Survivor is known for pushing contestants to their limits — mentally, physically and often ethically as they go against their personal morals to manipulate and blindside their tribemates. Unfortunately for Christian Hubicki, he was pushed to his limits in more ways than one in this week’s episode of the reality show.
The mechanical engineer, who became a fan favourite on Survivor: David vs. Goliath before returning for the milestone 50th season, realised mid-conversation with another contestant that he had quite literally pooped his pants. Christian was squatting near the fire when it happened, and Joe Hunter noticed he “froze like a statue” and thought he had a spinal injury because he was “so erect and stiff”.
“Feeling good?” Joe asked, to which Christian replied, “Um, I’ll let you know once I know. I’ll be right back.”
It wasn’t until he turned to walk away that Joe realised what had happened, and the camera blurred the back of Christian’s khaki pants as he headed towards the beach.
“You’re not gonna want to see this,” Christian told the camera operator who was following him. “I promise you, you do not want to see this.”
Christian, for his part, candidly spoke about the accident in his piece-to-camera interview and said that “the sheer and utter embarrassment of unexpected gastrointestinal distress” was simply a part of being human.
“Of all things I thought could happen on this show, I didn’t expect to have an unexpected evacuation. It’s a dark cloud, let’s just say, in my life at the moment,” he said. “I’m f**king dead. My wife is going to divorce me.”
Christian’s co-star Savannah Louie, whose torch was snuffed at Tribal Council, told PEDESTRIAN.TV following her elimination that the entire tribe couldn’t stop talking about his misfortune during filming.
“I think I was doing a confessional, and I walked back and I met Joe, who was at camp, and he kind of spilled everything that was going on,” she recalled.
“But Christian’s difficulties, it didn’t just happen then. I think he had a couple of rounds of difficulties over the couple of days that I was still at camp.”
Without sharing too much information, Savannah admitted that the entire tribe and camera crew “saw Christian’s naked butt from afar at one point” as he dealt with some of his struggles on the beach.
“There were some funny moments, and Christian just handled it like such a champ. He handled it in the best way possible, probably way better than I would have!” she added. “I say that not to throw him under the bus or make him feel uncomfortable, but it was funny.”
Savannah tells all about her Survivor 50 experience
Similar to Christian’s unique situation, Savannah had a truly one-of-a-kind experience on the reality show when she won Survivor 49 and immediately returned for Survivor 50 alongside her close ally Rizo Velovic.
P.TV chatted with the two-time player about the experience of playing back-to-back seasons, how she prepared for her quick return to Fiji, and her biggest regret on Survivor 50.
Your Survivor journey is just so wild, especially the fact that your original season hadn’t aired yet when you played Survivor 50, so no one knew what to expect from you. How soon after you won Survivor 49 were you actually asked to return?
It hadn’t even been 24 hours and I got told, ‘We need you to go into this room, someone wants to speak to you’. And I go into the room and I see Jeff [Probst] on this laptop and I’m like, oh Jeff must want to congratulate me on the 49 win. And he starts and he says, ‘Savannah, congratulations’. I’m like, ‘Oh, thank you!’. He’s like, ‘We want to bring you back for our iconic season 50’. And I’m like, ‘Wait, what?’. It was like a record scratch moment, like, did I hear that right?
In that call, I’m like, ‘Yeah, I want to do it, obviously!’, but there’s so much that goes into making sure that you can actually be on the show for one season, let alone two seasons back to back. So I told him, ‘Yes, I want to be out there, let me check with my people back home to make sure everything’s okay and taken care of, and if everything’s good back home, I will for sure be back’. So I think I gave them the firm ‘Okay’ like two days later.
And then it was about two weeks before you went off to film Survivor 50, right?
I want to say it was only nine days back here in Atlanta.
Wow, so were you able to switch off your Survivor brain in that time and get back to normal, or what was that period like before Survivor 50?
You really couldn’t. To illustrate where my mind was, there was one day where I had ordered a package on Amazon, and the package didn’t get delivered, and then I got a call from the Amazon delivery driver, and the driver goes, ‘Hey, I have your package, your apartment downstairs door is locked, I can’t get in, but I have your package’. And I go to my boyfriend, ‘Oh my gosh, babe, they’re hiding my package, they’re stealing my package, and they’re trying to taunt me about it’. Obviously, I got my package later that day, but that goes to show you are so paranoid and you are kind of crazy after Survivor. Maybe that might have been a little bit of a good thing going into 50 because I think I did clock certain things that maybe other people weren’t catching quite as quickly, but it was a weird mindset to be in.
Were you able to pre-game during that time and communicate with any of the other players before filming, and did you make a plan with Rizo?
So Rizo is a friend in real life, and after what we had done together for season 49, we actually concocted a story and we were gonna say I got fifth place in season 49. And on our way to Fiji, we found out that someone had leaked our boot order and that a bunch of people on our cast already knew that I won, so I had to come clean. I was so upset and I was so pissed off. And honestly, I was very annoyed at my season 49 cast, because I’m like, ‘Who leaked this? How would you do this to me?’. Of course, with time, it’s fine now. People get back from the game, they’re so excited to talk about their adventure, to share how they did, and I’m not actually mad at anyone, but at the time, I was like, ‘I hate all these people’.
But other than Rizo, I didn’t talk to anyone. And my biggest regret, probably about season 50, is that I didn’t DM any former players or reach out to anyone. I really wish I had. I know it might be looked down upon, but in hindsight, I don’t care. Like, I want to be part of these people’s alliance when I get on the beach! They’re all so close, I want to have that leg up too!
Was it obvious to you that people had pre-gamed and there were previous connections?
Yes and no. I’m not accusing everybody of hopping on a call before we head out there, but you have people who have played the season together before, right? You have people who have mutual friends, and so maybe they didn’t hop on a call necessarily, but you have that mutual friend who’s going to say, ‘Hey, you can trust this person, this is a good guy, they’re not going to screw you over, they’re someone who will go to the end with you’. And in a game where trust is everything, having a stamp of approval just like that is so valuable. I must have had some mutual connections with some of the people on my tribe somewhere, right? So I wish I had done a little bit more in that aspect, but hindsight is 20/20. That’s what I get for obeying the rules!
So not only were you a former winner, but no one knew what your game style was like because they hadn’t seen your season. In your opinion, how big was your threat level?
It was way up here — it’s out of the frame! I think honestly, though, what’s scarier than being a winner is not knowing my game and not knowing what that game looked like. Survivor is a game of uncertainty, and the more uncertainty you have, the harder the game becomes. So I think that a lot of my tribemates, instead of looking at me as a potential ally, looked at me as someone who was a bigger obstacle. And so, how do you reduce the amount of uncertainty in their game? You remove the person who has the most uncertainty with them.
I mean, it sucks and I tried really hard to be honest about my game, which I really don’t think was that scary in 49. I was a pretty straight shooter, I owned what I did, but there’s always that what-if. Like, ‘We can’t trust her, we don’t have that confirmation, we don’t have that proof that that’s really how she played’. So I get it.
When your original season eventually aired on TV, did any of your Survivor 50 co-stars message you about your gameplay?
I did have quite a few people, not even people who were on my beach, who reached out, and they were so kind about my 49 gameplay, and I think that really speaks to the types of people who were asked back for 50. This is no shade of anyone who didn’t get asked back, but I’ve been so touched by the kindness that people have shared with me. I’ll be real with you, when I was out there for the first six days, I was talking to my tribe about how tough parts of 49 had been and how hard that break had been in between, and everybody was offering their advice and their support.
And even dealing with some of the stuff that was online during season 49, I had people reaching out to me and just saying, ‘Hey, if you need to call me, here’s my number’. I had an incredible person who played season 50 with me, who actually gave me their partner’s phone number so my boyfriend could talk to their partner and kind of express some of his struggles with everything. It speaks so much to the types of people who have been part of this season.
There are so many great players this season, but when you got eliminated, who did you think had the best chance of winning Survivor 50?
I was hoping Rizo would win. Every day, I remember being like, ‘I hope I don’t see Rizo today. I don’t want to see him today, I don’t want to hear from him or any of that’. Just because every little bit that Rizo was still in the game, it’s not only someone who I played with, but someone who I consider such a dear friend, and I wanted to see him take it all.
Survivor 50: In the Hands of the Fans airs exclusively on Stan every Thursday.
