The following contains spoilers for Episode 9 of Survivor Season 43.Season 43 of Survivor has been a bit of a strange one so far. All the players are, for the most part, nice and agreeable, with no clear villains emerging. No one has really made any big moves until this point, and a lot of times they tend to go for the easiest vote. A lot of fans have criticized this, saying that it's made the season feel boring. There may be some truth to this, as it's not a particularly wild or chaotic season, but this episode finally provided some exciting gameplay and some big strategic moves from the players.

As the episode starts, Sami is also seemingly annoyed that the tribe went with the easy vote last week by getting Jeanine out. He wants to make a big move, and his target is James - he just doesn't have the numbers (yet). Owen is mad because James told him to vote for Ryan before the last tribal but then changed the vote without telling Owen, which leads Owen to believe that James doesn't trust him. This, in turn, means that Owen no longer trusts James, and the tribe is starting to realize just how much pull James has in this game.

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Then, very early on in the episode, it's on to the challenge, because there are two Tribal Councils to get through this week. The players are divided into two groups, with each group having one person win Immunity, and both groups traveling to Tribal Council separately. Despite a finger injury, Karla wins for her team, and Cody ends up winning for the other side, and also nabs them a reward of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches as a reward for holding out the longest overall. After the challenge, the tribes are sent to two different camps to have their pre-Tribal scrambles separately from each other.

survivor 43 e9 challenge

The first group consists of Cassidy, Ryan, Gabler, Jesse, and Cody. Ryan wants to take out Cassidy, because he sees this as a big move to break up the original Coco tribe and show that he's playing his own individual game. Cassidy, in turn, wants Ryan out because she sees him as a threat, not to mention the fact that he's been targeting her. This half of the tribe is having a less chaotic afternoon, as their discussions seem to be slightly more calm and collected.

The same can't be said for the other half of the tribe, however. Owen and James are both in this group (along with Karla, Sami, and Noelle), which doesn't bode well as they're both trying to target each other. This comes to a head when Owen and James start having a conversation at the water well that quickly turns into an argument that they end up roping the rest of the group into. It was actually kind of fun to see a real argument on Survivor again, as it seems like they haven't happened as much in recent seasons. There's nothing funnier than watching two people yell at each other while their tribe members make excellent reaction faces in the background.

survivor 43 e9

Back at the other half of the tribe, Jesse and Cody are more calmly weighing their options for the vote. They bring up the interesting point that they have to consider how their vote will be received by the other half of the players, because this vote doesn't just affect these five people. If they vote Cassidy out, they worry that Karla and James will be mad at them. However, this group has the advantage of going to Tribal second, so they get to see the results of the first vote. They decide to make their final decision once they know how that first group voted, which honestly seems like a really good strategy for reading the room.

The other group is still discussing their vote, and Noelle comes up with a great plan to use her Steal-A-Vote advantage to steal Owen's vote (therefore making James feel comfortable because it seems like she's voting with him, meaning he won't play his Knowledge Is Power advantage) and then use that to vote James out with Sami and Owen. Sami tells Karla about this plan because he wants to work with her and sees this as a show of trust, which almost seems like a mistake at first because she's James's closest ally. However, Karla admits that Sami makes a lot of sense, and while James is a number in her corner, he's also a threat to her game.

This group goes to Tribal first, and definitely has the more exciting Tribal of the two. After explaining their argument to Jeff like he's their dad at a parent-teacher conference and assuring him they got over it, Owen and James start to argue again and prove that they are not, in fact, over it. When it comes time for the vote, Noelle does play her Steal-A-Vote, and James looks thrilled about it because of where he thinks the vote is going. The viewer is kept in suspense because it's not clear which way Karla and Sami are going to sway, but in the end, they send James packing. He is very put out about it, sulking his way to the jury bench. Obviously, it's normal to be upset after a blindside, but he seems to have let his overconfidence get to his head and doesn't seem to respect the move in a gameplay sense in any way, like most players do when they're voted out.

survivor s43 e7 challenge

The second group enters, their brains starting to spin when they see James on the jury. The gears clearly start turning in Jesse's head as he tries to calculate what their move is from here. This part of Tribal feels underwhelming compared to the first bit, but they end up voting out Ryan in the end, who leaves with a lot more grace than James did, to his credit. The split Tribal method is always entertaining on Survivor, as dividing and separating the tribe always leads to interesting votes and discussions of strategy, and allows players to make big moves when they didn't feel like they had the numbers to do so previously. This episode was tense the whole way through, as it was never totally clear which way the vote was going, leading to one of the more engaging episodes of the season.

NEXT: Survivor Season 43 Episode 8 Review