“Two sides. Two players. One is light. The other is dark.” John Locke’s legendary description of Backgammon not only describes the central conflict of Lost, but also the legacy of Aras and Vytas Baskauskas, the veritable Jacob and Man in Black of Survivor. For his part, Vytas appreciates the Lost comparison, up to a point. “I loved that show, for the first two and a half seasons,” he tells me when we hop on the phone, hours after the world watched Jeff Probst snuff his torch on the season premiere of Survivor: Cambodia — Second Chance. “I kind of stopped watching, but man, those first two seasons were some of the best two seasons ever on television.” He’s much more receptive to the duality of himself and his brother: “You can’t help but enjoy it. You can’t help but appreciate the beauty of our placement. First place Aras, last place Vytas, and when we play together, we’re right in the middle. I’m one of the worst players ever, and he’s one of the greatest players ever. When we play together, we kind of just meet right in the center.” Vytas tips his cap to the alpha and omega landing spots for the Baskauskas Brothers, but he does it with a hint of sadness in his voice. It’s barely audible when he describes himself as “one of the worst players ever,” but the sincerity of the comment is undeniable — in fact, he doubles down on it. “I’m one of the worst all-stars,” he says. “I mean, hey! I’m an all-star, but one of the worst all-stars. You know those all-star games where someone gets picked who has never really been picked before for an all-star team, they play for five minutes and sit on the bench the rest of the time? That’s kind of my game. Hey, I’m an all-star, I’m honored to be an all-star, and thank you for voting me in — but I’m one of the worst all-stars.” This is how Vytas views his legacy. As one of the more competitive players on the incredibly competitive Survivor: Blood vs Water, Vytas returned to the show and couldn’t last longer than three days — and he doesn’t think his past reputation did him any favors, no matter how hard he tried to shift the shape. “I think the first impressions I made on my first season were tough to overcome,” he says. “I probably should have tried a little harder. I tried my best. As soon as the campaigning started, I went into public relations mode, taking pictures of me with my kid, the lovable dad — I tried! I tried hard. I really did. When I walked around Ponderosa in the pre-game, I had this book, and on the cover it says in big words: ‘Life is a Spiritual Journey.’ I wanted people to see that that’s the kind of person I am. I tried so hard. Everything I wore, everything I did to show people, ‘Hey! I’m a likable, sweet guy.'” Based on what we saw on the premiere, Vytas did not come across as “a likable, sweet guy.” He came across as… well, something else. “To go from cool yoga instructor to creepy yoga instructor in 30 seconds? Yeah, that was tough to watch,” he laughs. “It’s always disappointing when you see things you don’t want to see, but the truth is, I did it. You just have to laugh at it. I tried to teach people yoga, and I guess I came off kind of douchey.” But Vytas doesn’t believe he came across that way to everyone on his beach; in fact, for a time, he felt he was set up pretty well. ON THE NEXT PAGE: A Tale of Two Cities

In the premiere episode, Jeff Varner described the situation at Ta Keo as the Shelter People versus the Beach People. Vytas sees it as Old School versus New School, and he was firmly entrenched in the former camp, starting with work he accomplished before arriving in Cambodia. “I talked to Shane,” Vytas tells me when I ask about his alleged role in Varner, Terry Deitz and Kelly Wiglesworth’s pre-game alliance. “I’ve known Shane for ten years. We talked a bunch about it, we talked with each other every day — not just about strategy, but cultivating our friendship again. We were having a blast watching everything go down in the pre-game. He told me he was talking with people: Terry, Jeff Varner, and a couple of other people. I sent Terry a text or two, that was it, but I knew from a text or two that Terry was on board.” “I had never talked to Varner,” he continues. “He seemed like a little bit of a wildcard, even in the social media. He campaigned the hardest out of all of us. I was always a little bit skeptical of him. We hit the beach, and we all talked, and he assured me that he was with Terry and Kelly Wiglesworth and the old school people. I didn’t quite buy it, but I wanted to work with him. He’s a sweet, sweet guy, and I really wanted to work with him.” But early on, Vytas started feeling nervous about Varner’s true loyalties. “The way I saw him playing on the beach, those first few days, he was going on as many walks as he could. He was not trying to help build a shelter. He was not trying to get anything done around camp. He was trying to strageize — and that scared me,” he says. “I remember on Day 3, the morning, I hit up Terry and said, ‘Dude, is Jeff with us? Are you sure?’ And Terry said, ‘No, Jeff’s with us. Don’t worry.’ And Kelly Wiglesworth was the same way. ‘I know him. We’re good. Don’t worry about Jeff Varner.’ I believed them, because I didn’t know what to think… but I was wrong. Very wrong. We were all wrong.” Vytas was wrong about someone else, too: Spencer Bledsoe. He believed the Young Lad from Cagayan was part of the Shelter People, and was completely blindsided when he found out otherwise. “I misplaced my trust in Spencer,” he says. “We would go talk every night at the end of each day: ‘Here’s what I know, here’s what you know.’ We shared information every night.” Vytas tells me that before the game, he and Spencer were friends, even before the Second Chance season started coming together: “We played chess all the time. I helped him with his school project. We spent a couple hours on the phone one day talking about his thing for school. He spent the night at my house one night. I thought we had a pretty good friendship, and I thought when the game started, we would be friends and share information, and nobody really knew we were friends — that’s something I thought I could use. But Spencer used that against me. He took everything I was saying, and went and told it to everybody else.” Vytas says his plan was to rally Varner, Spencer and the Shelter People against someone who everyone on Ta Keo, including the Beach People, could rally behind: Abi-Maria Gomes, who spent the premiere episode searching for her missing bracelet like it was her “precious.” “What I was saying was, ‘Hey, let’s rally around a cause we can all get behind, which is Abi,'” says Vytas. “I was trying to get behind somebody that we could all get behind and bring us together. Let’s get rid of somebody we don’t all really like so we can have more fun on the beach, there will be less annoying things happening, no bracelets will go missing, and then we can all have a nicer time and focus on winning some challenges.” “Everybody agreed Abi was annoying, but not enough people thought she was annoying enough to go home that day,” he says. “People gunned for me first and that’s how it went.” Whatever happened, happened, in other words, as an ill-tempered medium once told the would-be writer of The Empire Strikes Back. And while he’s certainly biased, Vytas believes Ta Keo’s decision could cost them moving forward. ON THE NEXT PAGE: Live Together, Die Alone

When I spoke with Vytas on the day before Second Chance, he was the first person to admit his place as the most villainous man on the cast — and rather than embrace that role, he tried to duck away from it. “My plan was to get out there and play low,” he says. “I knew I was a villain. I knew people would have interesting thoughts about me as far as my strategic gameplay, that people would see me as a threat, but I wanted to get out there and help with the camp, be a nice guy, and lay low. Then, all of the sudden, people want me out. Then what do I do? I had to scramble, but I didn’t want to. It was really hard for me to get out of that lay low strategy. For some reason, I was clinging to it. I should have scrambled more.” Vytas identifies Shirin Oskooi as the person who wanted him gone the most, and he says he would have tried to put the target on her, but “I didn’t want to turn it back on Shirin because I thought it would be a tougher battle than someone we could all get behind, like Abi-Maria.” “I should have seen it coming from what happened to Shirin on her last season,” he says. “She got treated pretty poorly by the guys out there, she’s still resentful, she has some trauma around it, and she has some old family issues with male authority figures, and all the sudden she’s going to get on the beach and say, ‘Who are the strong guys? I want to get them out.’ To her credit, she was able to wield her Survivor prowess and rally the troops.” Vytas says he should have worked harder on solidifying relationships with others on the tribe outside of the obvious Shelter People, like Peih-Gee Law. “She was at my premiere party last night,” he says. “She came up to me and said, ‘I didn’t want to vote you out!'” I can confirm that with my own two eyes. I was at that Tribal Council, watching from a monitor about three minutes away, witnessing every single vote that was cast. I’m paraphrasing, but Peih-Gee cast her vote for Vytas and expressed her strong disagreement with the vote — that it was too early to go after someone like Vytas. Vytas agrees with Peih-Gee, obviously, and he highlights his position by quoting some familiar words: “There’s this great quote in an article on Parade Magazine from the pre-game that says: ‘People who get rid of threats early are playing from fear. They rarely do well. They rarely win. They rarely get deep. They screw the game up for the threats.’ I didn’t think people were going to try to get rid of me that soon. I think that tribe’s going to struggle in the next few immunity challenges. I think without me, they lose a lot of strength and a lot of cohesion.” Vytas doubles down on the claim: “It’s not smart. They’re playing from fear. They won’t do well when they get rid of these big threats early. Yes, I’m a big threat, and eventually they’re going to have to get rid of me, but that early? Especially when you have strength immunity challenges coming up? I don’t know if it’s such a smart move for them. I was really surprised they would gun for me that quickly. I knew I was going to get gunned for. People were going to see me as a threat, I just didn’t think I would be the first boot.” But to throw some words back at Vytas, I quote something he told me during the pre-game: “There’s so much luck involved on Survivor. Can you take the cards that have been dealt to you and make them work? Sometimes you just get such a [expletive] hand. There are people over the years who are great players and have been dealt such a crap hand and there’s no way they can make it work. I just hope I get a workable hand.” I ask him if he felt he had a workable hand, or if he feels he messed up the hand he was dealt. “I think I got dealt a pretty bad hand, but it was workable,” he admits, without hesitation. “I do think I got a workable hand, and I didn’t work it right. On the spectrum of hands I could have gotten dealt with, between good and bad, my hand was not that good, but looking back, there’s things I could have done that would have made it a workable possibility for me. Not realizing that Spencer was going to turn on me right away, especially when we were friends before the game? That was tough. I should have gotten Peih-Gee on board. We bonded, but Shirin did a really good job of taking Peih-Gee under her wing, and I missed out on an opportunity to have another person in my alliance. I do think it was a crap hand, but it wasn’t a completely unplayable one. That’s on me.” Indeed, that’s on Vytas — and there’s something else on Vytas, too: Awesome shorts. ON THE FINAL PAGE: Something Nice Back Home