[This story contains massive spoilers for the Survivor Ghost Islandfinale.]
Given its haunted premise, it’s only fitting that Survivor Ghost Island concluded on a haunting note — not to mention an historic one: a tie vote at Final Tribal Council.
For the first time in the CBS reality series’ history, Survivor concluded with a deadlocked jury and a 5-5 vote split between two of the three finalists: construction worker Domenick Abbate and furniture builder Wendell Holland, two dominant allies who worked together in lockstep all along the way. With their games so interwoven with one another, the jurors were unable to decide between the two — meaning the third finalist, Laurel Johnson, was suddenly tasked with casting the deciding vote as the final juror of Ghost Island.
“When Laurel realized it would come down to her vote, I think all of us felt for her,” says executive producer and host Jeff Probst, weighing in on the climactic moment. “It was clearly a tremendous responsibility. She had spent so much time working with both Dom and Wendell, and she is a person of integrity and wanted to do the right thing. That’s all you can ask for from a Survivor player, is to treat the game the way you would want it to treat you.”
Apologizing to her fellow competitors in the immediate aftermath of casting her ballot, Laurel’s game-deciding vote was finally revealed at the Survivor Ghost Island live finale and reunion on Wednesday (May 24), in front of a packed crowd at CBS Studio Center in Studio City, California. In the end, she voted for the person who granted her immunity only a few days earlier: Wendell Holland, the official champion of Survivor Ghost Island.
Over the past several weeks of the season, Ghost Island felt like it was building up to one of two possible outcomes: Domenick or Wendell winning the Sole Survivor title and million dollar prize. The two dominant players aligned with one another very early in the game, and were in command of every single vote they encountered along the way except for one. Their partnership only broke in the eleventh hour, when Dom won the final immunity challenge and was tasked with bringing one person with him to the Final Tribal Council, while leaving the other two players to battle it out for the third spot in a fire-making challenge.
Dom sent Wendell to the fire with no ill will between either partner, both of them knowing the risk they posed for the other. For his part, Dom briefly contemplated pitting himself against Wendell in the challenge, lacking confidence in Laurel or fellow ally Angela Perkins to get the job done. He ultimately decided on Angela for the task, with Wendell pulling out the fiery finish. The rest is history… genuine history, too, as a tie at Final Tribal Council has never occurred before, making the Ghost Island finale a monumental moment in the legacy of the series.
Read on for more about the eventful evening from Probst, his thoughts on Wendell and Domenick’s legacies, what he learned from the latest season, and what to expect from this fall’s edition of the show.
It’s official: we have our first Final Tribal Council tie in Survivor history. What was your immediate reaction when you realized what had happened? And what were the reactions of the other producers as you processed the milestone moment?
Well, the final vote is unique in that we remove our camera operator from the voting booth to ensure that nobody sees the votes as they are cast and therefore nobody on our crew knows the winner. Then I go back to get the votes where executive producer Matt Van Wagenen is checking the votes to ensure each piece of parchment has a name on it and we have a good vote. So, the only two people that know the result are Matt and myself.
Typically, I just grab the urn and head back to tell the players that I’ll see them in LA for the reading of the votes. But this time when I walked back, Matt was staring at me with wide eyes. He nodded knowingly, but said nothing. I was so mentally drained by the end of Tribal that I didn’t know…
