Review: Survivor, "What I'm Smellin' is Stinky" | Season 51, Episode 3

There is a fundamental mania to playing Survivor. You build yourself up over months of auditions, and then you’re quarantined in Fiji waiting to hit the ground running, unable to even talk to the people around you. When you finally start the game and that adrenaline hits, you’re faced with the reality of everything you’ve been building toward, and that creates an emotional response that can easily manifest in ways detrimental to your game.

Usually, though, this mania is more interpersonal than anything else. It seems safe to say that a player like Eric is probably more annoying when they’ve been cooped up for a week, and someone like Kilby might have been less likely to mess up by badmouthing a player to someone who is going to run and tell them about it. Other times, though, you can sense that the tribes are acting and reacting in ways that show they’ve lost touch with the circumstance in front of them. It’s strategic for Toka to search Carter’s bag for evidence of any unspoken dimensions of his visit; it’s more than a little crazy to jump from “there’s a clue in the oars” to actively destroying them with an axe instead of thinking practically about the situation at hand (but we expect this level of crazy from Brady at this point).

In that case, though, there’s an urgency to the situation that can make anyone go a little crazy. The real danger, as evidenced by ”What I’m Smellin’ is Stinky,” is when you’re forced to sit with your loosening grip on reality for an extended period. Rob came out and started playing the game hard, and the game rewarded him: a hidden immunity idol, no strings attached. But as it turns out, that came with a lack of sleep, and by the time he arrived at tribal council he had concocted an elaborate plan that involved voting for himself.