Survivor 49's [Spoiler] Talks Getting Gamed By Savannah, An Unseen Alliance That Didn't Make The Edit

The following contains spoilers from Wednesday's episode of Survivor 49!

Fighting back and surviving against a majority after a tribe swap will forever be one of the hardest hands dealt in the game of "Survivor," and unfortunately for Jason, not even Savannah's strange and absurd dislike for Jawan could've granted him another couple of days on the beach.

After the new Hina tribe lost the immunity challenge again, Jason found himself facing a vote against a pack of original Uli members, plus Kele's Sophi, who, someway, somehow had worked her way into Savannah, Nate, Rizo and Jawan's good graces. Despite his expert-level puzzle skills and Savannah's very extreme feelings about Jawan (poor Jawan!), Jason didn't use his Shot in the Dark and was promptly voted off the island. (Read our full recap here.)

So why didn't he use that sole lifeline hiding in his pocket, and what major alliance did he have that wasn't properly shown in the edit? TVLine asks him about all of this and more.

TVLINE | For starters, tell me a bit about your journey from alternate to cast member. What was that whiplash like for you?
JASON TREUL | Dude, yes, it's crazy because I entered as the alternate with the "fake it till you make it" kind of mentality where I'm all like, "OK, just treat yourself like you're on the show, and then when you get the devastating news that you're not, that's when we will deal with the emotional fallout." That was advice that my fiancé gave me. It's just, "Pretend that you're on and then we can cry when we get home." So I was sort of at that crying moment at the time I get told I'm on because it's the last day. I faked it for so long, but it's nothing, right? So I made that dip back into pensiveness like, "OK, well, this is a really cool experience." I had a lot of finality to it. And then immediately [it's] like, "Oh, you're actually back on the show," so my heart rate is going insane, dude. Like I said in the first episode, my brain just accelerated all the time. It felt like I was told I was on the show, I went to bed and I'm on the boat, like, boom, boom, boom. Obviously, I didn't sleep that night, but my mind was racing. Whiplash is the best word, but I wish there was a more extreme word that you could use to also describe what I [was] feeling.

TVLINE | Was your elimination a surprise or were you pretty clear on where people were voting? Dude, as much as I wish I could tell you that it was very clear to me, clearly this shows how little of a grasp I have on the social game of "Survivor." I was a little blindsided. Something that you actually don't see in the episode, Savannah is working me all day, saying like, "Oh yeah, we should make sure that we have a Hina connection and an Uli connection, and when we meet up at the merge, we can do X, Y or Z. Jason, you're so important. You're such a special little boy. We just need to make sure that you vote with us so [we] know your loyalty." And I'm all like, cool, great, no one's telling me anything. I'm so down. Savannah's so nice and she's ready to talk. 

This should be a "Survivor" advantage, for me to be able to watch other people's confessionals, because if I saw any of what she was saying behind my back, like, dude, I am playing my Shot. Maybe it's the starvation, but I'm like, "She's pretty convincing!" I was convinced that she was on my side, that she was scared and in a position where she was making a risky play and I was facilitating that. So I think that had she not put in the work, the writing was on the wall, but she kind of gave me that rope to be like, "Jason, I can save you," and I just hung myself with it, bro.

TVLINE | Besides the Savannah of it all, any other reasons why you didn't play your Shot in the Dark?
In "Survivor," you don't have very much information to go off of, especially when you're somebody on the outs where no one can vouch for me. I'm the only [original Hina] guy left. What's the only way I can convince these people that I'm not a dirty rat or whatever the heck they think that we are. Your vote is your power, you know what I mean? And I think that I wanted to signal to them that, "Hey, I'm somebody who's willing to vote for you." And that's going back to the Matt vote, right? What you don't see is the second half of the conversation where I turn around and I say, "Hey, I understand that you all don't need my vote tonight, but I will vote with you anyways," just as a show of vulnerability to say and signal like, "I'm actually down to vote with you guys in this game. I never voted with Hina. I'm voting with you. Let's move through this game together." So I think that it's not necessarily like, "My vote was needed for X, Y or Z." It totally wasn't, but when you play your Shot in the Dark, you lose that opportunity to show loyalty, and in a game where I'm already kind of very untrusted by everyone, I felt like that was something that I wanted to show them. Clearly, I was drinking a lot of my own Kool-Aid because it's all like, "Hey dude, let's roll, let's get to the merge," and then [it was] like "Screw you, see you later." But I picked my lane and it was my own downfall.

TVLINE | Let's play a little "Survivor" hypothetical. Had a tribe swap never happened and the original Hina went to Tribal Council, how do you think that would have shaken out?
I actually felt really good at my spot on the old Hina beach, which is interesting because if you were to take the show at face value, I am the guy that lives in the puzzle dungeon, and they take me out for challenges, I win and I go back. And I'll tell you this, the truth of the matter was a little different than that. I don't know if it's that hard to believe, but on old Hina, the show showed a piece of the picture, which is there is this core four alliance with MC being pulled in as the fourth, right? MC is obviously upset about that. The thing is that I knew about that alliance the entire time. I knew about that alliance on Day 2, and the reason I knew that is because me, MC and Steven also had our own alliance of three and eventually we pulled in Sophie as our fourth. We did it in a more graceful way than Matt pulled in MC, but my read on the situation was that there were two alliances of four with MC and Steven in the center.

I think that if there was a reason for my side to have the scales tipped a little bit, [I had] two pieces of information. 1) MC showed me the idol when she found it. She showed Steven and then she also showed me. She didn't show Matt. She didn't show Kristina. I know that because when Matt was on the new Hina beach with me, he was telling everyone that Kristina had the idol because he thought that Kristina had it. And I was like, "Well, I know that that's not true." So that makes me think that MC and Steven had a closer alliance with us than those others. 2) Me and MC were alternates, bro. We're looking out for each other. That was a moment when she showed the idol to me. She's like, "Jason, we deserve to play this game as much as anybody else, even though we're the alternates." Like, "we can bring it, we can do things and we deserve to be here. I'm sharing this with you. We are ride-or-dies." So how much is strategy, how much is emotional? It's both, but I would say that I felt really good about my position on Hina.

TVLINE | Jason, puzzle king, I'm curious. What kinds of puzzle preparation did you do before flying out to Fiji?
I mean, I'm good at puzzles, but honestly, if I were to credit anything and please, put this on all the billboards across America, it's "Play 'Super Smash Brothers,'" you know what I mean? I'm sure it's funny. I was watching this clip, I think my brother showed me, of ["Survivor: Gabon" player] Kenny Hoang? He's the king of "Smash," and he was on some podcast saying, "If they had puzzles on my season, I would have been a puzzle beast, too." Also, shoutout to Kamilla from "48." She also was quite good at the puzzles. So folks, if there's a message from this season, it's [that] you can get big and buff like Jake, but the snake can bite any of us. Just get good at puzzles, just play video games. Just stay inside and play video games. Apply for "Survivor!" [Laughs]

TVLINE | What a pitch! I love it! Now, were you at all aware of Savannah's seriously irritated feelings toward Jawan? If so, did you try to play to that? 
It was hard for me to clock that because I think that Savannah just appeared very irritable about everyone, except that she and Sophi clicked instantly, which is why I never thought that Sophi was ever on the chopping block because she had such a strong immediate apparent alliance in Savannah. Did I clock that Savannah was upset at Jawan specifically? Not really. There was that bag thing, but I didn't know. I feel like if I had been on Uli Beach for a week and I saw it was happening over and over again... I just got the one story as a side comment, and I think that Jawan clearly wanted to move on to the next topic, so I don't know. I'm not perceptive. But also, I don't get to see as much as the TV gets to see, right? I think that those two things combined, I was just trying to knock on doors and trying to get my way in. I couldn't figure it out.

TVLINE | Jason, what's something that you were surprised didn't make the TV edit?
I think any sort of inkling of a relationship between me and MC, just because I felt really strongly about the two of us as strategic members, as people that went through the same experience. I was really surprised that I was the only one in the edit that is shown to be an alternate when she has the exact same experience. We talked about it a lot, and Sophie on our tribe was also an alternate from a former season and we talked about that a little bit too. It's hard to know when your tribe doesn't go to Tribal, what are the storylines that live, right? But I would say that that was something that was really important to me. We actually were [close], it's just we never ended up voting together.