Top Ten Blindsides

Who doesn’t love a good blindside on Survivor? Well, maybe you don’t like it if a person you like was voted out because of it. But there were tons of great blindsides throughout the course of Survivor history, so I might as well mention what I think the ten best ones are.

Rules: 1- Only one blindside per season. 2- Only contestants getting voted out counts as a blindside. 3- The same person can’t be on the list more than once, should they have been blindsided more than once either during the same season or during multiple seasons.

Honorable mentions: Silas’s elimination in Africa was pretty fun, even if it was expected. Richard in All-Stars had a totally unexpected elimination to me and I enjoyed it. But it wasn’t good enough in my mind to make the main list. The eliminations of Leann in Vanuatu and Erik in Samoa started making the rest of the game as good and interesting as it was. There are other random blindsides that I had here and now in my ideas list, but I don’t think that they are even good enough to mention here.

#10 Stacey in Borneo: This was probably not the most notable blindside of the first season, but am I including it for being the very first blindside of the show. Poor Stacey had no idea what was coming that she was convinced that production got the contestants to vote her out instead of realizing like those who came after her that maybe she didn’t know coming into tribal council what would happen.

#9 Rupert in Pearl Islands: While it was telegraphed on the wall due to the scene where the snack spent a long time eating its prey, it was still a notable blindside. I like Rupert and hated to see him go, but this is what one can expect from a great show like Survivor.

#8 Jeff Varner in Australia: It was a strategic vote that the poor Kucha tribe just didn’t know was coming. They all picked the wrong target and due to the deadlock vote because no one switched from either tribe, poor Jeff was voted out, blindsided by the other tribe.

#7 James in China: How do you have not one, but two hidden immunity idols and get voted out? Poor James will probably never live down the humiliation that he suffered by being blindsided. He was just too overconfident and was voted out as a result.

#6 John in Marquesas: This is here do to it being a power shift that happened as a result of the vote. Maybe others like it should have made the top ten, but I feel that the first true change of power was worthy of being on the list.

#5 Erik in Micronesia: He will forever get grief at the fact that he gave up immunity. That is why his vote out wasn’t a surprise to anyone. But he was still blindsided after making one of the dumbest moves of all time. He might have actually won otherwise.

#4 Katie in Blood versus Water: Maybe this doesn’t belong on the list due to the tie-breaker method and the fact that she didn’t really get voted out or even was the target by either side. But I still think that it is worth mentioning her because we had no idea what would happen or who would get eliminated that night as a result of what went on.

#3 Bill in One World: He didn’t see his elimination coming. Otherwise, he would have had the sense to not agree to his tribe’s plan to give up immunity. I don’t even know if other people would agree to this choice being on their lists, but it would be on mine and that’s all that matters now anyways.

#2 Phillip in Caramoan: You can talk all the smack about Survivor that you want to over how strange it was that a second idol just randomly entered the game. But I really just loved to watch the tribal council where all this drama was going down and Phillip became the victim of an insane vote out.

#1 JT in Heroes versus Villains: Maybe the scales were accidently tipped to the villains in the lead up to what had happened. But JT became the victim of a double idol play by the villains and it was his own idol that helped do it to. It was a fun blindside to watch.

Well, that is all for this post. I’ll be back next week when Survivor starts with my thoughts on the season premiere of Heroes versus Healers versus Hustlers. I’ll also need to start working on more of these random posts for the future so that I’m not getting them done the day before I am doing them. I just have not been on top of things like I should be, but you don’t even know as I haven’t missed a post. I had warned you at the end that I could so I will explain more about that in the next post or should, if I care enough. For now, this is Adam Decker, signing off.