The bribe has spoken.
Before Beast Games Season 2 Episode 4 (“The Survivor Takeover”) can ferry half its remaining contestants to Fiji and Survivor Island, so one of them can win their own private island, it’s gotta wrap up Captain Bribe from Episode 3. And boy is it a doozie. The captains up top the enormous cash ticker watch it spill over to a million bucks. The teams down below profess how one’s personal integrity should never be for sale. And within a few moments there is quiet across Beast City, an awkward, stunned silence, because JT (#126) said fuck integrity and took the big bucks personal plunge before taking a knee. You’ve never seen an instant millionaire look more despondent.
“JT, you slimy. I woulda gave you some money if you was that desperate.” Mia, #952 and the OG who won an island last season, has choice words for her duplicitous captain as she and four other players depart Beast Games. And while the X’d deliver their final arguments, Beast Games rolls tape on JT’s now hypocritical-sounding earlier comments about team solidarity. Was he out for personal gain this entire time? Historically, there are players who reached for the bag when it was there for the taking. But to MrBeast’s questions about motive, JT doesn’t sound convincing. He says he hates being the villain but can live with it, two sides of a sentence that cancel each other out. He’ll just have to count that cash in his head while enduring the evil eye from others who remain. And Mia addresses the competitors and the viewers with a beautifully-worded kiss-off. “Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve learned a very important lesson. Greed is idolatry. Peace!”
“Raise the wall!” In a corner of the City lies a colonnade of cannon. Find matching cannonballs on a property-wide scavenger hunt, and you’ll be on your way to competing for this season’s island, which is worth $1.8 million. (Cut to footage of Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson showing us around the placid parameceum-shaped escape like he’s trying out for a real estate reality show.) With each cannon blast another traveling player is set, and soon we’ve notched the ten who will go. The rest will watch from Beast City. Rather than dreams about having fun on an island in the sun, they might rue the day they squandered a chance to meet Jeff Probst.
THE CULT OF JEFF
It really is the actual Survivor Island, and the really real host of the ultimate reality competition is waiting for them on the beach. Probst calls Survivor and Beast Games similar “social experiments,” and makes a kinda redundant statement about how the latter uses money to incentivize the getting of money. But it’s immediately apparent how starstruck everybody is, including Donaldson. The Probstian hosting powers are legend, and let’s be honest, MrBeast’s aren’t. As the challenge phase begins, and Probst fires up his Survivor persona with such naturalism, such ease, he even quietly scolds the Beast honcho for all his hyperactive yelling. Everyone is envious of Jeff’s preternatural host chill.
With the players split into two teams of five, they’re fitted with trademark Survivor “buff” headwraps and presented with two heats. A relay course – tight-fitting net crawl, ball toss, table track; puzzle at the end – and “One of the most iconic challenges of Survivor,” the pole-holding Get A Grip. And it’s interesting how both favor neither the Strong nor the Smart, but instead demand personal fortitude, that most intangible and all-important reality show thing. “Jeff’s gonna get in your face and tell you how much you suck – just ignore him,” Sue (#91) tells her teammates. She knows: “Suenami” finished third in Survivor 47.
With Nate already fallen in Get A Grip, Ian slipping, and JC holding on for dear life, Team Smart’s Ethan (#21) takes MrBeast’s bribe of 50 grand, which is trundled onto the beach in a wheelbarrow. “It’s guaranteed money, that’s really all I wanted,” he says, highlighting an aspect of what JT encountered as a captain during Bribe. The final two will stand at tribal council, held in front of the same shipwrecked galleon from Survivor 49, where the other eight Beast-ers will vote on who gets the deed to their own private island.
ALL TRIBE, NO BRIBE
It’s remarkably straightforward. With stakes still popping for everyone back in Beast City proper, where Beast’s five-million-dollar prize is still on the line, JC and Ian deliver speeches to the group about why they deserve to win this Survivor-infused game segment. Would you give JC an island after he grabbed $650,000 for himself last season? Nobody seems willing, and Jeff even gets in a dig. “It’s fitting when something else is on the line, now you’re sharing about being inconsiderate of others in Season 1.”
It’s Ian, the bearded former Ninja Warrior, who wins out. His speech is all about how his family could really use a win, how validating his emotions as a man carried him forward. And he invests the integrity JT from Captain Bribe could never. “If you need me to self-eliminate,” he tells the tribal council made up of Beast players, “run through a wall, I’m there for you.” Ian wins the Season 2 island giveaway with an eight-vote sweep.
But as MrBeast signs the deed of ownership over to Ian, he also presents a final twist. As runner-up of the (“first…annual?”) Survivor–Beast crossover, JC is presented with a gold coin. If he makes it to the top 6 of the competition, he can flip the coin to potentially double the Beast Games grand prize to ten million bucks. MrBeast asks the OG what’s on his mind as Ian celebrates and all the competitors prepare for their return to Beast City. One word: “Leverage.”
20 players remain.
Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.