Player Drops out in Shocking Tribal Shakeup (RECAP)

We Can Do Hard Things

Season 45 • Episode 1

[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for the Survivor Season 45 premiere.]

Well, that was easy. The first tribal council of Survivor Season 45 featured a shocking self-elimination that led to no votes being cast on night one. And it wasn’t the player who blacked out during the first challenge of the season, but it was someone from his tribe, Lulu (yellow).

Contestants were coming in hot from the first moments of Survivor 45. Emily on Lulu came to win, with her cutthroat strategy making its debut in a challenge to Bruce (Survivor 44’s returning player, this time on the blue tribe, Belo) on the boat before the first reward challenge. While Bruce claimed he had no real advantage because he played less than 24 hours in the previous season, Emily argued the opposite. Everyone knowing who he was, she said, was a major plus. But it seemed she was more intent on making an early impression than she was committed to this argument.

Her teammate, Brandon, also had a dramatic and memorable start to the season when he fell into the water after jumping from a boat to the ship’s rope bridge. He hung there for a large chunk of the challenge, his muscles too weak to pull himself up the ladder. A panic attack may have onset from the intensity of his first Survivor moments (before game play kicked off, he cried about his dream coming true to host Jeff Probst and the rest of the players). This moment of weakness lost Lulu their early lead, but they were able to catch up with some teamwork.

Robert Voets/CBS

Tribe Reba (red) won in the end, and then it was off to the Sweat and Savvy challenges for Belo and Lulu. Some changes were made to this contest for Season 45. This time around, a pair from Belo and Lulu had to complete both of the challenges, with Sweat coming first and Savvy second. They had one hour to complete both tasks. On the line was the survival tools their teams didn’t win in the reward challenge (a pot, a machete, and flint). But neither pairing completed the tasks in time, marking a first for this new era.

Rather than having to compete for the tools again, Jeff revealed their pots, machetes, and flint would be waiting for them back at camp after the immunity challenge — an unexpected reward after a losing result. We’ve never seen two teams fail the Sweat or Savvy challenges like this in the new era, so we didn’t necessarily know what to expect if both lost. But winning their reward anyway is a bit of a disappointment. The losers of the immunity challenge, however, would still lose their flint. And it was Lulu who took that blow.

Emily and Brandon were the prime targets for elimination. Emily rubbed everyone the wrong way with her critical outlook on their actions at camp. While she saw herself as trying to highlight the better strategies, they saw it as her pointing out everything she thought they were doing wrong while offering no helpful alternatives.

Brandon also continued to struggle in the immunity challenge, falling down the ramp in the last leg of the relay. He eventually made it up to the top, but it’s not good when Jeff’s commentary is “it would take a miracle for Lulu” to catch up on the final puzzle. “This is more about pride of getting to the puzzle rather than having any chance of winning the puzzle,” he added seconds before Belo won immunity (Reba finished second).

Robert Voets/CBS

Brandon and Hannah commiserated at camp about the unexpected difficulty of the real-life competition. As nearly everyone on the show says, Survivor looks much easier when you’re watching on the couch. Brandon was committed to staying and redeeming himself but understood that he was the clear and obvious target for tribal council votes, seeing as he slowed the team down in both premiere challenges. Hannah realized quickly how much she hated the survival elements of the show (did she expect to be dry and well-fed?), but she motivated herself by saying, “We can do hard things!”

When it came time for tribal council, however, she was done. It didn’t matter that Emily had pulled her and Brandon into her strategy to split up Kaleb and Sabiyah before they could become an alliance. It didn’t matter that Kaleb and Sabiyah had planned to eliminate Brandon (who advertised his intentions to play his Shot In the Dark, a lame move to make on night one) for his weak physical performance. Even the tense skirmish between Kaleb, Sabiyah, and Emily in tribal council that laid their dislike for each other on the table (well, more so Emily’s dislike for them) didn’t matter. Hannah wanted to go home, and she asked everyone to vote for her.

They agreed, and Jeff saw no point in making them vote. She became the first person sent home from Survivor 45, and she seems to have no intentions of ever coming back. Her “we can do hard things” motto was so often said, it became the episode’s title. It turns out, yes, she can do hard things. She just didn’t want to.

It’s a shame to see someone quit in Episode 1 when there are so many watching at home who dreamed of getting her chance. It’s not often that you see someone willingly leave Survivor (or any high-stakes reality show, for that matter — we’re thinking of Heidi N Closet’s shocking exit from RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 8). Let’s hope it doesn’t happen again.

Survivor, Wednesdays, 8/7c, CBS