In the opening moments of Survivor 46 episode 10, Liz told us that, because she was left out of the Hunter blindside, she was “ticked off” and “trying to hold my composure, so I don’t explode.”
Thankfully, “not exploding” is not on Liz’s Survivor resume or one of the things she does to make her bajillions of dollars.
Liz didn’t explode then, though she immediately challenged the other players when she said she wasn’t going to—though she didn’t actually say, “What the heck, you ho-bags?”
She actually exploded over Applebee’s, which I know is the usual response to Applebee’s.
Yes, a person Liz tried to vote out of the game wouldn’t let her have her favorite burger, and she gave us a TV meal.
For a brief moment early in the episode, I thought Survivor was yet again stretching to fill 90 minutes. After less than eight minutes of content, including both the last-week recap and the title sequence, a commercial break arrived, followed by the reward challenge.
“The biggest reward of the season: Applebee’s,” Probst said. He told us that an actual Applebee’s chef would make them dinner, and spent maybe three, four hours reading the Applebee’s menu.
Liz reacted with pants-peeing excitement throughout, auditioning to become Applebee’s spokesperson, and not just because of the food. You see, Liz has a tradition, and it involves eating at Applebee’s with her daughter every Wednesday before watching Survivor. This is very nice, and as you can clearly see, entitles her to have WHATEVER THE f*ck SHE WANTS RIGHT NOW. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The challenge was an obstacle course—jump, crawl, sandbags, crawl, toss, yadda yadda yadda. Q was first to the throwing, and while everyone else caught up, landed his thing on the thing first.
Of course, he got to choose people to join him, and chose Tiff. Liz watched and said quietly, “I can’t, I can’t,” then said, “I’m gonna beg. Please.” Would she Bhanu to her knees?
Q then selected Maria, and Liz started crying, LOL. Probst said he could pick one more—four total, half the tribe—and added some version of: Are you going to choose Liz who’s about to die because she can’t eat any anything on the island, or are you going to do be a cold-hearted asshole and choose someone else?
Q answered this perfectly, effectively repeating the reasons Probst laid out, and then adding: “But Kenzie was with me since day one, and something in me is saying: bring the family back together.”
My jaw was already on the floor from screaming, and as Liz turned away, sobbing, Probst asked, “Liz, do you feel comfortable talking about what you’re feeling?”
The music dropped out and there was a brief moment of silence, birds chirping, and then the sound levels shot way up. “I’M PISSED!” Liz screamed. “I SEE YOU EAT EVERY DAY!”
Then, still screaming at the top of her lungs, said:
“Q you almost blew up my whole game! You overshadowed everything I was trying to do, and I said it’s cool! I didn’t say nothiiiiiiing! I don’t even want to be around y’all.”
Q, calmly, said, “Liz, you voted for me last night.” LOL! I was so, so impressed by him at that moment—both in terms of thinking strategically about his original alliance, and also rejecting the obvious peer pressure while simply pointing out her hypocrisy.
As quickly as she’d gone from zero to 100, Liz dropped back down to zero. “Thank y’all for letting me have that,” she said. “I just exploded. I’m sorry. Back to your regularly schedule program.”
“Liz, you don’t have to apologize for having your emotions,” Probst said. Yeah, really—especially when most people react that way to the prospect of Applebee’s.
But Liz was not sending us back to our regularly scheduled program; she was still mad, crying at camp and complaining in an interview. The transition to her at camp was brilliant: a fade from her beloved burger to her sad face.
“To not pick me, and deny someone, who has barely eaten in 18 days, who has this emotional connection to this meal—I don’t know what kind of person does that,” she told us.
Another mystery: What kind of person tries to blindside someone and then demands they do something nice for her?
“He’s a villain, bro,” Ben said to Liz, and an interview told us that Q’s decision was so, so mean because “the bourbon burger is her go-to item.” Wait, her go-to item! Doesn’t Q know how to play Survivor? You let people have their go-to items!!
Tangent: I just adore this cast and how terrible they are at this game—or that the editors are just gathering the most wacky stuff and showing it to us so we can feast.
Liz kept going. “It’s not just about food. My family grew up really poor. My family had a lot of food insecurity—pretty much barely ever had enough,” she said.
You may recall that Liz has previously said she doesn’t need the Survivor prize and is just there for the experience—like Applebee’s, which is only available at The Sanctuary in Fiji. Early in the season, when she and Tevin were talking about marriage, she doubted she’d marry, saying, “It’s a special kind of man who can deal with someone making so much money and not actually needing them.”
Anyway, Liz continued: “So being able to sit down at Applebee’s with my daughter is so important to me. My favorite part of the week—it sounds so silly—it’s picking her up after yoga, we go immediately to Applebee’s, I turn my phone off. That’s the one night a week that it’s just us,” she said.
Ah yes, no other time available to turn off one’s phone and spend time with one’s kid except at Applebee’s. “I really wanted a connection to my kid—and that delicious, juicy burger,” she told us.
This all just kept getting better and better—which is to say more and more hilariously ridiculous—when the reward people got back and shared everything about their feast—including how none of them ate their burgers, LMFAO.
To drop the snark for one second: Being tired and hungry for nearly three weeks cannot be fun. An emotional outburst is surprising, especially in a game for $1 million, and we’ve seen those before (though nothing quite like this!). What struck me was the sense of entitlement that persisted afterward, which went beyond disappointment to a place of I deserve this.
Update: I’m wrong; Liz is not entitled. She tweeted this in response to someone else: “lol I wasn’t entitled. Where did I say ‘I should have gotten the reward? He should have picked me?’ NOWHERE bitch you probably never been hungry a day in your life so just sit down and shut up.”
At the immunity challenge, just to remind us that this new era is completely crap, Jeff Probst talked fondly of he-who-shall-not-be-gabled, who won the same challenge before sliding back into his hole that he spent the rest of the season in.
That challenge was yet another hold-a-thing, preceded by another attempt by Probst to “negotiate” for rice. He wanted four people to sit out or two to give up votes; only Kenzie volunteered to sit out. Then Probst offered individual servings of rice to anyone who sat out—a thing they obviously created that day for Liz—and Liz took it. Kenzie competed.
Charlie and Tiffany were the final two, and Charlie pulled out the win. This was critical to Charlie and Maria, because they only have their sights set on Tiff and Q as votes. Mmm hmm.
Q’s attempt to win back his original alliance didn’t work, and everyone seemed ready to vote him out. “There’s no way under the Fijian sun I would let that go,” Tiff said. “Tonight is an easy vote.”
Maria proposed Q, Ben, Maria, Charlie vote for Tiffany, but that’s just four of eight votes, so they needed Liz, who of course was trying to will the earth to open up and swallow Q whole as punishment for his denial of burger.
At Tribal Council, everyone played it like Q was done. “A blindside at this stage is huge. That’s just not the case tonight, unfortunately,” Maria said.
Tiffany didn’t play her idol—which, wow—and then she was voted out with her idol in her pocket. Votes for Q came from Kenzie, Venus, and Tiff.
Before Tribal, Tiff even joked, “as long as y’all aren’t trying to blindside me yet.” In her exit interview, she told us, “I broke my own Survivor rule. I was trying to stretch my idol out for one more tribal.” I appreciate her acknowledgement of that, yet to watch that exact same thing happen to Hunter 48 hours earlier and not play your idol?
I don’t know what kind of game anyone is playing, but at this point every week is like watching them throw more and more into a blender that’s whirring with the top off, and just spraying stuff everywhere: a mess, but increasingly fun to watch, especially after a bunch of eatin’ good in the neighborhood got thrown in there, too.
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