Well, kiddos, it finally happened. We broke Jeff. He’s like a windup doll. He can only say so many things: “Come on in,” “That is how you do it on Survivor,” “Dig deep,” “I got nothing for ya,” and, of course, “Balls.” At the immunity challenge, he surely said all of those things at least once (and as with any challenge, there was more talk about balls than at a live lottery drawing or gay-porn rehearsal), but then Jeff started to cry. The first time ever! It’s my usual default mode to make fun of Jeff or to tell him how wrong he is, but not this time. I was sobbing too, my friend. (My friend is you, dear reader. Not Jeff.)

This all goes down at the immunity challenge. No, not the reward challenge, which Lagi wins. Nothing happened at the reward challenge other than Sai wanting to sit out — because, like a young millennial, she thinks she deserves a break — and then freaking out when her tribe (no clue which one after last week’s shake-up) doesn’t earn her a donut. Oh, and at the reward, David made sweet, sweet love to a jug of milk that was meant to be coffee creamer. They even played the most romantic royalty-free music an editor could find as he sipped. (Wait, isn’t loving and chugging milk, like, a white-supremacy thing?)

No, I’m talking about the immunity challenge. They had to drag a boat through the water, then get the chest off the boat, unravel a bunch of ropes to get a key, open the chest and take out the balls (balls!), and dig under a log and then each member of the tribe had to put a ball (balls!) through a table maze and get it to rest in a gorgeous little divot at the end of the table.

Vula, the green losers, though all of the losers are now on other tribes, easily won for two reasons. First, they were the only tribe with three dudes and one lady on a challenge that required a fair amount of strength, but getting those big frames under a log did slow them down a bit. The other reason is that they really bonded as a tribe. How? Trauma.

In the “new era,” we got a lot of players talking about the struggles they’ve gone through at home, and these are usually in exposition dumps that have very little to do with the game. The Vula roundtable offered three such offerings. First, Shauhin told his father was in the Iranian Air Force and was only let out of prison to fight against Iraq, which then captured him when his helicopter crashed. Then Joe told us about his parents, who were an interracial couple way before it was culturally acceptable and even took pictures in front of a segregated drinking fountain. (Aside: How old is Joe? He can’t be that old, but his parents were dating back then. Further proof that Black does not, in fact, crack.) Then it was Kamilla talking about her father, who fled the civil war in Sri Lanka. While this was all revelatory and educational, it brought it around in a game way when the Vula Four decided they were going to work together post-merge, even though they were going to pretend they didn’t get along. This already worked for Kamilla and Kyle, and I see it as a winning strategy going forward.

So Vula is jacked and united, and they win the challenge easily. It’s down to Civa and Lagi, who are both equally spaced on the maze, which some players are finding easier than others. Eva takes the table but gets frustrated when she can’t get her ball (ball!) past the first bend. She gives someone else a try. Lagi banks their three balls (balls!), so Eva is the only one left, and it’s a dead heat with Civa’s Sai at the other end of the field. Eva’s frustration is mounting, and you can see it on her face. Then you see the tears in her eyes, and she starts yelling that she keeps messing up at the very beginning. Mary, on the sidelines, tells Eva that she has to believe she can do it. “Say you can do it!” Mary yells. Eva says it, and, honestly, the tears are already starting.

Eva lands her ball (ball!), the tribe wins, and they all start celebrating immediately. While Eva is clearly happy, something else starts happening. She’s crying, she’s screaming, she’s hyperventilating, and even though her tribe rallies around her with hugs and support, she can’t calm down. The camera cuts to her old pal Joe, and he’s leaning on his knees, wanting to help her, knowing he’s the only one who can calm her down, but he can’t do anything because he’s now on the Vula tribe and is supposed to stay on his mat.

Finally, Jeff tells him he can go give her a hug, and he rushes over; she rushes to him, and he gives her a huge hug, starts clasping her hands like she taught him to, and grounds her in the moment. She almost immediately starts to calm down, and it is one of the sweetest, realest, and tenderest things we’ve ever seen on the show. Jeff immediately turns it into game chat, saying that Joe has now revealed a major relationship in front of everyone, one that can be exploited later, and, honestly, even as I was wiping away the tears with my shirt sleeves, I was thinking the same thing. But Joe says it’s not about the game; if his daughter was out there playing, he would want someone to treat her the same way. As Joe says, what happened with them was greater than the game, just proving that no matter how many twists there are, how many idols are hidden, how many silly dice-game journeys they go on, the most impactful part of this show is the human connections and relationships at its very heart.

Eva then tells everyone about her autism, how the doctors never thought she would be able to live on her own and have a job, and how her parents believed in her and helped her and got her here. She tells us about her episodes and how she had to tell someone in case one happened, and that’s how Joe knew what to do. But that’s not enough to get Jeff. He needs to know how this is going to help Survivor burnish its record as a groundbreaking force on television. Eva then says that she wants kids with autism to see her on the show and be inspired and for parents of those kids to see that their kids can have great and fulfilling lives. That’s when Jeff starts to cry, and, well, I want to be mad about it, but I can’t be. Eva is right. Survivor has showcased the lives of more than 700 contestants, and the representation of so many of them mattered so much, from the very first winner being an openly gay man way back when there were still laws against sodomy in many states. Yeah, you have to give it up for Survivor.

Eva’s day continues to be memorable. She talks to her tribe more about her struggles back at camp, and Star is inspired to tell everyone on the tribe for the second time that she has a Beware Advantage that she can’t open. Everyone rallies around and figures out the letters, and Eva eventually decodes it. The answer is the same as what every contestant wishes Jeff would be during the challenges: silent. When Eva opens it, Star gives her the idol, and I don’t know if it’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen or the smartest. Literally everyone left in the game knew Star had that idol, so she couldn’t have used it for a sneak attack, and her back now has my favorite store on it: a giant Target. Now Eva has the idol and everyone knows about it, so she is the manager of the giant Target.

Civa loses, and I know you don’t remember that the tribe is comprised of Sai and Cedrek from old Vula, Mitch and Chrissy from old Civa, and Bianca from Lagi, who also has no vote from the journey she went on. She comes up with a brilliant strategy: She’s going to be the swing vote and tell each of the other duos that she’s voting with them. That will force a two-to-two tie, and there will be a revote but then people can only vote for those who received votes, leaving her perfectly safe.

This is where Survivor gets tricky. Bianca would last through this tribal council, but what about the next one? If she’s lied to all the people left on her tribe, she leaves herself vulnerable should they lose again, and considering their performance over the two challenges in this episode, that seems highly likely. To manage that, she tells Cedrek that she lost her vote, hoping that Cedrek will side with Chrissy and Mitch to vote out Sai, once again leaving her safe. If only Bianca knew that the merge was next episode, then there would have been much fewer repercussions and she could have kept her secret.

I’m not sure if Cedrek knows he’s in Fiji or if he thinks he’s Matthew Fox washed up on a desert island after a plane crash, because our guy is Lost. He says that he only trusts Sai but knows that, in the long run, she is a liability. He doesn’t want to work with her long-term and has already voted for her, so there is no way she’s going to want to work with him, either. He should have gotten rid of her instead of Justin two tribals ago, and since that didn’t happen, he should have gotten rid of her tonight before she could flip on him and get rid of him. Also, if he voted with Mitch, Chrissy, and Bianca, that would give him three new potential allies going into the merge rather than just Sai, who has no allies. Her new tribe hates her; the only remaining old Vula, Mary, also hates her. Sai is nothing but dead weight that Cedrek refuses to cut loose.

What happened with the vote floored me, but not in a good way. We have a tribal where everyone talks about how Bianca is either the easy vote because she’s the only one without a partner, or she’s the swing vote, choosing between two sides, but she’s kind of neither because she has no vote of her own. When Jeff reads the votes, it’s one for Sai, one for Chrissy, and two for Bianca, who is eliminated.

What the …??? This is the kind of Survivor move that I hate, because it is an unexpected blindside, yes, but we missed who flipped and why. The shock of it happening is upended by the audience being totally confused. As Bianca is walking toward Jeff, whose eyes are still a little puffy with tears, Chrissy points out to a stunned Sai that there were only four votes, that Bianca lost her vote. Mitch, who voted for Sai, also seems to not know what is going on.

It’s a little hard for us to figure out, too. It seems like Cedrek told Chrissy that Bianca lost her vote, and those two decided to vote her out together. Sai was clearly not told, and maybe Mitch wasn’t either. Maybe they had Mitch still vote for Sai in case Bianca was playing some diabolical game and had an immunity idol, too, and then at least it would have been a tie between Chrissy and Sai, and on the revote, they could have gone with Sai. We have no idea because we haven’t seen any of it, not even a hint that Cedrek would have talked to Chrissy and/or Mitch and what might have motivated his switch against Bianca.

What we do know is that Cedrek is messier than a dorm bathroom after Taco Tuesday. Now Sai will really not trust him because not only did he vote for her, but he further alienated her by not telling her that Bianca lost her vote. He voted out Bianca, who was so willing to work with him that he is the only one she told about losing the vote. He’s left with Chrissy and Mitch, who have little allegiance to him. I can’t wait for Cedrek to go, and I just know that Jeff won’t shed a tear as he sends him packing.