Survivor Guatemala: Survivor Live Recap, The Finale, Part One

This week’s guests are third- and fourth-place finishers Lydia Morales and Rafe Judkins. My own occasional comments are enclosed in square brackets like this [I see the headlines – Who Wants Fries With That Chicken?]

The first thing one notices is that the lighting in the studio is terrible. This isn’t their usual broadcast site, and we can hardly see them. [I honestly thought this was a joke at first, and we were looking at more relatives!] The version that’s posted on the website is enhanced, though… too bad the video freezes up in the first segment.

I’m pleased to report that Jenna was a good girl last night and she’s in much better shape than last year’s show. Rafe and Lydia, however, have not really slept.

After going on about it all season, it seems the clip of Rafe unable to climb the ladder in the spider-ropes challenge is unavailable, so they harass Rafe about eating ants instead. Rafe says they were protein rich and they ate hundreds of them. “It was like a little chicken,” he adds. Still, the hosts are not too impressed.

Dalton says Rafe “broke his heart last night,” and, “It was Ian, redux.” Rafe really thought Danni was going to take him to the final two anyway. Dalton says Rafe made it too easy for her. Rafe counters that he and Danni were really close and thought their relationship would be enough.

Jenna and Rafe note that he kept Danni from winning 7-0. Dalton asks Lydia if she was star-struck that Stephenie was there. “Absolutely!” [Finally, someone admits it!] She was hoping they’d get Bobby Jon on their team, too. Rafe thought Stephenie was like The Mole, because she got them lost in the jungle and didn’t carry a bag of corn the first day. Rafe thought, “If we lose, she wins.” [Alas, Bill McDaniel will always be “The Mole.”]

Lydia says anyone who gets a second shot will do better and didn’t really think it was fair to the rest of them. Rafe says their return to the game was “the big elephant in the room that no one was talking about at the final Tribal Council.”

We start off with two dropped calls. Oops! Jenna steps in and asks why Rafe voted out Lydia when he did, knowing she could be easily beaten at the next stage. Lydia says she’s interested in hearing this answer, too. Rafe says there are two reasons – one, Steph thought she could beat Lydia at the end, so if Stephenie won at final three she’d take Lydia to the final two. Rafe wanted to eliminate that scenario. Two, Rafe thought he was in a good position already with two people who would both take him to the endgame, where he thought he could beat them both.

Rafe says he’d have voted for Lydia if she were in the final two, and she was the one who he was worried about beating. Dalton asks him to rethink if he would vote Lydia over Stephenie, and he pauses before confirming that he’d have been mad at Stephenie for his ouster and therefore voted for Lydia.

They have the clip run of Lydia’s final Tribal Council. Dalton asks Lydia to confirm if her plea was “I can’t win anything, take me along.” It was. Dalton says, that logic tells the jury you don’t think you should win.

Rafe says he thinks Lydia could have won some final challenges, if it was just standing on a block for hours on end [her lower center of gravity leads me to agree.]

Jenna asks Lydia how it would play out if she’d been in and won the last challenge. Lydia says she’d have taken Stephenie to the final two. A vindicated Rafe says, “See!” Lydia thought she might have won. Judd and Jamie were solidly against Stephenie, so she just needed two more votes. [Probably not Cindy or Rafe. It would come down to Gary, Danni and Bobby Jon, too close to call in my mind and too many new variables are introduced.]

Rafe recognized around the time of final eight or nine that no one was likely to take him to the end. Lydia agrees, saying, “He was too well liked.” Dalton tries to run through the jury/voting possibilities – not all agree with his assumptions and it was kinda complex, so I’m skipping that. He concludes that Stephenie couldn’t beat anyone.

Rafe and Jenna compare Rafe’s position to Rob Cesternino’s… both good players, both knew no one would take them to the final two.

The phones have been fixed and the first caller of the day is on the line. It’s Anita of Nevada, who’s sorry Rafe didn’t go to the final two, he was a great player. [Gee, do you SEE Lydia sitting there?] Rafe says, “I think that was the problem, it’s that people would have voted for me.”

Dalton is sure Rafe would not have beat Danni in a hypothetical final two, but Jenna does. They start to count votes but that halts abruptly when Lydia reveals she might not have voted for him like he’d thought. This catches him by total surprise! Lydia is surprised in return to learn Rafe had an alliance with Danni as early as final six… before Lydia had secretly talked with Rafe. Ha!

Back counting votes, Rafe is sure Cindy and Steph would have voted for him. He thinks Gary too [no way] and after further discussion where no one really agrees, Rafe decides it would have gone 4-3 either way.

Jenna finally gets in the point that if you change the jury members, it very much depends how they get voted off, as that can change a vote that seemed ready to go another way. [I’ve been waiting for someone to say that for almost five minutes. When you change the players and sequence of events, it can COMPLETELY change the game!]