Review: Survivor, "That's Not How I Play Survivor" | Season 50, Episode 7

When the merged tribe comes together as 12—we’ll get to Rizo and Ozzy eventually—Dee doesn’t wait for a private moment. It’s the morning after three players were voted out, and she walks straight up to Jonathan and says “You little fuckhead.” She knows that he turned on Kamilla, and she’s not going to mince words.

She comes in hot, but Jonathan immediately tries to turn it against her. He decides that the real issue is that no one is being honest, and he questions Dee’s honesty as though there is anything specific to base this on. Coach jumps in at this point, telling a story about how someone apparently told him Dee was plotting against him. As she says, the fiery Cuban comes out, and Jonathan claims in an interview this is what he wanted: he’s purposefully goading her trying to get her to say something incriminating. He thinks he won this interaction, which results in Coach deciding it’s all-out war against Dee and everyone who dares “lie” or strategize to play the game.

The thing is, Dee isn’t worried about any of this. She knows, as we do, that no one takes Coach’s moralizing seriously. She also knows that Jonathan is brainless, and has no real acumen for the war he’s starting. But what Dee is concerned by is the fact that she legitimately fucked up. She took Rizo’s information about having an idol and used it to secure trust elsewhere: with Emily, with Tiff, and most notably with Jonathan. She rightfully calls it “messy,” and knows that there’s nothing she can really do: she did exactly what Rizo accuses her of, and she’s on her back foot with people she wanted to play with at the same time she has Coach breathing down her neck about her immoral gameplay.