Most memorable moments from Survivor: Caramoan

Uneven Tribe Swap

After Brandon left, the two tribes dropped their buffs and we were treated to one of the most uneven tribe swaps in Survivor history. One tribe consisted of all of the strong guys as well as the majority of the strong women and the other tribe was everyone else.

This led to the infamous moment of Phillip claiming he threw the challenge involving the grappling hook because he wanted to get another fan out and it gave us Phillip vs Corinne Kaplan, which was fun. The new Bikal tribe also gifted us with the John Cochran confessional where he compared fan Julia Landauer to vanilla and then said that was “a disservice to vanilla”.

As expected, Bikal lost every challenge because why wouldn’t they?

Boring Pre-Merge

I mentioned earlier how lackluster the pre-merge was in Caramoan and that’s because the fans cast for this season were so boring. We had three straight blonde females get voted off and only diehard fans could tell them apart and even then it was no guarantee. Shamar Thomas took nearly all of the air time on that tribe only to be medically evacuated four episodes in.

After how fun the first Fans vs Favorites season was, casting really missed the mark with the group of fans they selected for season 26. Only three fans made it to the merge and all three of them were men. Fortunately, the post-merge was a lot more entertaining.

Three Amigos

The new Gota tribe put Malcolm Freberg, Eddie Fox, and Reynold on a tribe together where they teamed up as the alpha males and became the Three Amigos. This alliance went on to work their magic early on in the post-merge portion of the game and of course gave us one of the most exciting tribal councils where Malcolm put his Hidden Immunity Idol around his neck and gave another one to Eddie, proclaiming their intent to vote for Phillip.

That then forced the majority alliance, which was everyone remaining, to vote off one of their own or to risk someone else going home. The alliance mostly stuck to their guns, but Erik flipped and that was enough to send Phillip home. Truly a great tribal council.

Blindsides Galore

The saving grace for Survivor: Caramoan was the fact that the post-merge was fairly entertaining and that’s because we had so many blindsides. I talked about the Phillip vote, but we also had Andrea Boehlke getting blindsided with an idol in her pocket and Brenda Lowe getting blindsided after helping Dawn Meehan in a bind (more on this in a bit).

The Andrea blindside is one of my favorite blindsides ever because she was SO surprised. The best part is when she shouts “WHAT?!” when her name pops up more than she expected. She was a good sport about it, which is impressive considering she was just 23 years old at the time and it’d have been easy for her to harbor ill will toward her tribe mates for that, as she was on her way to making it quite far and potentially winning season 26.