Two tribal councils, one standoff over a rock draw and the same outcome as every other vote this season: on Wednesday, October 21, Survivor 51 sent home Alexis Levine and then Linnea Capobianco. That makes six people voted out of the CBS season so far, and all six are women.
The double elimination came in episode 5, “Not Here to Get a Pedicure,” which covered days 9 and 10 in Fiji’s Mamanuca Islands, the show’s home for 19 straight seasons. Toka won immunity and a basket of pastries, so the two other tribes, Savu and the newly formed Dina, both faced Jeff Probst on the same night.
Savu: the Helicopter Alliance closes ranks
Savu was down to four players: Alexis, Devin Way, Angelica “Jelly” Loblack and Ori Jean-Charles. Alexis, a 34-year-old criminal defense attorney from Atlanta, needed Jelly, and she pitched cutting Devin. Jelly said on camera that she felt pulled between “two different sets of morals” and did not want to watch another woman leave.
What Alexis does not appear to have accounted for is a pact formed on Day 1, before the tribes were even drawn, when Devin, Jelly, Ori and others banded together as the so-called Helicopter Alliance. It held. Devin, Jelly and Ori wrote Alexis’s name, she wrote Devin’s, and the vote finished 3–1.
Dina: a gift of two votes, then a deadlock
The second vote was shaped by a player who was never at risk. As the winning tribe, Toka had to send one member to another camp in exchange for giving up a share of the pastries. Mike Pinsky, Maggie Nestor and Kristin Flickinger all volunteered, and a random draw chose Maggie. On the trip she was handed an extra vote, the “Alliance Builder,” which she had to give away to someone on Dina.
Maggie gave it to her old Toka allies Lewis Kelly and Danny Kilby, who were outnumbered four to two on their new beach. Then she went further and handed over the separate extra vote she had pocketed in episode 3, after a scramble with Carter Krull and Brady Booker. With two ballots each, Lewis and Kilby could match the other four.
They did, twice. Lewis and Kilby put four votes on Linnea; Linnea, Sharonda Cox, Eric Macksoud and Cristian Chavez put four on Lewis. The revote ended 4–4 as well, because the extra votes carried over. Under the deadlock rule, the four players outside the tie (Cristian, Eric, Kilby and Sharonda) had to agree unanimously on who left, or the game would go to rocks. Kilby said he was ready to draw and never moved. Sharonda, Eric and Cristian would not risk it, and Linnea, 25, of Jersey City, New Jersey, was out. She was rattled enough that she forgot to carry her torch up to be snuffed.
Earlier, Lewis had tried a bluff on Sharonda, claiming his Irish wedding ring was a “blood ring” that would bind her fate to his. She asked, “Where’s the paper?”
Probst, writing in his weekly Field Notes, called the night “historic” and praised the gamble: “Kilby and Lewis made a big move that certainly could have backfired…but if you play not to lose, you’re doomed.”
Six vote-outs, six women
- Episode 1: Aaliyah Puglia, Toka, 6–2
- Episode 2: Ana Sani, Savu, 6–4
- Episode 3: Patt Cannaday, Toka, 6–5
- Episode 4: Jenna Doore, Savu, 4–1
- Episode 5: Alexis Levine, Savu, 3–1
- Episode 5: Linnea Capobianco, Dina, two 4–4 ties settled by consensus
The only man gone is Rob Antonson, who quit on Day 6 after the medical team cleared him to keep playing. The cast opened with 11 women and 10 men, the first female majority in the show’s history. Our count: 11 women minus 6 voted out leaves 5, and 10 men minus Rob leaves 9, so women have gone from 52 percent of the cast (11 of 21) to 36 percent (5 of 14) in ten days. For scale, if each boot were a coin flip between a man and a woman, six women in a row would come up about once in 64 tries (0.5 multiplied by itself six times). Votes are not coin flips, which is exactly what the argument is about.
“Game is game” or a pattern?
Probst raised the trend himself after Jenna’s exit. “This is an example that tribe dynamics dictate everything,” he wrote on Instagram. “More women at the start of the game doesn’t necessarily mean more women at the end of the game.” Those who read it as ordinary strategy note that women steered several of the early blindsides: Jenna redirected the first vote toward Aaliyah, Alexis, Linnea and Sharonda flipped to save Eric over Ana, and Thien An Nguyen pitched the switch that sent Patt home. Jelly, a woman, was one of the three votes against Alexis this week, and Sharonda was part of the group that chose Linnea.
Viewers who see a pattern point to history. Between season 26 and season 40, men won 12 of 15 seasons, and Survivor 44 also opened with four women voted out in a row. In this episode Jelly herself cited not wanting to lose another woman as a reason to break with her alliance, then stayed with it.
Fourteen players remain, nine men and five women. Episode 6, “I Love Crying,” airs Wednesday, October 28, on CBS.
Further reading
Image: Jaejay77, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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