The season finale of Survivor: Kaoh Rong airs tonight on CBS. Read a live recap and join the discussion here.
Tonight is the season finale of Survivor: Koah Rong. Aubrey, Cydney, Michele, and Tai are the Final Four. Who will make it to the Final Tribal Council and win the title of Sole Survivor and the $1 million prize? Let’s find out!
The episode begins with Jeff welcoming us from the live studio before we see a recap of the season. Highlights include the several medical evacuations and unpredictable tribal councils that led to several blindsides. Jeff calls it the hardest season of Survivor. We also hear Jeff discuss the merits of the final four. Michele’s greatest strength is her loyalty. Aubry refuses to give up after losing her closest allies Neal and Joe. Cydney orchestrated numerous blindsides, but will have to navigate multiple alliances to avoid being blindsided herself. Tai spent most of the game in a power position, but is now vulnerable after no longer having his hidden immunity idol or advantage. Which of these four will win the game?
Mark starts crowing at dawn, which annoys the tribe. Tai takes Mark to the beach and is worried about his chances now that he no longer has his hidden immunity idol or advantage. Later in the day he talks to Aubry. They want to go to the end with Cydney and hope they can make it happen. Meanwhile, Michele and Cydney talk. Michele thinks if Tai wins immunity, then she is screwed. In her confessional, Cydney says she is confident that everyone wants to take her to the Final 3. Michele and Cydney say they want it to be an all-female final 3. However, Michele admits that anything can happen.
It’s time for the reward challenge. They must race under a net crawl and then slide tiles across a table and through a target. They then must hold the tiles on a machete and walk across a balance beam to transport the tiles to a table. Once they have all the tiles on the table they must sort the tiles into pairs, but three won’t match. The three tiles that don’t match will have the numbers that will be the key to a combination to unlock the contraption that will raise a flag. The first to raise his or her flag will win reward. The challenge begins, and Cydney takes an early lead with Aubry right behind. However, everyone keeps dropping their tiles while walking across the balance beam except for Aubry. Aubry has a big lead, but she makes a mistake sorting her tiles. Two tiles she paired together don’t match, so she keeps trying the wrong number combination. Her mistake gives Cydney and Tai a chance to catch up and win as they try a number combination. However, Aubry realizes her mistake and finally fixes it. Cydney and Tai were wrong, but Aubry is right and she raises her flag. Aubry wins reward! Jeff tells her she can bring one person along to the reward (a meal), and she chooses Cydney. In her confessional, she says that she brought Cydney in order to be strong enough to go against Michele in the last immunity challenge. She wants Michele gone next.
While Aubry and Cydney are enjoying reward, Tai and Michele talk strategy back at camp. Michele tells Tai that they are on the outs. Michele tells him that they should consider teaming up and voting out Aubry. Tai is torn. He says in his confessional that he wants to stay true to his alliance with Aubry, but he will do whatever it takes to win the $1 million.
It’s time for the immunity challenge. They will race out into the ocean to collect keys. They will then unlock stairs and retrieve a key. They then will have to go back into the ocean to unlock a bag of balls that will be used to drop a ladder. They then will have to go back to the ocean for a third key and retrieve their bag of puzzle pieces. They will then race back up the obstacle course to a puzzle station. The first to solve his or her puzzle will win immunity. The challenge begins and Aubry takes the lead with Tai right behind her. They all do well collecting the keys, and all four castaways start working on the puzzle. Aubry had the lead, but Tai and Michele overtake her as they have better success building the puzzle. Cydney is stumped and out of the challenge. Tai keeps getting closer to winning immunity, but Michele is right on his tail. Tai is close to solving the puzzle, but Michele’s momentum keeps building and she overtakes Tai. Michele solves the puzzle. Michele wins immunity!
The tribe returns to camp, and Michele feels like she is in a power position. She will be sad to see any of the three of them go, but she is determined to make the correct choice that will help her win the game. Meanwhile, Aubry and Tai talk about how Michele winning was the worst case scenario. Aubry tries to sway Tai into voting out Cydney, but the turn talks to a tiebreaker challenge. Aubry is worried that Tai will turn on her.
Michele and Cydney talk, and they both confirm they are each other’s closest allies. Cydney tells Michele she will vote out whomever Michele wants to see go. Michele wants Aubry gone, and she hopes she can sway Tai to their side. Cydney asks Michele if she should practice making fire for a tiebreaker challenge. Michele doesn’t think she needs to. Later Michele talks to Tai, and she candidly tells him that she is voting out Aubry tonight. Tai is now torn. He says that an alliance will have to break at some point, but he’ll feel bad turning against Aubry. Before tribal council, Aubry says in a confessional that Tai has been acting shady. She says she will not go down without a fight.
It’s time for tribal council. Jeff asks how the vibe is around camp, and Tai says it’s now an individual game. He says alliances are no more. Jeff asks Aubry about how the jury will vote, and she says whomever is voted out tonight will have a lot of information that could sway the jury. Jeff asks Cydney about who to sit with at Final 3, and Cydney says they have to be aware of who the biggest threats are. Cydney says her vote will come down to what is best for her game. Tai agrees and reiterates that it’s an individual game. Jeff asks Michele how she feels, and she says she is nervous. She wants to make sure she makes the wisest decision.
It’s time for the vote. The first vote is for…
Aubry
Cydney
Aubry
Cydney
It’s a tie. After Michele and Tai say they are locked in and won’t revote, Jeff says they will go to a fire-making tiebreaker challenge.
Aubry and Cydney both have a fire-making challenge. The first to build a fire that will burn through the rope will win and remain in the game. Aubry is the first to have fire, but Cydney is not giving up. She tries to nurture a flame, but is unsuccessful as Aubry’s fire keeps building. Her fire starts getting high enough to reach the rope. However, her fire gets much smaller after she tries to make it switch direction. The fire burns the base and Aubry loses her fire. However, Aubry gets her fire back and it burns through the rope. Cydney is the eighth member of the jury. Before she gets her torch snuffed, Cydney tearfully tells Jeff how she was just trying to change her and her mother’s life, and is disappointed she did not make it to the end.
We return to the live studio, and Jeff talks to Cydney’s mother. She is also crying, but says she is proud of her daughter. Before we go into the next commercial break, Jeff says he hopes to see Cydney play the game again.
Aubry, Michele, and Tai return to camp. After talk of the tiebreaker challenge, Michele tells Tai that he just handed Aubry $1 million. However, Tai wonders if it might be a Final 2 since Jeff never congratulated them for making it to the end and how now the jury has all the power. His suspicions that something is up are confirmed the following morning. They get tree mail informing them they have one more challenge left. However, when they greet Jeff at the challenge, he tells them that they will not be playing for immunity. They are the Final 3. However, the winner of this challenge will get to vote out one member of the jury.
The challenge begins. They will have to stack balls on a stand. The first to stack all of his or her balls will win. Michele takes the lead, but it’s very close with Tai and Aubry not far behind. However, Michele drops her balls and Tai is now in the lead. Aubry and Tai drops their balls too, and Michele regains the lead as she is doing a good job stacking her balls. It soon becomes a much closer challenge as it’s neck and neck between Michele and Aubry. While stacking the very last ball, Aubry drops everything and Michele places her last ball on the stack. Michele wins the power to vote out a jury member!
Aubry, Michele, and Tai return to camp and celebrate being the Final 3. Michele says she has not decided what she will do yet. Michele and Tai talk about whom should be voted out. Michele considers taking out Joe since he definitely will vote Aubry to win. However, Tai says that Neal is very influential and could sway the jury. Michele then talks Aubry about her decision. She tells her that she’s considering voting out Joe or Neal, which doesn’t make Aubry happy. Aubry says that maybe Tai has more votes than he’s letting on, and she brings up the idea of voting out Scot. Aubry wants to plant the seeds to vote out Scot and keep Joe and Neal on the jury. Michele is torn what to do, and she wants to make sure she makes the right choice.
It’s time for tribal council. Michele reveals to the jury that she has won the power to vote out a jury member, which causes a big reaction from the jury. Julia whispers to Debbie that she believes it will be Joe who gets voted out. Jeff asks how it was back at camp, and Michele says she was bouncing off ideas with Aubry and Tai. Jeff asks how could she trust anything they say, and she says it was interesting to see them protect certain people. Aubry says that there are different layers to how this vote could be played, but Jeff says it should be a simple decision. Michele says that it could be wiser to vote out the most influential jury member. Over on the jury, Jason says he believes that could be him, and Scot agrees. Michele says she gathered as much information as possible, and she will vote out the person who she believes is the most influential and was never going to vote for her anyway. Afterwards, Jeff tells her to go vote.
Jeff reads the vote. Michele voted for…
Neal
Neal has been voted out of the jury. On his way out, Neal tells Michele she’s just someone suckling at the teet and that she has no chance of winning. Jeff tells Michele she may have made the right decision, and Michele agrees. In his confessional, Neal says that he would have been a big advocate for Aubry and that Michele’s only move was voting him out.
Aubry, Michele, and Tai return to camp. They talk about how Neal bashed Michele on his way out, and she’s certain she made the right choice. They are all now even more worried about Final Tribal Council and how a lot more jury members will have harsh things to say to them too.
On the morning of Day 39, Michele reads tree mail that there is one more surprise for them at the end of a path. It turns out to be a mirror and a scale. In her confessional, Michele says she plans to tell the jury that she did not make it to the end of the game on luck. She fought and won immunity when she needed to. She wants to prove she was a strategic force who made moves in the game. While they eat a nice breakfast, we hear a confessional from Tai. He admits that if he doesn’t answer the jury’s questions correctly, he won’t win the game. He says his biggest move was blindsiding Scot and it changed the course for the rest of the game. However, he is worried whether Scot will respect that move or not. We then hear from Aubry. She says that the game has shook her out of her anxiety and is was okay for people to see her as a threat. She says she doesn’t want to get too confident since her game has been all over the place. She says her game wasn’t the flashiest, but she was the person working behind the curtain making things happen.
It’s time for Final Tribal Council. As Aubry, Michele, and Tai sit down, we see that Tai brought Mark along with him. The first question goes to Nick.
Nick simply gives advice. He warns them that there is a lot of animosity. He tells them to take advantage of the questions asked to them. He tells Michele to display intelligence. He tells Tai to display awareness. He tells Aubry to display confidence.
Debbie says she’s proud of the Final 3. She asks Tai about his flipping. She asks if he has various personalities to explain his erratic game play. Tai says he was loyal, but only flipped once. He wasn’t back and forth. He says taking out Scot was a big move. Debbie tells Aubry is was nice to see her evolution throughout the game. She says she helped keep Aubry in the game, but did she do the same for her. Aubry says she did at first. However, they were headed in different directions and she had to let her go.
Julia tells Michele was lucky to have made it as far as she did since Beauty never made it to Tribal Council in the early part of the game. She says was it enough that she voted out Julia for her to win the game. Michele says her decisions were well thought out and she had to overcome a stereotype of people thinking she was not smart for being on the Beauty tribe. Julia says Tai was strong in the beginning, but his game deteriorated. Should he win for a first good half. Tai says yes and she should vote for him.
Joe asks Tai about his game. Tai says that he was someone who found an idol, and he was the one who made a move to vote out Scot. Joe asks Aubry why she should get the votes. Aubry says that Tai got her in the information, but she was the one that actually did anything with that information. She was on the right side of the vote more often than Tai was.
Jason says it’s truth time – he doesn’t know who he is voting for. He asks how Michele put herself into the alliance after the Scot vote. Michele explains that she was willing to vote out Julia to strengthen the alliance. She worked her way in. He asks Tai the real reason why he left him and Scot. He says he was scared of how tight Jason and Scot’s relationship was.
Cydney asks Aubry was she always the target. She tells them that they were targeting Michele, but she won immunity. Aubry asks if Michele knew they were voting out Cydney. Michele says not, but she never would have turned against Cydney. Michele says she wanted to be in the end with Cydney.
Scot tells Tai he heard enough. Tai had an idol but didn’t use it. He wasted his advantage too. He tells Aubry she started off well, but asks why should he vote for her. Aubry says a competitor should respect her game. She played the game with her strengths. Scot tells Michele that she out-toughed the other two. She got stronger as the game went along.
Jeff gives the Final 3 one last chance to say something. Aubry says that her game evolved. She managed a lot of personalities and did win an individual challenge and the tiebreaker challenge. She said she played her heart out, and she outwitted, outplayed, and outlasted. Tai says that he believes in kindness, and he recites a Vietnamese proverb about how we are all water plants, but the wind and water breaks us apart. He uses that as a metaphor for the game. Michele says that she had to keep her cool and she had to fight her way through a lot of roadblocks. She tearfully says that she trusted in herself and she’s proud of herself after how so many people doubted her throughout the game.
It’s time for the final vote. The jury cast their votes. We see Julia vote for Michele and Joe vote for Aubry. After the jury cast their votes, Tai says goodbye to Mark since he won’t be able to bring him back to the U.S.
It’s now time for the reading of the votes.
Michele
Aubry
Aubry
Michele
Michele
Michele
Michele Fitzgerald wins Survivor: Kaoh Rong!
It’s now time for the live reunion show!
Jeff asks about Michele about her game, and she said she played a social game. She got to know people on a personal level and became friends with them. She also admits to playing in the middle with Nick, Julia, and Cydney. She says the key is knowing when to hop alliances and feel where the shift is going. Jeff brings up the fact the jury saw her as an underdog, and Michele agrees. She said she had to prove herself after starting on the Beauty tribe.
Jeff says a great part of Survivor is watching someone grow, and he says Aubry grew throughout the game too. Aubry admits that it was overwhelming at first and is why she broke down crying on Day 1. Jeff asks her if she felt she evolved throughout the game, and Aubry says she did and compares herself to John Cochran. Aubry says Survivor was the best experience of her life and she’s super grateful.
The discussion turns to Tai. Jeff says that Tai is one of the most unique castaways and captured the hearts of America. He asks Tai how does it feel to be so adored, and Tai says he gets a lot of people coming up to him in his every day life. He says he just wanted to be himself on the show. While Tai is talking, someone heckles from the audience. It turns out it is Sia! She is brought up on the stage. She was such a fan of Tai and respected how much Tai loves animals. Sia says she will give $50,000 to Tai and then $50,000 to the animal charity of Tai’s choice! Afterwards, Drew Carey plugs The Prince is Right special with players from Survivor, Big Brother, and The Amazing Race.
There’s now talk of the medical evacuations. Jeff talks to Caleb, and asks him what he remembers from that moment he was evacuated. Caleb said he only remembered winning the challenge and then feeling he needed shade. He vaguely remembers Jeff looking down at him, but the only thing he remembers next is waking up in a helicopter. Jeff asks if it was emotional for his family, and he says it was tough for his family to watch that and that his mother cried watching his evacuation. Jeff then goes into the audience to talk to Dr. Joe. He tells him to explain how scary that day was, and he said Caleb’s situation was the most worried they were for a castaway. He says they only help out the castaways when it there is a risk for someone’s long term health. They have to deal with cuts and scrapes themselves, but only where it’s a dire situation when the medics have to step in.
Jeff talks to Tai about his decision to turn against Scot and Jason and refuse to give Scot his idol to form the super-idol. He says he did not make the decision at tribal council and made the choice the night before. Jeff asks Jason why give his idol to Scot, and he said he wanted to make Scot feel secure. Scot also admits that Tai lost his vote at that moment. Jeff talks to Debbie next. He says people saw Debbie as a nut, and Debbie jokes that “sanity is overrated.” She agree that she’s eccentric before listing all her different occupations. Jeff then talks to Joe about “getting it done at 71” and gives him kudos for doing well in the game. He talks to Julia (the youngest castaway ) and she says that she was able to empower herself throughout her time on the show. Jeff then brings up Mark the chicken, and says that he was named after Survivor producer Mark Burnett. Jeff is also astounded that Tai was able to convince people on Survivor to not eat a chicken.
Jeff teases the next season, which will take place in Fiji. There will be 20 new castaways and the theme is Millennials versus Generation X.
And that wraps up the finale of Survivor: Koah Rong. Thanks for reading, post your thoughts of the finale in the comment section below, and come back in the fall for an all new season of Survivor!
