Tiyana Hallums (‘Survivor 47’ exit interview): ‘I got bamboozled’ and ‘I’m beyond devastated right now’
On Wednesday’s seventh episode of “Survivor 47,” Jeff Probst randomly divided the newly merged tribe of 12 players into two groups of six for a challenge that gave half of them safety and reward, one of them individual immunity, and left the other five fighting for their chance to make it at least to jury. After her team came up short in the challenge, Tiyana Hallums “brainstormed” a few ideas for the looming vote with closest allies, but after a late-breaking advantage was played by the original target, she was ousted by her own allies in yet another blindside. Read on for her “Survivor 47” exit interview from the end of the episode.
Though they lost the challenge and would be going to tribal council, Tiyana and the other four original members of the Tuku tribe felt a sense of security in the fact that it would be the five of them alongside Rachel LaMont as an outlying original Lavo player making the decision for the next vote. Because Kyle Ostwald earned the individual immunity, only five of them were actually vulnerable and while the decision seemed easy to make, they all agreed that returning from this vote as five Tuku still in the game would position them as too big of a threat to the remaining disjointed six and prime them each to be picked off one by one. With that in mind, Tiyana hatched a plan with Caroline Vidmar to potentially spare Rachel and instead use this vote as an opportunity to oust Gabe Ortis instead.
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Tiyana’s plan did not get a chance to play out as she envisioned it could though. At tribal council, Rachel played a Safety Without Power Advantage that afforded her the gift of leaving tribal council without the power to cast a vote, but the safety of not being present to be eliminated. The advantage was anonymously sent to her by Solomon “Sol” Yi who found it at the reward challenge and had to send to one player on the losing group. Sol’s decision and Rachel’s advantage forced the five Tuku players to turn on themselves after seemingly deciding to stick together, despite Tiyana’s potential plan to switch things up. In the end, she is the one they decided to turn on.
“I thought I could trust the people that were in my alliance and I got bamboozled,” Tiyana admitted after her elimination. Adding later, “I think I played a genuinely honest game and it was true to myself. I don’t regret the way I played the game, I just regret who I trusted.” Tiyana thought that she could at least trust Caroline and Sue Smey after rumblings of a potential all women alliance and the half-baked plan to turn on Gabe, but that was not the case when push came to shove.
The decision of her four allies to send her home meant that Tiyana would be the last player eliminated before the start of the jury that will decide which player wins the game. The reality that she wouldn’t have the lasting impact on the game of casting a vote as juror hit Tiyana hard: “To come this far and to literally be one vote away from making the jury, I’m beyond devastated right now,” she concluded.
Tiyana is now the seventh person eliminated from “Survivor 47” following Jon Lovett, Terran “TK” Foster, Aysha Welch, Kishan Patel, Anika Dhar, and Rome Cooney as pre-jury boots.
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