Survivor 49 episode 2, "Cinema," hit us with a few new twists on some new era classics. Namely, an expiration date on the beware advantage's hidden immunity idol and the journey castaways not being forced to give up their vote to play for an advantage.
But that wasn't the only new take the show had for the first journey of the season. To start things off, representatives from Hina, Uli, and Kele—Matt Williams, Jawan Pitts, and Jake Latimer, respectively—went against each other in an elimination-style challenge rather than parting at the beach for individual journeys. We've only ever seen this one time before, kind of.
Last season, after the second post-merge immunity challenge where players teamed up to get to the final individual stage, the four, first-out castaways were sent on a journey where they were met with a funnel board consisting of randomly distributed gray and red balls. Players had to choose one or two balls, rotating turns until someone ended up with three red balls and lost their vote. Watch a clip below.
Where last season's elimination-style challenge was "first out loses and everyone else walks away in tact," this season the tables were turned and the last player standing earned a reward. Though in a surprising twist, the two losers did not lose their votes if they were eliminated—or so they thought.
Of course, the reward was not revealed until the challenge—filling your opponents' hanging nets with enough coconuts to drop them—was over and both the other journey voyagers were on their way back to their camps, not privy to any information. So while everyone was targeting Jake and Matt as the two more physical threats, Jawan's net managed to stay upright the longest, winning him a choice of two advantages: help yourself or help your tribe.
He ultimately decided that he wanted to earn some favor with his tribe and chose "help your tribe" by earning the option to provide another tribe a disadvantage at the next immunity challenge. This was the wrong choice. And yes, there was a right and a wrong choice.
By choosing this advantage, Jawan—not the Uli tribe, just Jawan as a singular player—had to publicly announce a decision to hurt another tribe. Not just one player, but six players. While the five (now four) Kele players seemed thankful they were spared, he just put a huge target on his own back and allowed six undefeated, strong players to aim their arrows at it.
Had he chosen to steal a vote, he still could have used it to get the credit he wanted with his tribe by producing it to them as a group advantage—announcing it as something they can use come the merge to ensure Uli stays on top with the majority. While there are some incredibly smart strategic players on his tribe who might have been fearful of his advantage, if he was open enough to let everyone know he had it, it shrunk the target just a little bit, especially if he pitched it as something other players could use, it gives them a smaller percentage reason to keep him around.
Jawan should have stolen Matt's vote
The disadvantage side of this would have been done anonymously. After losing, both Jake and Matt skipped off back to their tribe's beaches, happily knowing they still had their votes. If Jawan had stolen one of their votes, they wouldn't know until the next time they went to vote and a card was there letting them know someone stole their vote. That advantage is fairly common in the game, but it has never been used across tribe lines, so not only would his name has never been thrown in the pool of suspects, but he would have stirred chaos within other tribes and fully shaken up the game without even setting foot at Tribal Council.
Specifically, he should have stolen Matt's vote. Hina is on a winning streak, and it's likely no one from their camp will end up at Tribal Council until a tribe swap. If that happens to be Matt, it would have been far enough down the line that the journey wouldn't even have been on his radar anymore as a possibility of how someone stole his vote.
But now, like I said, there's a huge target on Jawan's back and he's still in the minority of his tribe—they didn't even get the first place reward even with Hina's disadvantage. So we'll see how that plays out over the rest of Survivor 49, but I have no doubt that Jawan is in for a rough ride moving forward.