‘Survivor: San Juan del Sur’ episode 9 review: Was Jon and Jaclyn’s latest move a mistake?

Tonight, the comedy of errors that is “Survivor: San Juan del Sur” continued, and there are so many awkward game decisions and questionable moves to discuss right now that we have a hard time even knowing where to start.

We suppose, though, we’ll begin with the big move to end the episode: Jon and Jaclyn deciding that, rather than dealing with paranoia about Jeremy targeting him and being suspicious over the fact that they had an immunity idol, they would vote him out right now. In the short-term, they may have achieved this goal.

However, here is the problem: There were already four people in Wes, Keith, Alec, and Reed who had zero trust in him before. Those people are still there. Now, he’s added another one in Natalie. That is five people to his four, and if they band together, this is trouble. We don’t see Jon or Jaclyn being a Tony Vlachos, who can go back to Natalie and get her forgiveness over voting out her closest ally. That just doesn’t work like that.

If we were Jon, we would have waited until at least next week or the week after, given that you could then be in a position where even after voting Jeremy out, you would still have the majority. It didn’t seem like Jeremy was coming after you right away, and you would have an opportunity.

Now, we turn to the other questionable players: The Macho Men Alliance of four. If they had an inkling that the vote would be split between Keith and Reed, why didn’t the four of them vote together and get someone like Jon out? It would’ve been so easy for them to do this. The only reason we can think is that they would still be on the wrong side of the numbers, and may have only bought themselves an extra week. With that being said, though, anything can happen…

The only winners for tonight’s move to us were Reed, who is still there despite being a target, and maybe Missy and Baylor since Jon has put the target hugely on his back. By the way, we’re more convinced than ever after tonight that Baylor is winning this game. The jury is going to hate Jon, Reed has too much of an uphill battle, and who else remaining is getting a good enough edit?

Also, we have to say that Natalie and Jeremy made a few mistakes of their own to pile on the stack. They didn’t need to be cute with the whole reward-challenge swap, since everyone knew what was up. Meanwhile, Jeremy’s whole confrontation of Jon was so unneeded. He could have taken that knowledge and then used it against Jon later, and he would still be there. He didn’t need to confront him at all.

We’re annoyed by some of the bad strategy, but at the same time, admit that this episode was at least intense / crazy fun. We don’t know who is left to root for, but we’ll worry about that next week. Grade: B+.

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