‘Survivor: Kaoh Rong’ episode 4 review: Is someone being evacuated from the game?
We’re going to be taking a little bit of a different approach to this “Survivor: Kaoh Rong” review as opposed to some others that we’ve done. Specifically, we’re going to update it as the night goes on. This is an atypical episode of the show, after all, given that it is not often that you see an installment of the show where there are so many injuries. The conditions this season may be the worst in the history of the show, and we don’t say that lightly.
Things started to get bad for the castaways almost right away at the reward challenge. Watching the tribes get through it was exhausting, and while the Brains won, Debbie was clearly suffering from heat exhaustion at the end. Hats off to Joe for taking care of her and calling medical over. This may have helped her to ultimately stay in the game.
The moment the challenge ended, though, we saw things go quickly from bad to worse as Caleb, who really exerted himself hard so that the Beauty tribe could finish in second, collapsed. Cydney over on the Brawn tribe immediately started to struggle, as well. This is without even mentioning the array of people who simply needed water. Caleb was the one who ultimately needed the chopper, and we really felt for him hard. We know how badly he wanted to be there, and how hard this had to be for him to go like this. (For those wondering, his cameo in “Big Brother” this past summer happened after taping this season, but clearly he’s okay.)
Let’s make one thing clear: We don’t necessarily blame production for this, since on paper this challenge wasn’t worse than any that we’ve seen in past seasons. If anything, they may have underestimated the humidity, but we don’t think they designed the challenge to be like this. Maybe they could’ve done a water condition, but sometimes the water isn’t always safe, either.
We move over to the immunity challenge, where we think there is a fair question worth asking: Did Jason and Scot more or less throw it? We do think that they tried in the water, but they were more than content to let Alecia hang herself on the puzzle. She and Scot clashed frequently throughout the episode, and we understand both sides. She was being a little distracting, but at the same time, he was being a jerk.
The thing here is that we feel like Scot and Jason played really badly through most of this episode, and it’s really lucky for them that there was no tribe swap after the evacuation. If that was the case, she would’ve flipped and they would have been screwed. Alecia’s not exactly a brilliant mastermind, either, so this tribal council was just a mess all around. It’s a good thing that they filled time earlier, since this was beyond cut and dry.
Ultimately, we don’t feel like grading the episode. It was just too uncomfortable. Therefore, let’s just see what happens next week.
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