Survivor: Game Changers: Analyzing why Brad didn’t win

Although Brad Culpepper took second place in Survivor: Game Changers, there are a couple reasons why he didn’t make it past Sarah Lacina to win the game.

The Survivor: Game Changers post-mortem has already begun, now that we know Sarah Lacina has won the game. Brad Culpepper didn’t really come close to overtaking her — Jeff Probst only read out three votes for him at that Final Tribal Council — but it was good enough for second place. Fittingly, there are two major reasons why he didn’t win despite juror Ozzy Lusth in particular going to bat for him. (We hope you’ll excuse the metaphor, since it isn’t from football.)

The first flaw in Brad’s game basically came from the beginning. Indeed, it came up during that Final Tribal Council. He had a partnership with Sierra. The jurors knew about it, too, and they asked him to make a case that Sierra hadn’t really been running the show for them.

Based on how many times we’ve used the phrase “Brad and Sierra” or “Sierra and Brad” throughout this season, it’s clear that it was also apparent to those in the game that they were a partnership. Even though he tried to explain that the two of them had just worked together, it’s hard to dismiss that image of Sierra leaning back in the hammock and playing the powerful role she did in the post-merge.

Now we come to the second point. Last night, while talking with my colleagues, I argued that Brad actually lost Game Changers not at the Final Tribal Council, but at the final four Tribal. It all had to do with how he spoke to Tai then. We, the viewers, knew that what happened at that Tribal was more the continuation of a pattern that developed early on in the episode, but for it to come out at Tribal Council, with the jury watching, didn’t really help matters for him.

For it to then come up again at the Final Tribal Council on Day 39 probably then sealed his fate. Tai still looked hurt and upset by what had gone down. With the new discussion-based format, that issue in Brad’s social game then had multiple times to come up.

To be even more accurate, I started bringing up Brad’s edit tanking during those initial scenes where he demanded an idol from Tai in order to secure any putative partnership. There really wasn’t any way for Survivor not to show those scenes. However, to focus on Tai’s reaction to what had happened put Brad in a very different light for us as viewers and helped explain why he didn’t win before the jury became really aware of it. I’m sure as we look at the edgic we’ll see something similar.

Next: Game Changers finale recap: One last twist

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