Monica Padilla surveys her surroundings, running her hand against obsidian-colored walls, her fingertips slick with oil.
She sees flames roaring in the fireplace, ablaze not with logs, but with socks. A picture of a dog that does not exist sits on the mantle, beneath an array of necklaces hung up like hunting trophies. She searches the pantry, and sees only seeds. Everywhere she looks she sees wheels and wheels, spinning round and round, never stopping, never ceasing.
Monica smiles, kicks back and relaxes, admiring the space. She’s inside the mind of Russell Hantz, and this is where she will live for the day.
In the early going of Survivor: Samoa, Monica only attended Tribal Council twice. One of those sessions was more like group therapy, after Galu lost their leader, Russell Swan, in one of the most heart-stopping medical mishaps in the show’s history.
Her tribe was finally brought to its knees by the season’s other Russell: Hantz, the owner of the brilliant brain Monica rents out for a few hours on Day 33, laughing at the idols on the wall, mocking the wheels, chewing on the seeds and spitting them out.
At the merge, Russell and the other three members of his Foa Foa tribe used immunity idols and insecurities to send Galu to the guillotine, one head at a time. They eventually turned their attention to Monica, but the 25-year-old law school student would not go quietly. In her final hours, she approached Russell, and issued a terse warning: If he voted her out that night, Monica would convince the jury to vote against him at the Final Tribal Council.
“Jaison told me you’re a multi-millionaire already,” she said, crouching no more than a foot or two away from Russell. “And I’m voting based on need. Who needs the money?”
With that, and without the help of Pym Particles, Monica Padilla shrank down to the size of an ant, crawled inside of Russell Hantz’s ear, and spent the next several hours scratching at the walls of his skull. He was furious, paranoid, rattled — and, by his own admission, impressed.
“Seeing what I’ve seen today, if I’d been on her tribe from the beginning, we would’ve been dangerous for sure,” he said about Monica later that night at Tribal Council. “She got me pissed off. If she played that hard this entire game, she’d be in charge.”
Minutes later, Monica was voted out and evicted from Russell’s head. Years later, she resumes her million-dollar quest as one of the twenty players voted onto Survivor: Cambodia — Second Chance, and you have to wonder if she’ll be able to ear worm her way into other people’s private thoughts. Was her final day in Samoa nothing more than an incredibly forceful day of Survivor, or was it a hint at what she’s capable of bringing in her second season?
For her part, when we sit together at Ponderosa, Monica tells me that she learned a thing or two from playing with the Survivor who, in his own estimation, “played the best strategic game in history.”
“I think Russell taught me to never turn off your head game,” she says. “Even while we were out there, Russell was constantly talking about the game, and talking about his alliances, and his position in the game. You could constantly see the wheels turning. That’s one thing. Never turn off the game in your head. Always keep playing out your moves, and never count yourself out. Always go out fighting. That’s what I did. I want to take that to a different level this time.”
Already, the wheels are turning for Monica. She zaps me down to size and invites me inside her brain for a spell.
ON THE NEXT PAGE: Mind the Map
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