Survivor 49's Second Player Out Says Bossiness Was Wrongly Perceived As A Dictatorship
The following contains spoilers for Wednesday's episode of Survivor!
"I kind of don't care if we go to Tribal Council. It's fine. Let's ship another person home and keep this game moving along." That's exactly what Annie Davis said in Episode 2 of Survivor 49, and boy, did she come to regret that remark.
The Kele tribe's luck didn't get any better this week, as the tribe continued to suffer loss after loss. While Annie seemed like the odd duck out, her closest, idol-holding ally Alex seemed to be considering Sophi as his target, with the goal of taking out his bromance Jake's other bestie. But while Annie thought she was Kele's head puppet master, she turned out to be its puppet (she said so herself in her final words), and she was unanimously voted out of the tribe by a vote of 4-1. (Read our recap here.)
Below, Annie fills us in on what went wrong with the Kele tribe, her relationship and alliance with Alex, and what her top 3 desert island albums are.
TVLINE | You said you felt like the puppet master out there, but here I am talking to you today. So, what happened out there?
KIMBERLY 'ANNIE' DAVIS | I was the puppet. [Laughs] Unfortunately, I thought I had an alliance with Alex. I thought it was really strong. I thought we had a good plan, and ultimately, after seeing the episode last night, I realized I wasn't privy to some of the conversations that were happening. I didn't know how strong the Jake, Sophi, Jeremiah and Alex little four-pack really was. As always with this show, we're not privy to anything but our own little experience, right? But that being said, I still had an amazing time. It was an incredible experience, for sure.
TVLINE | We heard you say that you didn't care if Kele went to Tribal again. Of course, they showed that in the edit in the episode you go home in, right?
And I really didn't! My thought was, the more people we can pick off the better because I can suffer. I could have dealt with no food all the way to the merge. I could have dealt with the heat and all of those things because, I'm bad at a lot of things, but suffering is not one of the things I'm bad at. So I can struggle. I just felt like with the heat and the sort of adversity we were dealing with as a tribe, that was only going to benefit me because physically I could last. And so I was OK continuing to go back to Tribal. I wasn't OK going back and having myself voted out, unfortunately. That's a bummer, but yeah, I didn't mind picking people off.
TVLINE | Watching it all back, what surprised you the most?
I think the way I was perceived on the bossiness side, because my tribemates are calling me Karen and they're rolling their eyes behind my back and they're doing all this talking about how bossy and terrible I am. And that was hard because I am bossy. I am. I will be the first one to tell you that. I am a CEO of a company, I front a band, I make decisions in life. It's what I do. But it all came from such a place of love. I was trying to help the tribe. I was trying to help build a shelter. I was trying to help find food.
When they show that scene where I'm talking to Jeremiah about like, "Hey, let's find the [coconuts] with the water in it because it's got a lot of potassium and we need that," they didn't know, and I realized this in hindsight, I'm a musician, but they didn't know I'm also a doctor. I also deal in biomechanics. I understand a lot about the human body and how it works. So I was just trying to be helpful so that we could all benefit from this. And I think they just thought this musician who knows nothing about anything is telling us how to find coconuts. What is she even doing? So I can see how they perceived it that way, and that's on me for not articulating it better or sharing my knowledge and why I have it. But yeah, I think that was a little bit surprising and kind of a bummer because I just felt like, man, I did all this from a place of love and it was perceived as a dictatorship, which it wasn't.
TVLINE | On the Uli tribe, Nate is having trouble connecting based on age alone. Did you feel like that was a factor at all in the dynamics of your tribe?
I'm 49 going on nine, so whether you want to look at the oldest or the youngest, either one, it was a little bit of a problem. I felt included by them. I didn't feel like they were ostracizing me necessarily from an age perspective. But I will say on this topic, since you bring it up: It is a bit of a challenge to never have, other than the the season where they did Millennials vs. Gen X, they don't typically put people from the over-40 crowd on the same tribe together. There's usually one on each tribe. There's a bunch of 25-year-olds, and so they're able to connect generationally. By design, we are sort of the outliers and have to figure out how to broach this 20-30-year-old generational clump of people. I think from that perspective, yeah, it probably did play into things, but that's kind of how Survivor does things. They don't typically put a bunch of old people together on the same tribe, which I think could be a disadvantage for us. But I think overall, I connect with younger people well because I feel at least I'm a youthful 50-year-old, but I don't think you can deny the fact that age does kind of matter in something like this, whether it's perceived as an issue or not. I mean, I'm probably perceived as the tiny little 50-year-old lady who's weak and can't contribute just by nature of what we think about older people. So, I don't know.
TVLINE | Your relationship with Alex seemed very real. What made you guys click?
I looked around our tribe on Day 1. I knew going in that my strategy was going to be, "Find the one person that I felt like I could align with, who was strong enough." Maybe not the strongest because they can become a target, but somebody strong physically, good personality, has a sense of humor, and I felt like Alex fit all of that. So I pulled him as soon as I had the opportunity on Day 1 and said, "Let's do something." He said, "I want to do something with you too." This is great. So I thought that was real because my plan was a super locked-in alliance with somebody that's very secretive and then we just split and don't talk again. Basically like check in once a day or something, but it's hard to have those kinds of alliances because everybody's getting pulled in so many different ways, but it was what I wanted to try to do.
So I found him, felt like this is it, now Alex, you go off and find your fake alliance. I'll go find my fake alliance, and then we'll sort of control things from the inside. So my thought was, "OK, now I'll try to go connect with Sophi," because she's already expressed somewhat of an interest in maybe working with me. Jake and Alex had the bromance, so that's an easy one. What I misread was whether Alex had already been tapped by Jake in advance of that conversation he had with me. I don't know if that happened in that order, or if he flipped on me because he felt like he needed to stick with this Jake and Sophie thing, because the two of them having an alliance caused problems if he tried to vote against that crowd and vote with me. I have nothing but love for Alex. I still think he was probably the right guy for me to try to align with and maybe in a different season, different tribe, different situation, this whole plan would have worked really well. It just didn't in this one.
TVLINE | Did Jake and Alex's budding bromance worry you at all?
It worried me the entire time. It's not like I didn't see it, but as I said in Tribal, you can't trust anybody and I still stand by that. You have to trust your gut, and my gut said, "Of everybody here, yeah, you can't trust anybody, but you can trust Alex the most." So you just have to believe that what he's telling you is the truth, that he's working the Jake angle to try to keep his vote on our side. So I was worried, but I wasn't that worried about it because I really do feel like Alex knew we needed to split up Sophi and Jake. So whether we voted out Jake or Sophi first, I didn't really care until Sophi's performance in that challenge was so bad that it felt like she was the natural choice. We've got to eat. We needed food and sustenance because we were five or six days in with nothing but a piece of coconut this big every day and you can't win challenges on that.
TVLINE | Let's talk about that challenge. Your tribe had such an incredible lead. What happened and how frustrating was that one to lose?
It was abysmal, that challenge. It was heartbreaking because we were so hungry and so tired and depleted, and it was hot that day and we had such a massive lead. And then Sophi and Alex were on the puzzle together and our tribe just could not solve a puzzle to save our lives. We lost the marooning challenge. Alex lost the fight for supplies, which arguably was kind of a puzzle situation. We lost the next challenge, where we voted Nic off. We lost this one. I don't know if we just had the wrong people on the puzzles. I'm not totally sure. We all sat down together on Day 1 and said, "Who's good at what?" And Alex and Sophi both said, "Puzzles are our thing." So we said, "OK, let's have you guys on this one." We had a seven- or eight-minute lead and lost that thing. You saw. It was terrible. It was so frustrating to watch. It might have just been mental fatigue. Everybody was so tired on our tribe. We hadn't eaten. The other two tribes were sitting around the campfire doing what they do, and we're just living on our little piece of coconut.
There's brain fog in there too. I don't fault them that much for it, but that's what happened. We were so far ahead. It was rough. I found it crazy that their names weren't coming up. So that should have been a red flag for me, too. I was like, "Why are we not talking about Alex and Sophi, who very clearly lost this challenge for us?" In hindsight, I should have realized that I was on the chopping block when there wasn't more talk about that whole situation. Nobody else was really bringing it up from their side, and I should have realized, "Oh crap."
TVLINE | When did you find out the truth about this elusive shoe bandit?
In the episode! I had no idea. We all speculated, "Was it an animal?" Because I was sleeping in the shelter one night when everybody else was on the beach because it was so cold down there. So I came up and was sleeping in the shelter by myself, and something came and chomped on my foot. I was sleeping with no shoes on. I thought, "Oh there's something out here that wants a snack." And so we all sort of speculated that maybe it was some kind of animal. It was so dark you couldn't see anything. So we thought it was an animal carrying them off, but it also kind of didn't make sense. It'd have to be a relatively big animal to be carrying a shoe around. I found out on the episode that it was Jake.
TVLINE | What's something that happened on the island that you wish viewers had gotten to see?
The thing that hurts my heart the most is that I had a really good aqua dumping story.
TVLINE | Hit me with it!
Oh my God. So Jeff did ask, "Annie, what is one of the biggest challenges you've faced out here that you didn't expect?" And I said, "Well, here's the thing. I've done a lot of camping and mountaineering and all these things. I've pooped everywhere. But I've never tried to poop in the ocean before," which is the preferred method out there. I was the first on my tribe to give it a go. I was like, "I got this, I'm good." So I run down the beach and I find this place that seems perfect. I get naked and I go poop in the ocean, and I realized very quickly, "Oh God, the tide is coming in," and then I've also just pooped in what is ultimately going to become our fishing area. So now my poop is sliding around in this little inlet, and it hits me in the chest, breaks into 1,000 pieces, and then I'm mortified because all of my tribemates are gonna come down here and see my poop sliding everywhere, floating around. So I'm trying to dump it over the rocks. It was ridiculous! I go back and I'm talking to my tribe about all this, I'm like, "Guys, this is what happened." We all had these stories for the next couple of days. Everybody shared their poop stories like, "Oh my God, Annie, I understand what happened now! That happened to me too." So I wish they would have shown some of that because that's what it's really like out there on the island.
TVLINE | Who knew you needed a strategy for aqua dumping?
Apparently, it's a thing!
TVLINE | What was the hardest part of the Survivor experience for you?
The social dynamics and not recognizing how much those matter. Of course, it's a social game. I get that. But being older, I used to watch the old school Survivor where the physical stuff and the survival aspect and living off the land, all that really mattered. Nowadays, I don't think it matters that much. Especially in the new era. It's so much more of a social game. I think our tribe could have just sat on the beach and strategized the entire time and never built a shelter, and never did anything physical. It's kind of par for the course with new era Survivor. I misread that. I thought my physical contributions were gonna be valued and I don't think they really were, and that was hard because that's what I feel like I contribute in life. I'm a decision-maker and I do physical things, and those two things did not play well on this season of Survivor, unfortunately.
TVLINE | I can't let you go without talking music for a hot sec, so hit me with your Top 3 desert island albums!
Oh wow, that's a really good question! Man, I like so much variety. I think I might take something like an Eminem album with me, and then I might take something that's a little more introspective, like a James Taylor, and then maybe something kind of out of left field. I'm a big fan of K. Flay, if you know who she is. Big fan of her stuff. She talks about a lot of the stuff that's in our heads that a lot of people don't talk about, and that resonates with me. It might have felt good to feel like other people are all messed up out there, too. [Laughs]