I always have to appreciate how fucked the edit of Survivor is when post-season interviews and retrospectives come out.
- Wendell and Michele were nowhere near as antagonistic as shown and Michele even said they both thought their relationship might be revived by their time together on Sele but it didn’t pan out. In fact, they planned that they would pretend to have had a really bad break-up.
- Speaking of Wendell, basically everybody unanimously agrees that he was the most fucked by the edit and everybody is shocked by the villain edit he got.
- Michele was in a pre-game alliance with Yul, Nick and Wendell. Parvati really was swap-screwed - there was nothing she could have done. If she had convinced Nick to flip, Michele would then have run straight to Yul/Wendell. And even if she had gotten an idol, if Sele goes back to tribal council, she’s once again on the bottom.
- EOE got real high school and may have played a part in why Natalie didn’t get votes as Danni, Yul, Wendell, and Adam all felt they were excluded by her. Not saying it was true but that this was how they felt. I’m not sure how justified they are in this. But I will say this - on the one hand, I don’t think Natalie could have won Adam’s jury vote no matter what, since he outright said he would never vote an EOE returnee. But on the other hand, there was an incident with Yul where everybody agrees they felt sorry for Yul so I do believe she probably burned Yul’s jury vote. Then again, Yul was tight with Tony so maybe it was already gone, but her actions probably didn’t help.
- Several people wanted to vote for Michele to give her second place but were scared Natalie might win. This included Wendell, Nick, Adam and Danni.
- On the Rob yara vote, Adam wanted to KEEP Rob but Ben was adamant that he go. Adam felt cagey since he realized that he would be on the outs, but Rob’s buddy system sealed his own doom. Speaking of which, Rob claimed he knew it was coming while the other four claimed he was blindsided. While I can’t claim for certain, based on the evidence, I think it’s much more likely that Rob was indeed blindsided.
- Michele has said that her biggest regret of the game was voting out Yul instead of Wendell. That and her confessionals about Wendell.
- Lots of rewards going missed. And apparently peanut butter was an even bigger deal on Edge than we thought as people were stealing it from others.
All in all, it goes to show how little we really see of the game! Especially since as with most returnee seasons, pregaming was a huge part of it (albeit unlike other returnee seasons, the editors admitted that pre-island relationships and games were impacting the game).
