'Survivor' 46, the Curse of the Hidden Immunity Idol, and What It Means for the Future

By Dustin Rowles | TV | May 17, 2024 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | May 17, 2024 |

It’s been a wild season of Survivor full of messy players, messy behind-the-scenes social media activity, and messy gameplay. But it’s also been a remarkable season for the last month because of four consecutive brutal blindsides in which the eliminated player went home with an immunity idol (it’s happened four weeks in a row and five out of the last six).

This is unprecedented, and I don’t know what it says about the players this season, but I do know what it will mean for future seasons: Immunity idols will be short-lived.

It used to be that having a hidden immunity idol conferred a lot of power on a player — players could remain in the game for weeks based on the threat of using an idol. Later, however, players perfected the art of splitting votes — putting votes on a person with the idol and someone else so that the other person would go home if the idol holder played their idol. That would evolve again into a strategy by players to try to keep knowledge of their idol a secret because having an idol basically puts a target on a player’s back.

What’s interesting is that, in this season, several players have not practiced what they have often preached: Just play the idol ASAP because while it might go wasted, it will not only guarantee the player will survive to play another day, but it also removes the target from their back. It’s a win-win.

And yet, time and time again, players this season have greedily hung on to their idols believing that they could make it to one more tribal council without needing to use it. But every time a player has gotten an idol, they have been voted out. Not only have five players been voted out with an idol this season, but no one has correctly played an idol.

The idol has proven to be not only useless but borderline detrimental. Maybe that is specific to this season of players, who are among the worst strategists in Survivor history. It’s hard to say exactly why each player so naively trusts everyone else enough not to play the idol, but my theory is this: Brutal blindsides bring players together. It’s like Boyd said to Raylan: “We dug coal together.” These players may not always like each other, but they bonded over ousting someone else. They bonded so hard that they were blinded to the possibility that they could be next.

Think of it like this: If seven players bond together to blindside an eighth player, it doesn’t even enter the mind of the seventh player that the other six could turn on them. That naivete came to a head this week when Charlie and Maria — who had been close allies for basically the entire game — turned on each other simultaneously. Maria tried to get four players to join her and vote out Charlie, while Charlie tried to get three players to join him and vote out Maria’s other ally, Q.

At no point did either Maria or Charlie believe that the other would turn on them. Both felt guilty the entire time for being the first to turn against the other. It never properly registered to either one of them that the other would betray them. Why? Because all of these players believe that they are so well-liked that no one would betray them, or that no one would turn on them because they are in control of the game.

No one is that well-liked, and no one is in that much control of the game. No one in charge of the vote, really, has checked their egos. I’m still fuming about Hunter going home with an idol because they told him he didn’t need to use it, which is the first warning sign that you absolutely need to use it. If you needed to use it, they wouldn’t tell you that! DAMNIT HUNTER.

The season really does, however, diminish the power of the hidden immunity idol moving forward, and I think that ultimately is a good thing. It should be treated like a regular immunity idol, in that it should only be used in the first tribal council possible. It will not only mean more idol-hunting but also that at nearly every tribal council after the merge, players will have to plan around both the regular immunity idol and the hidden one, which means there will be a number of times when idol-holders will be able to turn the vote around on someone else and bounce the blindsides around. It’s another wrinkle that could invariably make the game even more intense and exciting.