Jonathan saved himself with his hidden immunity idol in Survivor: Philippines Episode 7 leaving RC in the path of the elimination vote.
Jonathan may have survived the vote, but still his alliance screwed him over. He now hates everybody.
The plan is to get rid of the veterans. Once their second shot has been ended, they will then target the obnoxious people: Pete, Abi, and Artis. Do us a favor and go after those guys first.
At the reward challenge, they will divide into two teams. One person from each team will be tied to a rope, swim out, dive and collect a fish trap, and be reeled back in by their team. Two people will then solve a puzzle using the retrieved pieces. Reward is a river cruise with food. Skupin, Pete, Abi, Artis, and Carter go against Jeff, Malcolm, Penner, Lisa, and Denise.
Jeff easily establishes a lead over Abi, which Penner narrowly retains over Pete. A very slow Lisa gives up the lead to Carter. Skupin’s inability to dive returns the lead back to the other team as Denise pulls ahead of him. Both teams are close enough that it comes down to the puzzle. Penner and Jeff go against Skupin and Pete. The puzzle goes very quickly, particularly for Jonathan and Jeff, who finish it to win reward for ther team.
Pete finds Abi annoying like everybody else does, but he’ll keep her around because nobody’s going to vote for her if she’s in the final three. Logically, since nobody likes either of them, they should be thinking along these lines. Of course, keeping them around would mean trusting them, which can’t be done. They can only trust each other, at least until another of Abi’s mood swings kicks in and she stops talking to Pete for two weeks without telling him why.
Though Penner remains the immediate target, there are multiple people thinking that flipping at 9 and keeping Skupin around might be a better move than getting rid of him. Lisa’s the first to get to him, and she tells him that Malcolm has an idol.
The two stage immunity challenge will have them untying puzzle bags and racing over a series of obstacles, then working on a snake puzzle. Pete, Jeff, and Penner are the three to advance to the second stage. Seeing as they were three of the four people who participated in the puzzle in the previous challenge, I assume they are all fairly comfortable with them. The main thing the onlookers are rooting for is just that Jonathan does not win. Penner wins immunity.
Oops. It doesn’t sound to me like anybody has even considered a plan B. Now they’ll have to come up with one.
This will make the other veteran, Michael, the target. But nice church lady Lisa isn’t about to let that happen. She tells another person, Pete, that Malcolm has an idol. Like I said, though, you can’t trust Pete. He asks Malcolm whether he has an idol. After their conversation, Pete is convinced that Malcolm does not have an idol because he freaked out (perhaps because his secret has been discovered?). Malcolm’s reaction is to tell everybody else about how Lisa’s saying he has an idol.
In any event, during their conversation, Pete proposed eliminating Jeff, which is the plan most people are now supporting. When he finds about this (good luck keeping a secret on this tribe), they toss around Pete and Abi as potential targets.
Not content dropping the issue, Malcolm brings it up at tribal council. As the questioning gets redirected to Abi, she’s upset. Oh, this again. She says she didn’t care if Skupin went home anyway because he was always on the outside with RC. During this discussion, Malcolm pulls out his idol and shows it to everybody, telling them it’s getting played tonight because there’s too much chaos. Probst has a follow up question: does anybody else want to reveal they have an idol? Yes, Abi does.
Now Penner would like to know whether everybody’s onboard to go with plan B, which would be voting out Pete. Lisa counters by saying they should go with her own plan B, which would be Jeff. This has gone from dull and predictable to revealing and suspenseful.
One more piece before the vote is revealed. Now that he’s played them all for fools, Malcolm declines to play his idol. Granted, with the tribe split right down the middle, voting against him with even the chance that he might use it would have been too much of a risk. The good news for him is that he should be safe until they have enough votes to split the vote. The bad news is either if they get rid of him to flush the idol or view him as untrustworthy because he’s told the entire group at least two lies already.
Votes
Abi
Jeff
Pete
Jeff
Pete
Jeff
Pete
Jeff
Pete
Jeff
With 5 votes, Jeff has been voted off the island. He got what he deserved. He had total control and gave it up to jump to the other tribe because he so desperately wanted to get rid of one of his allies (and failed). Speaking of which, the swing Abi vote that prevented it from being a tie? Yeah, that came from Penner.
Stay tuned to dingoRUE for another live recape of Survivor: Philippines Episode 9, which airs Wednesday at 8/7c on CBS.