Survivor 41: Evvie Jagoda Spills Some Survivor Secrets

“Well, first of all, the reality is I was much more like 50-50,” Evvie said of her certainty that the plan was going to work, “but you never want the people you’re working with to think you’re nervous about the plan, because you don’t want them to get nervous about the plan. So I bumped it up to a cool 75, but really, especially with Deshawn, that relationship had been building and had such an interesting arc over the whole show. You saw us go on our journey together early in the game, and we really, really bonded. And when we got to the merge, we really did want to work together. And I think you saw it in that episode, that even though we came for each other, we were both saying, ‘Ugh, I didn’t want it to go down this way. I did really want to work with this person.’

“So I thought it made sense, but obviously Danny was much less into that idea. You can see when Deshawn asked him, ‘What are we doing, Danny?; He’s like, ‘What do you mean? We’re obviously getting Evvie.’ So I think we were just playing antithetical games. So it makes sense that he didn’t go with me. I think the other thing is that I felt pretty good about Deshaun, and Xander felt like he had a good relationship with Danny, but like we’ve seen now between what happened in this episode and what happened at the merge vote, I think Xander always thought that relationship was a bit more two-way than it was. Danny was happy to receive information from Xander and push him where he wanted to go. When Danny said to Xander, ‘I’ll do whatever you want to do’? No, he wasn’t going to do whatever Xander wanted to do.”

And so why didn’t Xander use his idol?

“So you saw Liana floated [the idea of] giving her the idol, and Xander told me about that, which was crazy — like, what an insane ask,” Evvie says. “But when it came to Xander playing an advantage for me, I felt like Charlie Brown and the football. Like, he had been saying since Yase, ‘Oh, I’ll play an advantage for you. If it comes to a swap, I’ll give you the extra vote.’ And then it would come time for what we thought might be a swap, and I’d be like, ‘Xander, are you going to give me the extra vote? I’ll give it back to you if there’s no swap.’ And then he was like, ‘No, I’ll give you the fake idol.’ And then when it came to the merge and I needed that idol the most and we were most in lock step executing this excellent plan together, he didn’t play the idol for me and I almost went home. So, to me, the idea that Xander was ever going to play the idol for me was kind of like… I wasn’t going to put my cards in that. So I was really trying to make a different plan happen.”