Survivor 50 episode 5, “Open Wounds,” featured a lot of stand-out mentions of players’ past seasons. We saw Christian Hubicki calling out Ozzy Lusth’s temperament a la Survivor: South Pacific, Kamilla Karthigesu questioning Rizo Velovic’s honesty about Survivor 49, and Coach Wade revisiting his affinity for giving nicknames per all his previous alliances. But the most interesting connection to past seasons didn’t happen until the end of the episode.
When our castaways arrived at the challenge arena, Jeff Probst announced tonight would feature a Double Tribal Council, effectively sending two players—one from each losing tribe—home. After a neck-in-neck challenge, Vatu was once again on the chopping block, this time with Cila arriving at Tribal Council right behind them.
Angelina and Charlie were both voted out in Survivor for the first time
The afternoon was filled with what seemed to be a lot of “bad blood”-led social gameplay that resulted in the Vatu tribe ultimately working together for the first time and voting out Angelina Keeley. Cila took a different route and instead of the Kalo majority staying united to eliminate Rizo, as previously discussed, Rizo formed his own squad and blindsided Charlie Davis.
With Angelina’s original season and Charlie’s original season being five years apart, you might not think that the two would have much in common besides departing on the same day in Survivor 50. However, looking back, you’ll remember that both Angelina and Charlie made it to their season’s Final Tribal Councils. Ultimately, Angelina took third place in Survivor: David vs. Goliath and Charlie took second place in Survivor 46—though that was very controversial and still widely discussed whether or not he should have won.
In other words, we just watched two players who finished runner-up on their respective seasons and had never been voted out of Survivor get voted out in back-to-back Tribal Councils.
With both of them making it to the end of their original seasons, they entered Survivor 50—the first returning season for both of them—without ever having been voted out of Survivor. So on day 11 of their second season, they both finally had their torches snuffed for the first time in their entire Survivor journey.
That means Angelina survived 50 days in Fiji, while Charlie made it 37 days.
We still have a few players left in the game who have yet to be voted out. It will be exciting to see if, like tonight, having that status puts an additional target on anyone’s back. We’ve already seen two winners go home, with Dee Valladares now being the sole Sole Survivor remaining, so we already know she’s definitely a contender for top threat status. But we’ll have to wait until next week to see how things continue to unfold this season for our players.