Survivor Recap: Merge Madness

Photo: Robert Voets/CBS

“Earning the merge,” as Jeffrey Lee Probst loves to call it in the new era, is now a difference without a distinction. Don’t get me wrong: I loved all of the changes they made this season as they brought the tribes together, but once everyone is on the same beach, there’s only one person immune, and they’re voting as one big tribe, then that is the merge, whether or not they’re wearing a buff to prove that they’ve made it. Can’t we just call the merge a merge?

This chaotic episode starts with Mitch...