Survivor: San Juan del Sur Power Rankings
Week 7
By Ben Willoughby
November 11, 2014
BoxOfficeProphets.com

Why do we look so much better when we're airbrushed?
Last week, there was a merge and all of the castaways were sent to live at Coyopa Beach as punishment for past-performance. What the merged tribe lacks in imagination they make up for in self-publicity, because the new tribe name is #Huyopa. #Huyopa, who are always hungry, immediately went in search of stuff to eat and found a bunch of hoarded trail mix in Julie’s bag. Okay, hoarding food on Survivor? Not cool. Eating everything in sight so that other people feel they have to hoard food in order to get any? Also not cool. Sensing her number was up, Julie quit, and was given what seemed to be the easiest quit by Probst ever. He didn’t even call her a quitter, shame her in front of the rest of the tribe or ask her how disappointed John Rocker would be in her decision.

Here are the power rankings for this week:

1. Jon

Jeremy wants to talk with Jon. Josh wants to talk with Jon. Everyone wants to talk with Jon, and it’s not because of his engaging personality. It’s because both sides have pinged him as the one most likely to flip. Wes, Alec, Josh and Reed want him to go bro, while Jeremy and Missy want him and Jaclyn to stick with them. Jon seems tempted to flip over to Josh’s alliance of couples plus Alex, but I think this would be a disastrously bad move for his end game.

At the moment, Jon and Jaclyn are allied with Missy, who will be planning the votes, Baylor, who no-one respects, Natalie, who is annoying and Jeremy, who is respected for his game play and therefore likely to get his throat cut around final five or so. Among that group, Jon and Jaclyn are Mr. and Ms. Congeniality, and if one of them makes it to the end they’d get votes both from within and outside their alliance. But if Jon were to flip, he would marginalize himself and Jaclyn, who would be painted as a coat-tail rider. He would receive no votes from his Hunahpu alliance because he ruined their chances in the game, and probably no votes from his new alliance, who all have stronger alliances within the group.

It would be a terrible move. So obviously, Jon is strongly tempted by this offer.

2. Jaclyn

Jaclyn is in the similar swing position to Jon – “so stressful”, she complains, but it’s exactly where she should be. She claims to be keeping her options open, though from what we saw she basically dismissed Josh and does not seem on board with flipping.

3. Missy

Missy is still in the driver’s seat of her alliance, which is currently six against five. I did enjoy her maternal advice to Baylor – “you’re going to have to be a little bit phony” – but her phoniness to Julie was disappointingly transparent. Of course, after 18 days of listening to Julie, my phoniness would be pretty transparent too. Anyway, she still seems to be running things on her alliance, or at least the smarter players on her alliance are letting her run things.

Also, Missy got to give a confessional about her relationship with Baylor and what it means to have her daughter coming for advice. So you know something bad’s going to happen to her.

4. Josh

Josh realizes that his alliance is down in the numbers and the editing suggests that he is the only one on that alliance doing anything about it. His first pitch to Baylor “you owe me in this game, so betray the woman who gave birth to you and raised you through three failed marriages” wasn’t particularly thought through, but his second “couples together” pitch to Jon and Jaclyn shows more promise. Of course, it’s still a stupid pitch (does couples together include Missy and Baylor? Does it include Alec? When did Survivor become about having a good time with people you respect? And what happens comes crunch-time – which in an eight-person alliance is only three weeks away?) but it found the right audience in Jon. Josh is pretty confident about his chances – before Julie quit, he was 80% sure Jon and Jaclyn would be with him – but give it another three days and we’ll see whether that 80% becomes 100% or zero.

5. Jeremy

Josh, Reed and Alec want Jeremy gone, despite his charming defense of “I suck at these challenges!” Even Keith and Wes want him out, which I’m pretty sure is a breach of the firefighter’s code. Anyway, Jeremy is seen as a power player which means that despite everything we've seen, on some level he sort of is one.

6. Reed

We don’t see much of Reed, but he’s allied to Josh, so...

7. Natalie

Natalie should probably be lower, but she has at least seems semi-confident, we haven’t seen much of her annoying side and I don’t feel like putting her under the various Josh alliance non-entities.

8. Keith

Keith spits whenever he talks about Missy and Baylor. He’s not going back to their side, but he doesn’t have much of a chance with his new alliance of younger people who, if Wes wasn’t there, would be laughing at the old man with the hillbilly accent who is old enough to know who U2 is.

Also, Keith managed to forget his son’s birthday in the morning and then beat him in an immunity challenge show-down that afternoon. Way to father, Keith.

9. Wes

If it wasn’t his birthday, Wes would barely have gotten a mention. Maybe he should start sending gift baskets to the Survivor editors or something.

10 Alec

Oh no, with Julie gone, who will loud-mouth Alec have to trash-talk now?

11. Baylor

Baylor has only one alliance in the game – Josh – that she is going to betray.

Last week’s conclusion was interesting, in that after Probst announced Julie would be leaving the show, everyone believed they had suffered a set-back because of it. Jeremy was certain that Jon and Jaclyn would have stayed with them, Josh would have gone and the rest of the lickspittles would have up for Pagonging. Josh was 80% sure that Jon and Jaclyn would have flipped and that Jeremy would be going home, followed by the people that no one likes. But we have to wait until the next episode to find out who was actually correct.

Come back here to read Kim and David’s recap.