CBS "The Penultimate Step of the War" - Ben Driebergen, Denise Stapley, Sarah Lacina and Nick Wilson on the two-hour Thirteenth episode of SURVIVOR: WINNERS AT WAR, airing Wednesday, May 6th (8:00-10:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network. Photo: Screen Grab/CBS Entertainment ©2020 CBS Broadcasting, Inc. All Rights Reserved
The all-winners season of Survivor has reached its final two episodes with “The Penultimate Step of the War.” Can Tony Vlachos be defeated at this point? Not only has he won three immunity challenges in a row, but the show is giving him a great edit, which makes it seem likely that he will win the whole thing.
In the episode description for the May 6 episode, CBS teases, “In a crucial immunity challenge, the remaining seven castaways make their final push towards the $2 million prize, on the penultimate two-hour episode of Survivor: Winners at War.”
That’s right — Survivor is two hours tonight, so buckle up, because we are going to get two eliminations tonight.
Have your snacks ready? TWO episodes of #Survivor are coming your way soon! 🔥
Follow along here with our live recap but be warned of spoilers. Don’t keep reading if you don’t want to be spoiled. All times Eastern.
8:03 — Back from Tribal Council, Michele Fitzgerald feels like she really got skunked by Jeremy Collins choosing not to use the 50/50 advantage she gave him but also letting everyone know he had it because now everyone knows Michele gave it to him and that they are aligned. Yeah, that’s not great. It really does seem like Michele brought a butter knife to a gunfight, as she says, so hopefully, she can figure out some moves.
8:06 — The next morning, Denise Stapley wants to make it clear to fans that she’s not “done” with the game, but she is done with getting so twisted up in knots about the game. She sketches out some tattoos she wants to get that say “endure” and “let go.”
This debate between Jeremy and Tony right now. 😂 😂 #Survivor
Meanwhile, Tony and Jeremy are having an argument about whether 10 days or 14 days constitute two weeks. Tony sounds kind of insane here, not gonna lie. There are nine days left and that is closer to one week than two weeks.
8:10 — Then Tony and Sarah Lacina have to try to figure out what to do next. They think they should keep Jeremy around as long as possible because he’s a bigger target then they are, but honestly? If Sarah wants to win, she needs to get Tony out. Yes, that’s doing your alliance-mate dirty, but 1) he did that to you previously, and 2) Tony is the biggest threat to win right now by a country mile.
The big question is whether Sarah will see that. But right now, she’s working on Ben Driebergen about blindsiding Nick Wilson and keeping Jeremy in the game. Ben seems to be on board.
8:15 — Challenge time. They have to race out to a track where they throw a ball into the track, then run through the obstacles to catch the ball on the other side. Wow. Once they’ve done that twice, they have to dig under a log lodged in the sand, then they have to solve a slide puzzle. The winner gets two fire tokens in addition to immunity.
8:20 — Right out of the gate, it seems like Jeremy should kill this challenge, as a former semi-professional football player. He’s just a straight-up athlete. Lo and behold, he’s ahead going into the sand-digging portion, but Nick, Ben, Tony, and Sarah are right on his tail. Denise also manages to catch up enough to have a shot at it. Poor Michele… does not. And then Nick wins it! Afterward, Michele is crying because she’s frustrated and embarrassed about her performance and everyone is very sweet in consoling her. Also, this puts quite the wrench in the whole “vote out Nick” plan.
8:25 — Back at camp, everyone congratulates Nick, but really, everyone is scrambling to figure out what to do. Sarah, Jeremy, Nick, Ben, and Tony seem set on Denise, but… wow, that seems foolhardy. The biggest resume in the game right now is for Tony. Why would you not vote him out? Nobody can beat him.
8:30 — Interestingly, Jeremy is convinced them saying Denise is a smokescreen to vote out someone else (Jeremy thinks it’s him), so he starts talking around and he and Michele figure out that Ben told Jeremy to ask Michele for the 50/50 and then told Michele that Jeremy is going to ask Michele for the 50/50, trying to pit them against each other. But they’re way sharper than that and figure him out in a hot second.
The only question is can Jeremy and Michele get the votes to vote out Ben? They approach Tony and Nick about it and the two of them say sure, but behind Jeremy’s back, Tony and Sarah don’t want to vote out Ben. So Tony tells Ben and Denise about the plan to vote out Ben and they decide to split the votes Tony, Nick and Ben vote Jeremy, Sarah and Denise vote Michele and that’s that. It all seems to hinge on if Nick votes with Jeremy/Michele or with the other group.
8:40 — At Tribal Council, they talk about their game personas and who to be at any given time and how personal the game can become. Jeremy says you can’t take it personally, you have to find a sweet spot between playing with your heart and with your head. And it has given them trust issues. Ben even admits he came home from his first season and had trust issues with his own wife. Jeremy admits it took him three months to feel comfortable with his firefighter colleagues after he played in Cambodia. Wow. That’s tough and what a big thing for them to admit.
Then Michele talks about her 50/50 advantage and how tonight is the last time it can be played, so she “expects it to be played.” Probst leaps onto that turn of phrase because it’s very cryptic. This is also the first tribal in a while where there hasn’t been scrambling and whispers. This should be interesting.
These looks from the jury… 👀 #Survivor
8:42 — During the votes, we see Denise vote Michele, Jeremy vote Ben, and Tony vote Jeremy. Hopefully, Michele gave the advantage to Jeremy. Him being successful with that (and Nick voting with them) is the only way Michele and Jeremy stay alive as a pair in this game.
8:50 — Before the votes are read, Michele plays her 50/50 advantage. Jeff asks if she’s playing it for herself and she wrestles with playing it for Jeremy. His giant eyes are practically begging her to play it for him, which I think she should have done, but she chooses to play it for herself and it lands “safe.” Well, good for her. The votes go Michele, Michele, Ben, Jeremy, Ben, Jeremy, and… Jeremy. On his way out, he does give his two fire tokens to Michele, though.
8:55 — Back at camp, Nick tries to talk to Michele and she’s like, “I’m genuinely curious what you think our path to the end is now?” She’s right, unless they can flip Ben and Denise to go against Tony and Sarah. Yeah, Nick and Michele’s chance was to go to the end with Jeremy and hope they could make an argument against him. It’s going to be really tough for them now.
Michele vows to go down fighting, though, and she plants some good seeds with Sarah that Sarah should absolutely not go to the end with Tony because no one can beat him. Sarah correctly recognizes that Michele is desperate and has no allies at this point, but also — Michele is right! I feel like Michele’s best play right now is to convince Sarah and Denise that they cannot beat any of the men at the end and that there hasn’t been a female Survivor winner since Sarah won six seasons ago, so maybe they should align together.
High stakes, high emotions. That’s #Survivor.
9:00 — We finally get a check-in with Edge of Extinction when they are given a clue about a “throne of stone,” which Natalie Anderson immediately figures out is this big stone piece on one beach. She gets an advantage where she gets to place a disadvantage on one player in the next immunity challenge. She can sell it to any person for as many fire tokens as she thinks she can get. Someone points out that she needs to target the most fire tokens, so she sends it to Nick, who has six fire tokens. BUt it costs eight fire tokens, so he’s going to have to get two from other people. The one nice thing about the disadvantage is that the person he plays it on won’t know it came from him.
9:05 — Nick tells Michele about it and she agrees to give him two, but then they have to decide how best to use it. I mean, you gotta give it to Tony, right?! The guy has been on FIRE lately.
Would you purchase the advantage? RETWEET for yes. Fav for no. #Survivor
9:10 — Challenge time. The person Michele and Nick decided to give a disadvantage to is… Ben. Huh. The challenge is a block-balancing challenge where you make your blocks fall like dominoes. The person with the disadvantage has 30 percent more blocks to stack and 30 percent more beam. Ben is kind of surprised to get the disadvantage and frankly, that surprises me too.
9:15 — Michele, Sarah, and Tony are neck-and-neck for the lead until Michele drops a block and has to take it back to the table. But Michele STILL manages to pull it out! Oh, good for her. Ben was actually in it at the end even with his disadvantage, which is impressive. But that’s great. I always root for the most chaos and this makes the most chaos. Tellingly, nobody claps at first when she gets her necklace, but eventually, they smile and clap for her. She basically knows that the conversation was “anybody can win except Michele,” which has to hurt a little bit. So it’ll be interesting to see how this shakes out.
9:25 — So what is plan b now? Denise acts like a dejected player and says that she knows she’s going, so she’ll give up her tokens to buy an extra bag of rice so that she can eat a bunch of rice right before she goes to the Edge of Extinction. But she’s doing this so that she doesn’t let Nick get hip to the idea that he’s going home. Ben, Sarah, Tony, and Denise are solid on voting out Nick.
However, Nick is convinced he’s never been in a better seat in the game as he is right now. He talks to Tony about how good Ben will be in the fire-making challenge, so he thinks Tony and Sarah should vote Ben out. Tony acknowledges now might be the time to do that, but he decides to take to the trees first to see what he can overhear. And then he actually overhears something juicy when Denise talks to Ben and Sarah about not taking Tony to the finals, which sends him running to Michele about voting out Denise.
Tony then approaches Sarah about taking Nick to the final four with them and getting Denise out this week. Sarah agrees that Denise would be hard to beat at the end, but she says that to a guy that she cannot beat at the end. If Sarah really wanted to win, she’d go to the end with Michele and Nick.
9:35 — At Tribal Council, they talk about the unpredictability with who might come back into the game, plus trying to keep track of everyone’s fire tokens. Talk comes around to Denise’s ploy of making people think she’s going home and she says she doesn’t want to go home, but there’s only so much you can do. The jury knows it’s a fake-out, but is it really a fake-out now?
9:45 — The votes go Nick, Denise, Denise, Nick, Nick, and Nick. Not a huge shock. Michele better be ready to win some immunity challenges.
“It’s insane that I’ve been here a month.”-Amber #Survivor
9:50 — The next day, it’s time for the Edge of Extinction battle back challenge. Boston Rob and Natalie still have a hidden immunity idol for if they should get a chance to re-enter the game, which could be incredibly useful. I mean, if Boston Rob gets to the final three, he will totally win. The jury is full of his friends! Natalie also uses her surplus of tokens to buy an idol for Tyson in case he wins the battle back challenge.
Unfortunately, we don’t get to see even a sneak peek of the Edge of Extinction battle back challenge. The show decides to just replay clips from the season for the last 10 minutes of the episode. Is this our punishment because we no longer have to endure the sad tiki torch fallen castaways walk during the finale that we used to have to sit through at every finale?
Survivor: Winners at War airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET/PT on CBS.
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