Survivor: Cook Islands- Survivor Live, Episode 11

First, my trivia question: It was repeated a couple of times that with fifteen votes, Jonathan accumulated more votes than any other Survivor player. Whose record did he break? To see the answer, drag your cursor between the square brackets that follow: [ The previous record-holder was Rory, from Survivor: Vanuatu. He accumulated fourteen votes in his brief journey on the show. ]

The show begins with Jenna telling us the stitches in her ear didn’t come out easily, but they are gone. Dalton is clearly sick as his voice is rather raspy. He does a promo for a Survivor trivia computer game, called “Blast.” Look for Rupert and Stephenie on the cover.

Attention now turns to Jonathan, who is not wearing that disturbingly goofy hat we’re used to seeing him underneath. Shaving helped, too. Dalton repeats his view that when he and Candice mutinied, it saved what was looking like a bad season.

Jonathan calls his act “informed impulsiveness.” He says he thought Adam had the hidden idol, and when he saw Candice step off and the numbers shift to Raro, that did it for him.

Jenna asks if he had second thoughts a couple of hours later. He says, “Hours? Maybe by the time I got to the other mat!”

He says he was determined to be more like Bligh than Christian. He adds, “My leg started moving without my brain knowing. What a great schmuck move I made!” He realized he was on the team with the numbers, but didn’t think that as last in, his position wasn’t very secure.

He thought he would be eliminated soon and still doesn’t understand why they didn’t send him home sooner. Dalton jokes that he stuck around like a rat. Jonathan amends that to say, “Like the sun.”

Until Yul showed him the hidden idol and put him between a rock and a hard place, Jonathan says he intended to stay true to Raro.

Jenna asks why he didn’t tell Yul he was with them, and then vote someone other than Nate. Jonathan says he preferred the Aitu four, feeling they deserved it more in his mind. When they refused to consider Yul might have the hidden idol, that convinced him, “I can’t work with these people!”

Jason from Albuquerque is the first caller today. He asks if, when he returned from Exile Island, was he just shut out (of strategy conversations) or could he figure out a way to avoid his departure. He says, “There was nothing to be said. They made up their minds when I was away fro two days.”

He adds that he tried to talk to them and they wouldn’t listen at all. He thinks the footage of him being readily ignored by Becky and Sundra is pretty funny. Jonathan thinks he was seen as a threat that wouldn’t be happy finishing fifth.

Dalton calls the other players “bad liars.” Jonathan says, “They told me what I needed to hear.” When Yul said he’d take one last shot at saving him, he talked briefly to the others and then went to take a nap. Jonathan knew he was unquestionably done for at that point.

Jonathan says he finally did get his hat back. He says the others were extremely disrespectful of items left behind by other players, “They’d burn them or wipe themselves with them, or do crazy things with them, and I really didn’t want to see that happen to my hat.”

Jonathan felt if he had made to the final two, he’d have outwitted, outlasted, and outplayed them all. He doubted he could win their respect, though perhaps some cold logic might have worked in his favor.

He accuses them of playing emotionally, not rationally. He feels he wasn’t responsible for the evictions of Brad, Rebecca, or Jenny – that was Nate, Parvati, Adam, and Candice’s doing.

A clip is run. It’s a fake-out, it’s Jonathan playing a pimp on CSI: NY. Jonathan thanks them for playing the clip, because now it’s believable that he can play a villain on TV as well as be one. Ha!

The intended clip is run now, which shows it getting very, very quiet whenever Jonathan is around. Live Jonathan is viewable in a pic-in-pic. He laughs at Becky and Sundra trying to ignore him.

Jenna wonders if it was an age thing. She wonders who drove his eviction, and he says Adam and Candice. Dalton surmises it was also because Yul was worried about jury votes.

It would have been interesting to see how the Raro quartet would have voted in a Yul-Jonathan final two. Would they vote for the guy they deeply hate, or would they go back on their promise to withhold votes for Yul? Either way, they would have to compromise.

Jonathan thinks they ought to have waited another week to be safer. No foolin’! This was crazy-dangerous on Yul’s behalf, and he made his trip to the endgame unnecessarily dangerous. Jonathan says he doesn’t blame Yul, and thinks he’d have done the same thing if others were putting so much pressure on him.

Aramis from Wisconsin recalls when there were nine in the game and he could have forced Yul to bring out the hidden idol. What is the tiebreaker? Fire-making, he thinks. Jonathan figures if he’d thrown his vote away (voting, say, for Parvati) he’d have permanently lost all chances of finding later allies. He calls that his “least viable alternative.”