It’s ten in the morning on the east coast when Peih-Gee Law answers my call. She’s in San Francisco, however, so it’s bright and early in her neck of the woods — probably too bright, and definitely way too early, given the shenanigans that ensued the night before. “I’m a little bit hungover because I was watching with Shirin last night, and we were playing a Survivor drinking game,” Peih-Gee tells me. “We had a couple of things that every time it happened on screen, we would cheers and take a drink.” Leave it to Peih-Gee to mark her Survivor: Cambodia — Second Chance demise with a game. Some of the items on the list, according to the Season 15 veteran herself, included: 1. “Anytime Jeremy mentioned his wife.”

2. “Anytime I made a face at Abi.”

3. “Anytime Abi was being annoying.”

4. “Whenever Spencer made social game concessions.”

5. “Whenever they showed Stephen ineptly chopping something.” Given how episode three, “We Got a Rat,” played out, then, it’s kind of a wonder that Peih-Gee is awake this morning, let alone alive. “I’m barely functioning,” she laughs. “You have me at the sweet spot where I’ve already had one and a half cups of coffee. Anymore, and I’m going to start tweaking out. The people later in the day are getting tweaked out Peih-Gee, and the earlier people got not-awake Peih-Gee. So you’re in a good position here.” Music to my ears, for so many reasons, including the fact that we should have a vast range of Peih-Gee Law interviews to look forward to throughout her exit press day. That’s just about the only good news for Peih-Gee, however, now that she’s the third person voted out of Second Chance, little more than fifteen seasons after her original shot at Survivor. “It’s a bummer that I had to go out so early,” she concedes, “but I’m glad I got to go out at all. It feels awesome. I’m just glad I even got another chance to come back and play.” Less exciting? The circumstances surrounding her demise — including something of a full circle moment throwing back to her earlier season. ON THE NEXT PAGE: Angkor What??

Even though she’s the third person voted out of her season, Peih-Gee managed to make Survivor history all the same. Peih-Gee, Jeff Varner, Abi-Maria Gomes, Woo Hwang, Andrew Savage and Tasha Fox all became members of the 100th tribe in Survivor history, Angkor. It’s also the first time two tribes have been swapped with an entirely new third tribe spawned in the process — a twist that some of the castaways saw coming in the pre-game, based on what they told me at the time. “How I see it, because it’s good TV, is you start with two tribes, you knock at least two contestants off, and then you break it up into three,” Terry Deitz predicted when we spoke at Ponderosa, on the day before the game began. “That breaks up loyalties. When you get back to the merge, you don’t know what you’re going to get. As a fan, I like that. It really mixes things up, and forces people to play a social game.” Terry clearly liked the episode three twist not just as a fan, but also as a player, based on the fact that he (1) stayed on his original Ta Keo beach and (2) was joined by people he described as “first round draft picks,” like mighty Joe Anglim and Keith Nale. (Nevermind that whole business with Kelley Wentworth kicking him under the bus; that’s a problem for another day.) Less psyched about the swap? Peih-Gee and the rest of Angkor. Despite their place in Survivor history, pretty much everything else about the situation was a bummer, as Gillian Larson would say. Unlike Ta Keo and Bayon, the people at Angkor were forced to build a completely new shelter on a completely new beach, with only the bare minimum of supplies — absolutely no food or anything else the two other tribes were able to keep from the marooning. “It was a ten out of ten worst case scenario,” Peih-Gee tells me with an exasperated laugh. “We called it the Survivor Ghetto. It was a thousand times worse than even my season on China, and it was pretty hard out there, too. This was worse.” That’s a serious indictment, since Peih-Gee’s season is widely considered one of the most difficult living conditions of any edition of Survivor. Peih-Gee doubles down, describing the Angkor situation as “really, really unfair in a lot of ways.” She goes on to list one specific example, involving the terrain of Angkor beach. “For example, just for us to get to our beach from challenges, it’s like a 10-minute uphill hike. On our other beaches, when you got back from challenges, you got to walk directly onto the beach, no hiking. Our camp was really, really hilly. When you don’t have food, it’s work, and it’s hot. Just to get food and water and supplies was literally an uphill hike. All the other beaches? It was flat. You’re just dragging a piece of bamboo down the beach. It was totally easy.” “They had food, they had all the supplies that we got from the marooning,” she continues. “We had already expended energy into building the shelter the first time, and now we had to do it all over again. It was a nightmare.” But if there was one silver lining, at least, it was the members of Angkor. Peih-Gee entered the new tribe with a numbers majority, four people hailing from Ta Keo and two from Bayon. “The first thought was, ‘Oh, thank god, I’m in a majority on this tribe,'” she says of her first impressions of her new team dynamic. “I had Varner, who I was really tight with, and I had Woo, who I was also really tight with. I was also glad that at least we had Savage and Tasha, who are both very strong players. So the hope was that maybe we would not have to go to Tribal at all.” But even if Angkor visited Tribal first, with the numbers firmly on her side, Peih-Gee shouldn’t have had much to worry about. In fact, she tells me that early on in the tribe’s formation, she and Varner strongly considered throwing the upcoming immunity challenge in order to take out one of the former Bayon members. “On the first day we get to Angkor beach,” she says, “Jeff comes up to me and says, ‘Maybe we should throw this next challenge so we can vote out Savage. That way we’ll save one of our former allies on the other tribe, and we can get rid of Savage. We’re the only ones in control right now.'” Sound familiar? It’s a close mirror of the situation Peih-Gee found herself in during Survivor: China, when she threw a challenge to knock out the swapped-over Aaron Reisberger, a big threat from the other tribe. “Don’t think for a second that I haven’t thought about that,” she laughs. “The irony is not lost on me that at this point, once again, I had the opportunity to do the same thing. Can you imagine if I threw another challenge and voted Savage out?” Surprisingly, given her willingness to throw a challenge in the past, Peih-Gee was not on board with the idea this time. “On my first season, the timing was right, because the merge was coming,” she says. “I said, ‘Right now, we’re so far from the merge, it just doesn’t make sense to me. You just don’t know what’s going to happen.’ I flatly refused. I wasn’t going to throw that challenge.” Even without throwing the challenge, Angkor wound up losing anyway, and Peih-Gee was the one sent packing. How could that have possibly happened, with the numbers on her side? Well… about that. ON THE NEXT PAGE: Hurricane Abi Defies The Law

Almost as soon as her second chance began, Peih-Gee found herself in the eye of a storm, and that storm had a name: Abi-Maria. The details of Bracelet Gate are already well-documented at this point, at least as far as it was depicted on the show — and at least Peih-Gee believes the depiction was accurate to how it played out in real life. “I think the edit shows what she’s like out there,” Peih-Gee says when I bring up Bracelet Gate. “It’s hard feeling like you’re being accused of something you didn’t do, especially when you’re being called a thief, and someone is going behind your back to everybody on your tribe and trying to tell them that you’re a thief. That was a hard pill to swallow.” Following the bracelet drama, Peih-Gee and Abi continued to clash. For instance, in the second episode of Second Chance, Abi walked up on a private conversation between Peih-Gee and Shirin, during which the two were venting about the Brazilian firecracker from Season 25. The episode went on to show Terry Deitz comforting Abi while the rest of the tribe laughed at her expense, but Peih-Gee says there’s more to the story. “That night she sat on the beach, I went to talk to her and I sat with her for a while,” she tells me. “At the very end, I was like, ‘Okay, well I’m going to try and get some rest, we have a challenge tomorrow, and I don’t want anyone to go home.’ And she goes, ‘Oh, you don’t want me to go home?’ And I said, ‘No.’ And she says, ‘Oh, you did want me to go home then?'” Peih-Gee describes a few other incidents that didn’t make the show, and even some accusations from Abi that Peih-Gee only heard second hand. “She didn’t say it to our faces, but Abi would say, ‘Peih-Gee and Wiglesworth are working hard just to make me look bad,'” for instance. “She took everything I said the wrong way,” Peih-Gee continues. “I’m one of these people where I don’t hold a grudge. I get over things very fast. Even after we’d fight, I would be okay with her, but she constantly took everything I said the wrong way. I’ll tell you, it would try anybody’s patience.” Even with her patience tested, Peih-Gee felt she could work with Abi. She said as much during their blowup in episode two, telling Abi directly that she can work with anyone, personality issues notwithstanding. The proof was in the pudding in the season’s first two votes, with Abi and Peih-Gee both on the same page. For her part, Peih-Gee hoped the trend would continue over at Angkor. “We’d been fighting, but we had voted together in the last two Tribals,” she says, “so I was hoping that maybe it would continue.” It did not continue, however, for a few reasons. First, Peih-Gee credits Savage and Tasha for working their minority position within Angkor: “There was a big divide between me and Abi. We had a lot of trouble working together. They were smart to exploit that.” But she also lays some blame down at the feet of Varner, for a few reasons. For one, Peih-Gee says that Varner’s actions at previous Tribal Councils were rubbing Woo the wrong way. “Woo was like, ‘I don’t trust him, so maybe we should try to work with Savage and Tasha,'” she says. “Woo and I had been very close at that point. I said, ‘If you’re determined to go that way, I’ll go that way as well.'” She also feels like Varner called her out during his emotional outburst at the end of the episode three immunity challenge, even if she can’t quite remember all the details. “After the challenge, I was really spent, and I was only half paying attention, but Tasha called him a rat, and he said, ‘Well I’m not the rat, I’m just calling out the rats! I saw Woo doing this, and I saw Peih-Gee talking to Savage,’ and blah blah blah,” she says. “He said he was trying to keep his former alliance together. I think that’s what he said. I’m not 100% sure. It was something in that vein. I was wondering why he was calling me out.” Peih-Gee says she would have been fine with Varner’s outburst if not for the fact that he brought her name into the equation. Following the loss, it really looked like the Australian Outback veteran and de facto narrator of the season would be going home — if not for Abi. “It was going to be him up until the very last minute,” Peih-Gee explains, “when Abi was like, ‘I’m voting however Tasha votes. I’m siding with them from now on. I’m going to do whatever she wants.’ And I was like, ‘Well, if she’s determined to never work with me, and I vote Jeff out tonight? Then I’m just screwing myself up in the future.'” Hence why Peih-Gee went to Tasha and Savage to flip the vote against Abi. She gives a good amount of credit to Varner, too, for putting her on that path, despite the episode showing him dejectedly lying down in the shelter after the challenge. “They made it look like he didn’t do anything, but Varner came and talked to everybody,” she says. “It’s not true that he didn’t do anything. He came chasing after me and Woo, he was huffing and puffing. He came and told me that Abi was trying to vote me out. I will say that’s what made me want to go and talk to Abi about it, and that’s when she said, ‘Well, I’m not voting with you guys, I can tell you that much.’ That was definitely part of it. He was able to turn it in another direction. Ultimately he didn’t get voted out because I went after Abi and they decided it was easier to go after me then, because I flat-out refused to go after Varner. And then I think Jeff, the minute he saw somebody else’s name come up, he just jumped on it.” Obviously, Peih-Gee wishes Varner hadn’t jumped on that opportunity. “I really wish he had been willing to go for rocks,” she says. “I think the risk is worth it in the long run. I told him: ‘If I lose you, I’m going to be out next, and if you lose me, you might be out next.'” We’ll see how that plays out in the future — the situation for Angkor at large and Varner specifically is grim right now — but recall what Varner, who lost season two in a tie vote, told me in the pre-game: “I will not draw a rock. If I have to flip a vote, I’ll do it.” Consider the vote flipped, and consider Peih-Gee rocked out of the game. She doesn’t blame Varner, and she certainly doesn’t blame Savage and Tasha. “To be fair to them, Abi-Maria was being super, super sweet to them,” she says. “She saw an opportunity to jump ship. Tasha was braiding her hair and using her church voice on her, and Abi-Maria was loving it. So I get it. I was telling them, ‘I don’t think you can trust Abi-Maria. She’s going to turn on you.’ But because they didn’t have firsthand experience of it, I’m sure they thought the same thing Jeff was thinking: ‘We’ll work with her for this first vote at least, and that’ll put us in the right position.’ They did what they were supposed to do.” If only Peih-Gee had done what she wanted to do a few days earlier. ON THE FINAL PAGE: Game Over