‘Survivor’ 45: Kaleb Reveals Why He Didn’t Tell Katurah About Bruce’s Idol Sooner
Q&A
The Tribe Has Spoken
For exclusive news and updates, subscribe to our Survivor Newsletter:
[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for Survivor Season 45 Episode 7.]
Kaleb Gebreworld made history in Survivor Season 45 Episode 6 when his Shot in the Dark canceled out the 11 votes against him, a first in the show’s history. Naturally, since everyone wanted him out in Episode 6, he was the obvious target in Episode 7. But he and Jake O’Kane hatched a smart plan to orchestrate a 3-3 vote split, which would send them to re-vote.
The risk of a re-vote is the threat of another tie, which would lead to the players drawing rocks to determine who gets eliminated (the player with the odd-colored rock gets cut). Jake and Kaleb were confident that Katurah Topps would go with their plan, which was to split the vote and bring Austin Li Coon to their side in a re-vote to send Julie Alley packing. But their offer of an alliance wasn’t enough to convince Katurah. She sided with the Reba trio — Dee Valladares, Austin, and Julie — and voted Kaleb out, making him the first member of the Survivor 45 jury.
Kaleb spoke with TV Insider following his elimination (Sifu Alsup was also sent home that night in the first of two Tribal Councils). And he’s still fantasizing about how impressive it would’ve been to make it out of his first Tribal post-Shot in the Dark unscathed. “Can you imagine if we had those two back-to-back Tribals? What it could have been?” he reflects. He also says he “blacked most of” that history-making Tribal out. “It was crazy. What a high.”
Survivor 45 cast reacts to Kaleb’s successful Shot in the Dark (Credit: Robert Voets/CBS)
Despite being offered a genuine alliance from Kaleb and Jake, Katurah voted for Kaleb because of broken trust. Kaleb was the first to tell her of Bruce Perreault’s — her nemesis — idol, found not even two days before their Episode 7 conversation. Trust was lost because he didn’t tell her sooner, nor did Jake. Dee, Julie, and Austin didn’t offer Katurah anything in exchange for a vote for Kaleb; there was just a consensus that he was the obvious, safest, and most-desired vote.
Here, Kaleb reveals why he didn’t tell Katurah about Bruce’s idol sooner and Julie’s involvement in that decision. Plus, why he was 100 percent sure Sifu never had an idol and what he thinks Katurah could do to capitalize on voting him out.
I was shocked by Katurah’s decision to vote you out. How do you feel about your elimination?
Kaleb Gebrewold: I’m OK, I’m good. I mean, we have six months to decompress this stuff, but just realizing how close we were, it’s an interesting position for Katurah to be in. It’s a tough position for her. And the question is strategically, did she make the right move or the wrong move? I guess it depends what type of game you play, right?
From where I’m sitting, she was getting offered a big bag of nothing from everybody else. You and Jake were the only people to offer her anything of substance, and no one else approached her for an alliance. Everyone just kind of expected that everyone would want to vote for you after the history-making Tribal.
I know she did talk to the Red tribe. It’s not like that that didn’t happen, but I would say that it’s interesting because she was concerned, yes, if I vote with you, I might be on the bottom of Belo. But what I was trying to tell her was, listen, I’ve been on the bottom this whole freaking game. I get it. We need each other. You don’t get to choose the hand that you’re dealt. This is the hand that we’re dealt. Emily was screaming my name for the first three days. [Now] I’ve got to ditch Emily? You pick up who you can pick up. We need each other and we can actually work together and take it all the way. I think that she just kind of figured that, you know what, maybe I’m not going to be the first target by Red, and let’s see how far I can make it and then make my next play from there. But my goal was to try and offer her some more agency potentially. And who knows, maybe she feels like she had a better bond over there.
If that’s how she feels, that’s not clear from the edit. Maybe there’s footage we haven’t seen yet about that. But what gets me in Survivor is when people are like, “I don’t know who I can trust.” To me, the answer is there if you’re analyzing things as a whole package. That’s what I thought made you a great strategist: evaluating every single player’s game. It’s also why people wanted you out. Is that your take on your overall strategy?
Yeah, I think so. It’s so funny. You have two stages of my game: the pre-merge game, which borderline half of it doesn’t even matter because none of the people even made it to the merge, and then the other half, which is kind of Lulu Legends in the merge. I just feel like one of my superpowers is connecting with people. I fall in love with everybody. It’s not like I look at Emily and I’m like, oh, she’s on the out. That’s the only reason I can work with her. It’s like I get Emily, I know I can play with somebody like Emily because I can speak to her in her language. Same with Katurah, same with Kendra [McQuarrie] by the end of the game. I know I can work with these people. And the more people that I worked with and got information from, the more of a clear picture I saw of how the game board was shaping, and that’s where it was so tough to try and shake people and get them to play in their best interest.
Like Bruce, for example, it’s this classic mistake in reality TV where you vote for the person who might be on our side out versus the people who definitely are not on our side. And if he thought I was in the might category, I just think it was shortsighted and I probably gave him a little bit too much credit as a returning player.
Kaleb gets eliminated in Survivor Season 45 Episode 7 and becomes first member of the jury (Credit: Robert Voets/CBS)
Bruce and Katurah seem to be playing emotional games, but not realizing it. Katurah hinted in Episode 7 that she feared she was making an emotional decision. Those aren’t always bad in Survivor, but I don’t think this was an emotional decision that served her best. If trust was broken for her between you, her, and Jake, I do understand why she would get to that conclusion. But you were offering to make amends.
The Red tribe, they had their alliances already. They would love to scoop her up, but they weren’t giving her the real enchilada like with myself. Part of my game at the end of the day is that if I’m working with somebody, I’m sharing information with them. And I think you can see throughout the game when I work with Emily, she’s at the bottom. I can’t tell her everything right away, but when I can, I do and I bring her in. She’s so logical, she understood why she didn’t know about Sabiyah [Broderick’s] idol right away, but when she understood that I did know and why I couldn’t tell her, she was on board with the fact that strategically it was still in our best interest to work together.
I was bringing in Kellie by telling her information and Jake by telling him information. I was trying to do the same thing with Katurah, which had worked in the past. But I do think it might’ve been a little reactive in terms of the gut check of wanting to dispel me as opposed to critically thinking, what does the path look like if we work together versus the path on the other side playing with Red where I may or may not be having as much control in the numbers.
Why did everyone think Sifu had an idol? Were there things that happened off-camera that viewers don’t know about?
I tell you this: There’s one thing I knew for a fact in this entire game, and that was that Sifu did not have an idol. If every single person is coming up to you being like, I think he might have an idol, he’s looking. If everyone’s saying that, they’re clearly pinning it on him. So, the one thing I knew for sure was that Sifu definitely didn’t have an idol. It’s how I felt about it in the game.
I was concerned that Julie had the idol, and honestly, part of the reason why I didn’t work on Katurah more was because I was worried that Julie would pick up on it. I thought Julie was just a gangster. She was so good, so genuine, connected with people and never gave up nothing. You give and give and give and she’d give you a smidgen of information. She was such a guarded but open [player], and it was just such a valuable skill. I was like, Julie is terrifying. I definitely wouldn’t put it past her to have an idol, but everyone was saying it from Reba. It was part of their strategy.
I think that four-person alliance’s plan [on Reba] was to talk about it. When I went on the raid, they were telling me, oh, watch out. Sifu was looking. He’s been looking a lot. Every single person, they’ve been throwing Sifu and J [Maya] under the bus since we met them. And that’s part of the reason why, I don’t know if other people picked up on it, but just knowing like, OK, they’ve been throwing these two people under the bus, they’ve never thrown each other under the bus. I don’t know if it’s a four-person alliance, but I definitely think there’s a, let’s not target each other right away kind of the vibe [between Dee and Julie]. And that was kind of the scary part about it being on a six-six split with three of them.
So to you, it was clear that at least Dee and Julie didn’t actually think that Sifu had an idol. They just wanted everybody to think that?
It’s funny because watching the show, I legitimately think they’re like, maybe there’s a 10 percent chance he has one. But as a fan, there’s one idol per beach and they knew where the idol was, so I always got confused by it. But on the show, I just always figured that Sifu never had the idol. That’s always how I felt and what made me so paranoid in my three-three split.
I’d love to get your strategic perspective on this. What do you think Katurah needs to do to capitalize on voting you out?
At this point, I think that she’s kind of giving up having agency in the game a little bit. She’s not going to have the relationships on Belo as closely, because I think I was a helpful part of her bridge, right? And she’s new to Reba. They hadn’t really spent as much time together. She was pitching for me to stay the whole time. They never listened to her in the Mergatory split.
What’s nice for her versus me is that she could probably lay low for a little bit. She could probably go anybody but me and fly under the radar. The question is, can she actually build the relationships then get the allies to be able to make a couple of big moves towards the end of the game, or the next half, to be able to be considered a threat enough to win? But at the same time, probably try not to peak too early. If she was going to be a threat sooner than later, she might as well have worked and tried to keep me.
Survivor, Wednesdays, 8/7c, CBS
Survivor where to stream
