‘Survivor: Kaoh Rong’ episode 3 review: Are oblivious confessionals the best confessionals?

Consider this a classic trick of “Survivor” editing. Anytime that someone acts insanely cocky during a confessional, they’re probably going home.

Here’s the funny thing: Going into this episode, we would have said with the utmost confidence that it would be Debbie who was completely out of her mind during confessionals. Instead, she did a really amazing job here! She was really the person we give the credit to for being able to unify her and Joe with Aubry and Neal, and as a result of that they were able to completely blindside Liz in one of the bigger shocks that the game has seen so far this season.

We should also be real here that as much as we give credit to Debbie, we also have to blame Liz and Peter, whose confidence was completely their undoing. We think that Liz is probably a great player in a more under-the-radar alliance, but she was with someone who was incredibly confident in his abilities and was rubbing people the wrong way. She also made a few social errors as well. This is a game about how you deal with people, and the other Brains had an underdog mentality going.

Elsewhere in this episode, it was nice to see some social dynamics play out. Nick is on the outs on the Beauty tribe, or at least he is seemingly. (Why in the world did Anna just flat-out tell Caleb that the women were almost inseparable? That could be a problem later?) Tai found the idol on this tribe, and seems to be back in the good graces of everyone. Meanwhile, over on the Brawn it is (unsurprisingly) everyone against Alecia, who also saw Jason find the idol over there. That tribe remains a mess, and they barely won the immunity challenge over the Brains when the dust settled.

In the end, this was the best episode of the season. It’s really not even close thanks to the drama at the end. Grade: A-.

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