Your winner (probably).
Photo: Robert Voets/CBS
The following includes spoilers for Survivor 50.
Last night, in its penultimate episode, Survivor gave up the game. Aubry Bracco is, quite clearly, our season-50 winner, and she will be remembered as a very lucky one. She is a talented Survivor player by all standards, but it’s hard not to see her impending victory as a bit of a disappointment. She’s been dealt a fabulous hand all season, and her success doesn’t seem to be through particularly great work on her part. Instead, she’s ended up in the best position possible through twists. In what should be the most epic Survivor game in history, our winner has capitalized on twists she had nothing to do with choosing.
But let’s back up: How do we know Aubry is winning? For that, you have to look to the edit. In last night’s episode, Aubry narrates the entire plot and the show gives her credit for both boots in the double-elimination episode, but outside her confessionals, we see her having very little actual effect on the proceedings. First, she takes credit for Ozzy Lusth going home in last week’s vote. Then, she uses her experience losing Survivor: Kaôh Rōng to explain who she wants to be in the final three with her — two people whom the jury won’t like that much, meaning some combination of Jonathan, Joe, and Rizo — and why she’ll win if she can bring them there. After the challenge, she tells the audience why Rick Devens going home would be good for her game. But what we see is Cirie Fields making that decision. Devens goes home, and the audience is supposed to imply that Aubry had something to do with that decision, even though we did not see her influence anybody to vote that way. On the next vote, Aubry initially wants Tiffany Ervin gone, but Tiff wins immunity, so Aubry and Rizo Velovic simultaneously initiate a hit on Cirie, knowing that Cirie can beat them if she gets to the end. Cirie, intuiting that she’s on the chopping block, then tries to turn the vote around on Aubry. The edit hypes this up as the battle of the two masterminds and gives Aubry a killer final confessional before Tribal Council: “I love when my back’s against the wall, this is when I play my best game.” When Cirie goes home, it’s sold as Aubry’s doing.
Look, maybe this is all true and Aubry has been killing the back half of the game. That’s not what I see. I see a person who is expertly floating while the big threats go home due to various twists and who sees an opportunity to win, given that all the best players are now out. She’s been so lucky. First of all, her tribe never went to Tribal Council pre-merge, when she was consistently on the bottom. Then, she got lucky that her nemesis Genevieve Mushaluk, who Aubry alienated through no fault on Genevieve’s part, found two idols but had to give them away due to Billie Eilish and got subsequently voted out after being swapped onto a one-episode tribe where she had no friends. Since then, Cirie has undoubtedly controlled the majority of the merge. But, last week, Cirie got unlucky when Survivor randomly split the merged tribe again. Cirie’s best ally, Ozzy, got put on a tribe without her and got taken out, partially because of Aubry, who took advantage of the golden opportunity and worked with the more powerful Jonathan to target him. Left with few allies this week, Cirie went home.
Throughout the game, Aubry has played the twists extremely well, to the point where she’s been virtually unnoticeable. Nobody since Genevieve has bothered to go after her, because twists keep putting them in positions where it makes more sense to knock out bigger threats. It’s hard not to notice how the game has consistently twisted in Aubry’s favor. That’s a deep irony, given her first game on Kaôh Rōng, when she got so unlucky that two of her closest allies were medically evacuated. That time, she lost by a matter of three votes at Final Tribal Council. This time, Survivor’s randomness is working out for her. That could have happened to anyone, but it happened to Aubry. Maybe she could have won without all the twists, but we’ll never know. It looks like Survivor twisted itself out of a satisfying winner.
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