Survivor’s [Spoiler] Talks Flipping Switches and Running Out of Options: I Was a ‘Tall Nail Waiting to Get Hammered’
The following contains spoilers from Wednesday’s episode of Survivor 47.
Two huge targets couldn’t hide from the vote in this week’s Survivor, especially after a wild rice negotiation took away their last resort and safety net.
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After Jeff Probst wanted four players to sit out of the immunity challenge in exchange for a large bag of rice, Caroline and Kyle put the players’ Shots in the Dark on the table as a bargaining chip. But Probst would only budge after Kyle offered up everybody’s Shots, and after all of the players agreed to the upped ante, the rice was secured. However, big threats Gabe and Genevieve felt extra vulnerable without their potentially life-saving dice after Kyle won immunity and left them on the chopping block for the night’s vote. In an effort to cut Tuku down to size and eliminate a power player from the game, the group decided to kick Gabe to the curb by a vote of 7-2. (Read our recap here.)
Below, TVLine talks to Gabe about what went wrong, his unseen ties with Caroline and what he would do differently a second time around.
TVLINE | Why are you the one I’m talking to today?
I just think the threat level got too high. Everybody saw that there was this majority of Tukus left in the game. They knew this was the last round before we had a majority, or at least a split majority, with four versus four miscellaneous people, and I think everybody saw that I was the one who was calling the shots of that majority. Kyle would have been a pretty good sell had he not been immune that night, but he was immune because he’s a challenge beast and he’s awesome at the physical part of the game and he deserves all the applause for that. So I think people were like, “OK, well, Gabe is this huge target and if we let him get through Round 9 with four Tukus, then this guy has a crystal clear path to the end, and I don’t think anybody wanted to sit with me at the end.
TVLINE | In hindsight, is there anything you could’ve done to minimize the size of your target?
At that point it was tough. There was this one moment where Sol comes up to me and he’s like, “Dude, you gotta chill at Tribal.” I was like, “What do you mean?” I’m not throwing anybody’s name out there. I’m not blowing up any plans. I’m just talking about the game, and he was like, “You’re giving these really elaborate answers at Tribal and it’s freaking people out.” And I don’t think I realized this until after the game, but around camp, I had this great relationship with everybody. I was one of the class clowns of the tribe. I was always cracking jokes, always telling stories. I was a high spirits guy, right? There are some people at camp who are a little more introverted and kind of just take everything in, and there are other people who are class clowns, and I was one of those people. Then we get into Tribal and I flipped the switch. I would give these really complex, elaborate answers, and I think a lot of people would leave those Tribal Councils being like, “Who the hell is that guy? That’s not the guy we see at camp. That’s not the guy we see in challenges, and if he’s able to flip a switch like that, then that’s not somebody I want to sit at the end with because he’s proving to be a lot better at holding his cards closer to his chest than we all think.”
Maybe I could have chilled out at Tribal a bit more, but I also thought if that label is on me, I can’t go into Tribal and not talk or just give dumb answers because then everyone’s gonna see that switch. It’s gonna be like, “OK, well, now he’s clearly conscious that we all think this about him, and he’s trying to play it on an even more mental level, and that’s even more threatening because it shows that he’s clocked all of us about what we think about him.”
I also think maybe if Kyle goes instead of Sol — I worked really hard to keep Kyle in the game that round and to work with Genevieve to get Sol out — but maybe a Tuku 3 isn’t as intimidating. But Sol was somebody who was gunning for me, so I don’t see any reason why he wouldn’t go after me at nine if he survived 10. I just think that I hit a wall in the game. Something you don’t really see a whole lot when you’re watching the show is there are times when you just run out of options and it’s like, “There’s nothing left that I can do here other than hope that the votes just fall my way.” I know it’s kind of a lame answer, but I don’t really know what options were available for me to not be such a tall nail waiting to get hammered.
TVLINE | Were you being truthful to Caroline when you said you wanted her and Sue there with you in the Final 3?
Yes, 110%. Perhaps it wasn’t the most viable thing, to get three people from the same starting tribe all the way to the end. But if I could wave a magic wand, 110%, I wanted to be sitting at the end with Caroline and Sue. That was an alliance that I brought together. We all played a very big role in it. I don’t want to minimize the excellent game plan and excellent work that both of them put into that alliance, but I was the one who went to Sue hour one, day one, and then independently went to Caroline and really turned that two into a three. And it was a pretty forceful three all the way up until it wasn’t, when I got voted out. But 100% honest, Caroline and Sue were my ideal Final 3.
TVLINE | Sol told me last week that he wasn’t truly aware of how well Caroline was playing. Is the edit doing her justice? What haven’t we seen regarding her game out there?
This is from my perspective, so I don’t want to tell her game to the world for her — she’ll do that at some point — but I think that Caroline was really good at propping other people up and being like, “Hey, I want to do this plan, but I’m gonna make it seem like it’s your plan and I’m gonna give you a lot of credit for it, and I want you to feel good about implementing this plan that really, I laid the seeds for and it never comes back to me.” Caroline was really good at that, and it worked out great for her up to the point that we’ve seen on the show, so I hope that it continues to work for her.
TVLINE | Some of your former Tukus wrote your name down. Do you feel betrayed by anyone in particular?
Definitely not betrayed because it was a good move for them. That’s what they should have done, and if I was in their shoes, I would have done the same exact thing. Sue was the only person who didn’t write my name down, so Sue was with me up until the very end and I adore her for that. But it was great for Caroline’s game to get me out at that point because you hear her say in the episode that “Gabe has played a better game than me or at least is perceived to have played a better game to me” and “we’re getting so close to the end that I need to usurp him in this role of the best Tuku left in the game.” And for Kyle, yeah, if I needed to burn a Tuku, it would have been Kyle, and he clocked that correctly and he was like, “If I’m vulnerable, Gabe’s gonna come after me, so let me go get him while I am not vulnerable before that opportunity presents itself to him.” I would have done the same exact thing in their position and they deserve a lot of credit for that move.
TVLINE | How much of a factor was the wind in that immunity challenge?
So me and Teeny are on the end, right? And that’s where all the wind is coming from. And I look at Teeny and I’m like, “What is this?” And T looks back at me and goes, “This is so messed up and they’re not gonna do anything about it.” And I was like, “So we lose, right? And Teeny goes, “Yeah, yeah.” When I dropped out, I walk past Teeny and I just see her smiling ear to ear, knowing that the wind got me before it got her. I can see her out of the corner of my eyes smiling, and I’m fuming mad because I know how vulnerable I am that night. And just to see that little devil smirk on Teeny’s face, I was like, “You’ve got to be kidding me, man!” So yeah, the wind was a huge deal.
TVLINE | What’s something we didn’t see on TV that you wish was highlighted?
How close me and Caroline were and how much we were really relying on each other, not just in a strategic sense, but in a social sense as well as in an emotional sense. We were rocks for each other, especially in the pre-merge. Caroline felt very lost early on. She had a lot of rocky days early on and I didn’t feel particularly lost, but I felt like I was unable to really connect with anybody beyond the, “Hey, nice to meet you ” level. When me and Caroline finally got through this barrier of her not really wanting to trust me, we would have these hours-long conversations at night, just spitting strategy back and forth and just our philosophies on the game, our philosophies on the current state of our tribe, what we were going to do when we made it to the merge, how we wanted to work the people on the other tribes and how we wanted to manipulate them. Also, personal conversations of where we were at in life and what this meant to us being out there. Me and Caroline got really close out there. I don’t think we really saw any of that. The important thing for me is that we have that relationship, but it would have been cool just for everybody else to have that context, to know how close we were personally and how we were working together strategically too.
TVLINE | You said “I’ll be back” as you were exiting Tribal Council. I guess it’s safe to say that you’re waiting for that Survivor 50 call?
Oh, yeah. I mean, even if it’s not 50. I don’t know if there’s gonna be a theme. I know nothing about what they’re trying to do for 50. So that wasn’t directed towards Season 50, that was just in general. I’ll be back. You’re gonna see me again. That’s what that was.
TVLINE | What would you do differently a second time around?
Well, I’m not gonna give away all my secrets, but one thing that I’ll say in the context of 47 is that all of my closest alliance members were people that I didn’t view as outward threats. Caroline was super strategic and is this awesome player, and Sue has the grit and the resilience of a soldier, but it was people that I knew were going to have issues seeing themselves as threats, and were not going to be presented as threats to everybody else, and those were all of my closest allies. So I think that something I would do differently is I would, those early, early days, I would try to form equal-level relationships with people who were outward threats, so that when the numbers start to dwindle down as they did and those bottlenecks start coming up more and more often, it wouldn’t be Gabe and a bunch of people we’re happy sitting with at the end. It would be Gabe, a couple people we’re happy sitting with at the end, and somebody else that we’re really scared of. So whether that was TK or whether it was Kyle or Sol or whoever, I think that I would maybe have some more birds of prey to go with my flock of wounded birds.
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