The day before Survivor: Cambodia — Second Chance began, it was hard to get a sense of who would fall where in the weeks ahead. Everyone talked such a mighty game, everyone felt sure about their potential, and everyone had their eye on people to beat. If there was a consensus about any group of individuals, however, it was the increasing alarm raised over the so-called Cagayan Four — the handful of individuals hailing from Season 28: Spencer Bledsoe, Tasha Fox, Yung “Woo” Hwang, and Kass McQuillen. All four of these names were conjured for all manner of reasons, but none more frequently and with more incredulity than “Chaos Kass,” the brainy mom from a small town in California where she practices law and some sort of apparent witchcraft that causes people to speak llama. “She scares me,” Stephen Fishbach, runner-up from Tocantins and the apparent poet laureate of Second Chance, told me during our chat at Ponderosa, less than 24 hours before the start of the game. “She seems so rational and funny and smart, but uniformly I have heard she’s erratic and vindictive.” Others echoed his sentiments, like Kelley Wentworth, who described Kass as “[expletive] nuts,” and Ciera Eastin, who admitted that Kass “makes me nervous.” It seemed that everyone on the cast had reservations about Chaos Kass, voted onto Second Chance on the legs of her reputation as one of the most infamous villains in the show’s history. But viewers and contestants alike were in for a surprise when Kass hit the beach. Whatever killer clown makeup she once wore as the anarchic Joker of Cagayan did not make the trip to Cambodia, or was buried too deep in her bag to ever come out. People who feared Kass before the game, like Wentworth, ended up with friendship bracelets on their wrists, rather than agitated animal noises spewing from their lips. Yes, there were enemies and blowouts (at least one of game-ending proportions), but for the most part, Kass McQuillen’s second chance was characterized not by chaotic gameplay and middle fingers, but by genuine bonds and laughter. So, the obvious two-part question: What the heck happened to Chaos Kass, and who is this smiling stranger wearing her face? “Kassanova was in full effect,” she explains to me the morning after her exit episode. “I used Chaos Kass to get voted back in, but that’s what I had to to do to get into the game. Once I got into the game, chaos was out the window. I was there to win.” Chaos is many things — a ladder, an elevator, a force of nature, a nickname, a play style — but in the end, according to Kass, it was most importantly a platform to get back on the hunt for the Sole Survivor title. And once she got that shot? It was time to take a page out of a very different playbook. ON THE NEXT PAGE: How To Win Friends And Influence People

Weeks before sharing a beach with him in Cambodia, Kass shared an elevator with Andrew Savage in Los Angeles, during the casting process for Second Chance. She “totally fan-girled” at the sight of Savage at the time, thinking back to her crush on the Pearl Islands veteran from her law school days. Sadly, the good vibes were not reciprocated, according to Kass, who says Savage did not trust her from the very beginning — and it wasn’t a secret. “He let me know early on that he didn’t trust me,” she says of her original Bayon tribe mate. “He was directly like, ‘No, Kass. I don’t want to hear it. You’re Chaos Kass, and that’s who you’re always going to be to me.’ And I was like, ‘Oh! Well, so much for that second chance.'” In fairness, Kass didn’t exactly have the kindest things to say about Savage during the pre-game, and her assessment of the man is even harsher now that she’s out of the game. “What’s that app where people swipe at each other — Tinder?” she asks me. “My relationship with him was like a Tinder thing. I swiped right when I saw him, we rode three floors [on the elevator] together, and then we went on this beach vacation, and he turns out to be this cantankerous toddler who is very emotional and has not a lot of clue about what’s going on. It was kind of a letdown. I’m glad I found out before I took things to the next level with him.” (See? Even if she put chaos behind her, Kass still has her signature poison-tipped observations at the ready.) Looking beyond the choice of words, Kass’ early dynamic with Savage represents the uphill battle she faced immediately on entering Second Chance — but one she was able to overcome, thanks in large to her tribe’s success at challenges, and the behavior of some of her other tribe mates. “Monica was absolutely blowing up her own game,” she says, as a for instance. “At that point on Bayon, Kimmi and Monica were the two targets over me, as far as I knew. If we had to go to Tribal, it was probably going to be Monica. I felt I was winning some credibility, and then winning the first challenge helped more.” By the time Bayon won the second immunity challenge, Kass was feeling even more ingrained in her tribe. “I was getting along well with people, I was sleeping in the middle of the shelter with people snuggling me,” she says. “I was taking trips to the water well, and other people weren’t doing those things. There were a couple of people who weren’t having those moments. I was feeling good.” Kass even felt good about Tasha, who she played with and (more famously) against in her first season. The two spoke by the fire on one of the first two nights, according to Kass, deciding to put their past behind them and forge ahead with the new game. “We were pretty tight over there on the initial Bayon,” says Kass. “I knew she didn’t like me, because it’s something you can tell. You know when people don’t like you. I knew it could become a problem, but as long as there was no reason for her to go after me, I felt I could work with other people and build my case with them and just keep her at bay.” Kass didn’t have to worry about Tasha until much later, thanks to a tribe swap on Day 7 that put the two on separate beaches. Kass says her second tribe, Ta Keo 2.0, was her happiest time in the game, and the period where she felt she was actually winning over friends and influencing people. “I was with a lot of people I was working with anyway,” she explains. “Joe and I were having our little Joemance; Terry and I were bonding, since we were both in the Navy and had stuff to talk about; Ciera and I got along great, and I felt I was channeling my inner Laura Morett and stepping into that role to help Ciera feel comfortable in the game; Wentworth, I enjoyed goofing around with and teasing — I made her a bracelet! I killed a chicken with Keith Nale, and we bonded over plucking. He enjoyed me throwing the guts into the water and teasing the girls with intestines.” “I was really having fun,” she reiterates. “That Ta Keo 2.0 tribe was wonderful. All of the people were great. Nothing bad was going on over there.” Nothing bad, that is, until Terry Deitz was removed from the game due to a family emergency, facilitating the dissolution of the three-tribe format — and the dissolution of the Cagayan Four as well, such as it ever existed. ON THE NEXT PAGE: The Brains Mistrust

Heading into Second Chance, there were few marquee match-ups more eagerly awaited than the inevitable showdown between Spencer and Kass, often talked about as the Charlie Brown and Lucy of Survivor. Even in their pre-game interviews, Spencer and Kass spoke about each other with a mixture of fearful trepidation and gleeful anticipation of the game ahead, with Kass letting me know that she would write down Spencer’s name every time if no one kept her in the loop. But when faced with the chance to pull the football away in Second Chance, Kass instead helped Spencer kick the thing into a winning vote against their fellow Cagayan veteran Woo Hwang, the first and only victim of Ta Keo 3.0. At the time, it was hard to picture why Kass would choose to trust Spencer over Woo, given their history. On reflection, however, it makes much more sense; Kass did not trust Savage (and, based on her comments, the feeling was mutual), and she needed to vote out one of his top lieutenants while she still had the chance. “If you think about it, Woo needs an alpha,” she says. “He’s never going with me. He’s a number for my enemies at that point. We wanted to get Savage out, Abi didn’t want to vote Savage, so Woo was the next best choice, because he was in Savage’s pocket. If Woo gets to the merge, he’s a pawn. He’ll get used by everybody. I left my fate in Woo’s hands once, and it didn’t work out well. Woo told me that he was actually playing Survivor this time, and that scared me to death. I was like, ‘Oh my god! Woo’s actually trying to play? This is more dangerous than Woo not playing!'” As for Spencer, Kass says she had a fireside chat with her fellow Luzon loser, just like she spoke with Tasha at the beginning of the game. “We had a nice talk out there on Ta Keo 3.0,” she recalls. “I said, ‘Hey, I’m here to play Second Chance, not Cagayan. I will work for you if it works to my benefit. I have no grudges.'” “People want the Chaos Kass versus Spencer rivalry,” she adds, “and it’s all fun, but I was never going to throw my game away to vote out Spencer.” But that’s easy for Kass to say, considering she beat Spencer and Tasha the first time. When the opportunity to target Kass emerged at the merge (the earliest and largest in the show’s history, with timing that certainly saved Savage’s skin and equally certainly put Kass and Ciera in an unenviable position), Tasha went after the person she knew, historically, she could not trust. To this day, Kass does not feel like she should have been targeted at the merge. “I wanted Jeremy or Savage out,” she says, explaining that she tried to get others on board with the plan, like Fishbach. “I tried my hardest, and laid out a really good case to him, but he wasn’t ready to do it.” Instead, almost everyone in the game turned on Kass, thanks to a variety of factors — like Joe choosing to side with the alpha males rather than the Kass contingent, for instance. “There’s clearly a division between the alphas and the perceived weaker women,” she says. “And rightfully so. If I was an alpha male? I think it’s brilliant that they’re sticking together.” Kass is less complimentary toward Tasha’s play style. She says that Tasha openly spent “an entire day maligning me and berating me,” to the point that Kass knew her time was up hours before arriving at Tribal Council. “I think it’s the worst way to go out of Survivor,” she says, “other than the way Terry went out; for people to say, ‘You’re going home tonight, Kass,’ and then not talk to you.” Kass says she would have respected Tasha’s move if it was a blindside; instead, she feels she was slowly eviscerated, Walking Dead style. “[Tasha] ripped me open and left me lying out for the vultures,” Kass says about her demise in the game. “I think it’s disrespectful to the game and to me as a person and player, and I think it speaks volumes about that kind of player and that person — that you don’t have the cajones and the self-control to execute a beautiful move, one that would be wonderful for the show. Instead, she came out guns blazing.” The shots did not cease for several hours, through the rest of a tense day at camp and an equally brutal Tribal Council. “You can tell I was sitting there waiting to go,” says Kass. “I was just holding my bag as Jeff started reading the votes. I don’t think they could have edited it as a surprise in any way, because of how it played out on the beach.” With that, Kass’ torch was snuffed — but her time in the game was far from over. ON THE FINAL PAGE: Welcome to Ponderosa