, with seven left. At six, you need four votes anyway, and by five, who knows what things looks like? The fifth vote might be Dean then, and it might be Lauren going home at the boys’ expense instead of the other way around. No, now is the time for Lauren to act. All she has to do is get three of Elaine, Noura, Dean, and Janet on board. Elaine is a free agent and gone otherwise, so she’s easy, and Noura isn’t much harder. Lauren dominates both of those two in the endgame. All she has to do here is sell Janet or Dean and she becomes the front runner.

Instead, we see Lauren and Janet discussing a chance to take out… Noura?! Yeahhh, that’s not a resume move. Oh well.

Tribal council is the Elaine show, for better and for worse.

Elaine makes a pretty good case to stay, as good as she can make at that point, but it’s too little, too late.

And then, Elaine delivers her goodbye soliloquy. It gets a bit dusty as Elaine talks about her journey to this moment, both in the game and beyond. She tells us the glass is always half empty for her. She’s had a rough go. Her mother passed away three months prior, and she never seems to catch any luck. Time is what Elaine needs, and time is the one thing she’s about to run out of in this game.

On cue, Janet is there to give a hug and a powerful word of encouragement. Janet is the mom we all deserve. What a nice moment this is to end the episode on.

Oh, wait.

Jeff goes to count the votes, and for the second time this season, the camera fades to black and we go to commercial. WHY??, scream my notes.

Dan is why, it turns out.

There’s little drama in the vote. If Elaine wasn’t on lock before, that tearful moment in front of the jury has sealed her fate. You can’t keep a potential million-dollar winner around, not after that.

Noura gets two votes, one from Elaine and a stray vote from Dan as Vokai protection just in case there’s something wonky. But there isn’t, and Elaine exits after hugging it out with Jeff.

Dan Gets Removed from the Game, Finally

Dan’s hinky vote is his final moment on screen.

After Elaine’s exit, instead of going to her parting thoughts, we’re back at camp the following morning and a haggard Jeff Probst is strolling along the beach toward camp.

That’s never a good sign. You never want to see Jeff. The castaways immediately know something’s up, and it’s not too hard to put two and two together since Dan is missing.

Jeff just spoke privately with Dan. A decision has been made, and Dan will not be returning to the game.

He won’t be coming back to camp. He won’t be on the jury. He’s gone.

Janet notes that “Very real world things are coming into the game,” and that’s about all we get, plus a simple black screen from production with white text:

Dan was removed from the game after a report of another incident, which happened off-camera and did not involve a player.

And with that, Dan is gone.

No further explanation is given, though it’s hard not to put the pieces together given the fact that WE HAVE LITERAL VIDEO FOOTAGE OF DAN SEXUALLY HARASSING AND INAPPROPRIATELY TOUCHING WOMEN.

We also have multiple testimonies against Dan which do not need to be called “accusations” or “allegations” because WE LITERALLY HAVE THE RECEIPTS.

An EW interview with Jeff Probst reveals nothing. We do have this tweet from Kellee Kim, the woman who came forward against Dan earlier this season before being unfairly voted out and silenced:

What exactly did Dan do to become the first player in 39 seasons of Survivor to be removed from the game?

We don’t know, and we never will. The lawyers will make sure of that. It’s not helpful to sit here and speculate about what final straw ended things. But again, we do have multiple episodes of footage and conversations that are more than enough for Dan’s removal to have come approximately 34 days earlier.

Why didn’t this happen then? Why did it take so long for production to make this decision? Why did it take a second incident, and why are we calling it a “second incident” when we literally have footage and conversations about any number of incidents that have occurred in the past five weeks?

Production specifically tells us this additional incident did not involve a player, and again, let’s not speculate about who it did involve. But why did it need to involve someone “outside the game” for production to take it seriously?

Why was there again no trigger warning before this segment, after all the backlash CBS took last time?

Why was Dan removed at the specific time he did? The footage makes it clear Dan’s removal happened the day after Elaine’s tribal council ouster, and it appears to happen early in the morning. It feels relatively safe to assume the “incident” did not happen overnight, with a decision made within hours. So if the incident happened before tribal council, why wasn’t Dan removed already? Why can’t Elaine keep her place in the game with no tribal that night, like typically happens when a player exits the game unexpectedly? Why can’t Kellee Kim go back into the game in Dan’s spot?

(Fine, that one would have never happened… We certainly can’t let someone exit early in the season and miss a slew of votes only to return right at the end with a chance to win the whole season.)

We learn online that next week’s “live” finale reunion will no longer be aired live. It will be pre-taped four hours early and aired “live” throughout the show and after T̶o̶m̶m̶y̶ someone is crowned this season’s Sole Survivor. Heavy is the head wearing that crown on this season.

Dan won’t be on the jury or at the reunion. That’s a relief. Most of us will never see Dan ever again.

But unlike Dean’s Island of the Idol winnings, that doesn’t nullify what Dan did, and production removing Dan moments before the finale doesn’t mean he will be absent from it. This season is forever marred by Dan’s actions and by CBS’s equally important inaction.

BELIEVE WOMEN.

If you take nothing else away from everything we saw this season, take that lesson away.

Believe women.

Believe them the first time. Believe them every time.

I am a white cis male. This is not my conversation to lead.

I’m a listener here. I’m learning.

Let’s all learn a little bit from this.

Let’s hope Dan learns a lot from this. Let’s hope Missy and Elisabeth and Aaron learn from this. Let’s hope Jeff Probst and Survivor production and CBS learn from this. Let’s hope viewers at home learn from this, too.

This was messy and ugly. And unfortunately, while we would have all preferred a cleaner, tidier ending to this saga many episodes ago, life is not always clean and tidy. I get the sense that this messy, delayed, far-too-late conclusion is all too similar to the real-life experience for way too many. It’s not enough to receive one accusation. Multiple corroborating stories aren’t enough. Video footage apparently isn’t enough. Nothing is enough, until it is, and by then, it’s way too late.

This — THIS — is why women are so hesitant to come forward or speak up. This is why we often hear these stories years or even decades after the incident in question. This is why #MeToo continues to matter and will always matter. Jeff Probst got that one right: we must NEVER let this go.

Believe women.

BELIEVE WOMEN!!!

Shout it from the rooftops.

So Where Does That Leave the Final Five?

This is a Survivor blog, so let’s conclude with some Survivor thoughts as we head toward next week’s finale and put this season in the grave for good.

This final five is a heck of a lot different from the final six. There’s almost no chance Dan was getting voted out next, so this is a giant wrench in the game.

What about Dean’s legacy advantage?

Sadly, that moment is gone now. The legacy advantage was going to keep Dean safe at six, and Dean has safely made it past six. Besides, lest we not forget, that thing is super, duper fake. At best, Dean asks production if he can use the fake legacy advantage at five and they inform him it wasn’t real anyway. We aren’t getting that storyline again. Moment gone.

Janet has the only remaining idol, and we know it’s no good after five. Janet is playing that idol next vote, no question. And although that should make our queen mother safe into the final three considering she definitely invented fire years ago, of course wacky ol’ Dean has that idol nullifier and he knows Janet has the idol. Dean is nullifying that idol, and dangerous Janet — dangerous because she’s an ally and stands up for people and because she believed Kellee Kim — that dangerous Janet is probably going home at five.

That would leave Tommy, Lauren, Dean, and Noura as the final four, which would actually make for a pretty good final immunity challenge anyone could win. Tommy takes Dean with him if he wins, hoping Noura can knock Lauren out with fire. Dean probably takes Tommy, too. Heck, even Noura seems loyal to Tommy. At this point, the only way Tommy isn’t sitting at that final tribal council is if Lauren wins immunity and Tommy can’t make fire — and Lauren might not even force Tommy’s hand anyway.

Tommy’s path did just get harder. Dan was completely in his pocket and was never getting a vote at final tribal. Tommy smokes Dan or Noura or Dean in the end. Against Lauren or Janet, he could be in trouble, and now there’s a 50/50 shot (in theory) that at least one of them is there in the end.

There’s little chance of another goat uprising. That ship has sailed, even with the Vokai four down to a Vokai three. Do you really think Noura and Dean will ever have any shot at working together again? I don’t.

Dean is hopeless now, as always. All his cards are on the table, and even winning his way to the end can’t impress enough jurors. Neither he nor Noura have any shot. With Dan around, either of them could’ve held faint hopes of that final three, at which point one of them would’ve had to win. Instead, we seem doomed to a final three of Dean and Noura sitting idly by while we crown a champion, whoever’s sitting next to them.

We’re told there will be one final Island of the Idols moment, so maybe that will throw one last wrench into everything. Maybe there’s an additional idol at play. Maybe Janet can win an idol-nullifier nullifier. Maybe Janet will win the final four fire challenge and start a fire so big it burns down the Rob and Sandra rules, and maybe Rob and Sandra are freed at last to enter the game as contestants, and maybe production gift wraps another win for Boston Rob or maybe Sandra wins a third time.

Honestly, who really cares at this point? Just kill off this season and fast forward to Season 40.

Bring on the winners season. We all deserve that now. ■

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