There was a lot that went down in episode 9 of Survivor 49, including an interesting conversation around rewards and one player's inability to earn one.
Was the Kele tribe cursed? After the tribe swap, the group wearing blue bandanas won a challenge, so technically no. Was Sophi Balerdi cursed? While she didn't win any challenges for the first 10 days, she eventually was on the winning tribe right before the merge, so, again, technically no.
Well now the question is whether or not Jawan Pitts is cursed from earning food rewards. And in an exclusive scene released by Entertainment Weekly, we now see that even Jawan thinks he might be bad luck.
The unaired footage shows our castaways drawing rocks to randomly assign Rizo Velovic and Kristina Mills as team captains for the group reward challenge. The two then do a single round of rock-paper-scissors to decide who gets to go first—Rizo's scissors beat Kristina's paper and he gets first choice of players to join his team.
Host and executive producer Jeff Probst instructs Rizo to choose someone and share why. Without hesitation, Rizo picks Jawan who immediately tries to stop him, but Rizo goes on to say, "I'm hoping that we're gonna break the reward curse." He continues on about how he sees something in Jawan that's ready to come out and he hopes he can be the one to bring it out of him and help him win some food.
Before stepping onto the yellow mat with Rizo, Jawan asks, "Are you sure, bro?" But Rizo doesn't has a doubt in his mind, encouraging him to join his team, which Jawan does in some combination of reluctance and enthusiasm.
Even Jawan didn't want to be picked first for the reward challenge, afraid to be the reason his team lost
And, then there is Kristina's first pick, Sophie Segreti, who she claims to pick because the two need to start rebuilding trust. But it isn't lost on Sophie that she's also one of the strongest people here—having won immunity once and finished second for it the only other time it's been in play. So while Kristina's claiming this move is to bond the two, Sophie know it was also the smartest move for her to create a winning team.
The rest of the players are chosen without additional reasons until Rizo chooses Steven Ramm last and Steven jokingly prompts, "What? No speech?" Rizo in kind responds by hyping him up as a "legend" which then cuts to a confessional with Steven where he claims he wanted to be on Rizo's team because he has the confidence to win and challenges are sometimes just about the mindset you enter them with.
He should have remembered that confessional when they were figuring out the vote later that night. Rizo's confidence is exactly why he's still in the game with an idol in his pocket. He's nearly untouchable because he's done touch a good job of charismatically deflecting his target every single week. And like Steven said, he has the confidence to win.
When it comes down to the final two players left—Sophi and Savannah Louie—Kristina chooses Savannah, leaving Sophi to sit out and bet on a team to win. She chooses Rizo's team for the same reason everyone else wanted to be on it, to inspire some hope into Jawan finally winning a challenge. Once again, Jawan asks, "Are you sure?"
And as we saw in the final version of the episode (above), Jawan's team lost, but he was the only player to land a ring in the end, so—per Steven's theory—the reward curse might simply be Jawan's poor mindset regarding his tribe members' faith in him. If he hadn't second guessed all the positivity of his fellow castaways, maybe his own confidence would have helped contribute to a win.
In the end, Jawan got to eat as Kristina opted to switch spots with him. Though he was hesitant to accept the offer, his whole team encouraged him to take her up on it, which he ultimately did. And while Kristina might have offered the trade as a completely selfless move—intentions outside of the game—it's important to remember that giving up a reward for other players has almost never affected the final outcome of the game. But, Jawan takes loyalty of people very seriously. We'll just have to wait to see if he remembers Kristina's kindness and repays her in gameplay.