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Previously on Survivor, a man somehow accomplished the feat of getting his daughter voted out one week and then strategized himself out of the competition the next week. In fairness to Dale, he did formulate a clever plan to pass off a fake idol to a different competitor after last week’s vote. He simply had the misfortune of the future sucker being persuaded out of that tactic by his girlfriend, the former Miss Michigan. Jon, your girl Jaclyn has beauty and brains. She just saved you from being made quite the fool on national television. You'd better marry that girl.

The other issue that burned Dale was entirely beyond his control. The game of Survivor involves players attempting to vote one another out of the competition. Early on, Baylor tried to orchestrate Dale’s removal, and so he reciprocated in kind against her. Baylor’s none-too-bright mother, Missy, took this as an unforgivable transgression against her family.

While the mother/daughter tandem did not technically vote against Dale last week, there is no refuting the fact that they orchestrated his demise. And they did it for truly moronic reasons. Look, Survivor has had its fair share of less than intelligent players over the years (we’re looking at you, Shambo and Scoutmaster Lill). Still, if Missy were playing a game of checkers against a chicken at the county fair, we would put our money on the bird. We do give her credit for being a ferocious mother, though.

Due to their decision to join with Missy and Baylor, Jon and Jaclyn seem well positioned to go far in Survivor, but with such fickle, gullible allies, they could face a brutal reversal of fortune. The fact that this week will see a tribal merge creates further intrigue, as we learned last week that there is a women’s alliance across Coyopa and Hunahpu. Similarly, Keith has been hanging on until he is reunited with his son, Wes.

By our count, there are seven men and five women, and the women are more tightly aligned. If the men are not unified heading into the vote this week, one of them will get blindsided. We don’t expect that to happen, but an irritating player such as Jeremy or Alec or a perceived threat such as Josh or Jon could lose a numbers game that they think they control. Hopefully, the remaining twin, Natalie, is the pick this week. Then again, we’ve been saying that for several episodes now. Annoyingly, she has a fairly tight core guarding her back.

The episode begins with Missy once again demonstrating how not to play Survivor. We are not joking when we say that she starts the following morning with a confession to Keith that mother and daughter voted against him. In the immortal words of Lionel Hutz, “there's the truth, and there's THE TRUTH.” There is simply no rational explanation for telling an opponent that you voted for them. It’s the entire reason why the voting is done blind rather than in front of the tribe.

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