Surviving Barstool Season 5 Episode 7: The Ring Of Fire
TLDR: The merge, and the biggest night of the season by a distance: nine players called into one ring, told to drop their buffs on the floor, and told the night would run three individual challenges and three eliminations back to back. Three men went to the jury in one sitting, the tribe that has run the game since the swap held together through all three, and the one move that would have broken it died in a ten-minute whisper.
Brandon Walker, Dana Beers, Marty Mush, Ohio's Tate, Pat McAuliffe, Nicky Smokes, Rone, Tommy Smokes and Glenny Balls walked their torches in as two tribes and left the opening as one, Viva. The format is the part that mattered: three challenges, three councils, and no scrambling off in pairs between them. Deliberation happens inside the ring on a ten-minute clock, in front of the person being discussed — "we're all whispering," as one player put it, "talking about you, voting you out of this game right in front of your face."
The first challenge was a shuffleboard game where a puck landing anywhere the majority did not cost you a life, and it came down to Dana Beers and Tate in sudden death. Dana won it and the first individual immunity necklace of the season with it, which took the one man everybody had a reason to write off the board before a single name was said.
Every conversation on that ten-minute clock ended on Tate's name, and Tate could hear it happening: the show subtitles him catching Marty Mush saying it to Brandon Walker, and Dana talking him back down — "no he didn't, he said Pat." Pat got the other half of the same performance. He had been told he was going, he asked, and Dana answered "you're not going out. Swear to God." Minutes later Tate asked Dana the same question the other way round — "and you're going to vote Pat?" — and got "promise."
Both of those were true to exactly one man. Pat had been named in the ring as one of the two players doing the least, and the bloc that never said his name out loud wrote it. He went to the jury saying he had decided before the season to trust everybody on purpose, and that it came back and got him. Jeff read four Pat cards and three Tate and stopped with two ballots still folded; the third Pat card is written PATRICK, in a hand nobody else at that council used.
The first vote of the merge, and the one the room lied about to its own face. Every conversation inside the ring ended on Tate — Pat left it certain of that and said so on the way to the jury — while a bloc that never said his name out loud wrote Pat's instead. He had been named in the ring as one of the two players doing the least, and he had spent the afternoon taking Dana Beers at his word: "I promise. I promise. I promise." His own read on it afterwards was that he had decided before the season to trust everybody on purpose, and that it came back and got him.
The second challenge, a bag toss called In the Bag, carried a kill shot: land the top ring and you can knock a player clean out of the game's immunity race. Rone hit it repeatedly and used it on Tate, then won the immunity himself by default — and turned down the chance, offered on the spot, to hand the necklace to somebody else.
Tate spent the hour that followed doing the best work of his season. He counted a five onto Brandon Walker out loud to Dana — himself, Glenny, Nicky Smokes, Dana and one more — and asked him to spend his idol on it if it came to that. Dana said no. The second card Jeff pulled at that council is not a name but a sentence, "fuck you Brandon", and Nicky Smokes claimed it from his seat before the host had finished reading it. It was not enough. Tate left on the one promise he did keep: "I said it from the beginning, I'll never write Dana Beers's name down on that paper."
The obvious name once Pat was gone, and he nearly moved it anyway. Rone hit the kill shot in the bag-toss challenge and used it to knock him out of contention for immunity, so he spent the hour before the vote selling Dana Beers a five — himself, Glenny, Nicky Smokes, Dana and one more — onto Brandon Walker, and asking him to spend the idol if it came to that. Dana heard him out, said no, and Tate went to the jury on the promise he did keep: "I said it from the beginning, I'll never write Dana Beers's name down on that paper."
Going into the last vote there were seven left and one obvious problem: Dana, Marty and Glenny have moved as three since the swap, two of them are carrying idols, and nobody outside that three has been able to do anything about it. Rone built the answer before the final challenge — himself, Nicky Smokes, Tommy Smokes and Brandon Walker writing Dana, flushing the idol and breaking the bloc in one night — and called it what it was in confessional, a resume-winning move.
Tommy Smokes then won that final challenge, Drop Your Bluff, and the top-six seat that came with it. What he did next is the episode: with the whole ring watching, he leaned into Dana's ear during the vote itself and told him — the show subtitles it — that his name had been thrown out by Nicky and Brandon, and that he should play his idol and write Brandon.
Dana went to the booth last, sat with his head in his hands, and played nothing. The vote came back 4-3 on Nicky Smokes — the only council of the three whose count Jeff read out whole, three each with one ballot left and the last card deciding it. Nicky and Brandon had written each other, which the majority had worked out in the ring beforehand and decided did not matter.
What did matter is that Dana took nothing at a vote he had spent the evening being told was about him, and he worked out what the whisper had actually been for: "you wanted to flush my idol, Tommy, because you think I was dumb." Tommy laid out his own thinking the next morning in four points — ten years of friendship, a suspicion that the move was Rone's resume rather than his own, ten minutes of whispers he could not confirm, and the part that names his ballot: in his ideal world Dana plays the idol and Brandon Walker goes home. Neither happened.
The last vote of the Ring of Fire came down to him or Brandon Walker, and the move that would have saved him died at the table. Rone had built it before the challenge — Rone, Tommy, Brandon and Nicky writing Dana Beers, taking out the idol and the bloc in one night — and could not get it cast; Tommy spent the vote itself telling Dana to play that idol on somebody else. Nicky went to the jury naming the man who built it: "she told me you cannot trust Rone."
Nicky Smokes went to the jury blaming the man who built the plan rather than the man who wrote his name, both on camera — "she told me you cannot trust Rone" — and again on his own account afterwards, where the target is Tommy: the player he had most wanted to play with backed out of the blindside over somebody else's resume. Rone's version is shorter and does not argue with it: he was ready, the numbers were not there, he aborted.
So the three who have run this season since the swap are all still in it, with two idols between them and a jury of six that now contains three men they wrote out in one night. Marty Mush's own summary of the evening was that it is funny anyone is angry they stuck together, since nobody managed to stop them before this episode either.