Outlast: The Jungle's Winners Explain the Difficult Decision That Had to Be Made to Win

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for Netflix's Outlast: The Jungle. Read at your own risk.]

Netflix's survival series Outlast: The Jungle wrapped up its first season following a grueling competition that saw contestants survive with little more than their wits and guts in the jungles of Panama. Sweltering heat, sudden storms, voracious bugs (oh, the bugs!), and more environmental obstacles made life in the wilderness nearly impossible, but in the end, it was a difficult tactical decision — not keen survival skills — by winners Maddy Jones and Nikki Hru that made them one million dollars richer. 

Heading into the final challenge against Team Bravo's Abby Chu and Pharaoh Gayles, Maddy and Nikki's Team Alpha was a three-person squad that included Leiya Pillitteri, who defected from the male-dominated Team Charlie — the season's villains — once she realized they were going to vote her off. But in the penultimate challenge between the three teams that decided the two finalists, it became obvious that Leiya was having difficulties in the heat of the competition as the trio barely advanced after Leiya failed to produce a fire quickly.

"When we left the bow and arrow and fire challenge, like we felt like it was a loss," Maddy told TV Guide. "We didn't lose, but we walked back to our camp with our tail between our legs, and I don't like how that felt." Maddy was adamant about acknowledging the difficulty of what Leiya had to do — to start a fire with damp materials in the wind that would allow Maddy to shoot a flaming arrow at a target — but she doesn't believe it was the task itself that was Leiya's obstacle. "This is a primitive skill that takes a lot of time and effort to be perfect at, but ... I sensed a lack of confidence with her, and I think she really backed herself on the training that she had went through in order to prepare for this challenge, and so she really felt the need to show that in order to validate her own confidence or validate her own place on the board." 

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Things became more dire in the finale. During the race through swamps, jungles, and rivers to determine the winner, Leiya had to repeatedly be spurned on by Maddy and Nikki to move faster as she kept falling behind, threatening to cost them the win. As they camped overnight between stages and with the cash prize within their grasp, Maddy and Nikki made the tough decision to vote Leiya off their team with just one day left in the month-long competition. Devastated, Leiya left the group and Maddy and Nikki pushed on and reached the finish line first. 

"It's not so much about how quickly or slowly [Leiya] performed, or how well she executed skills that she had sold herself on," Nikki told TV Guide. "For me it was how the pressure was handled that really put me into a place of being like, 'Oh, I don't know if you have the mindset for this, and I don't know if you have the wherewithal to even know that you don't have the mindset right now.' Because it's OK to fall into these spirals or to like have a moment where you crack under pressure, but you have to be able to snap [out of it] and be like, 'OK, I know that I messed up, or I know that I'm cracking, how do I fix it?' And that seemed like to be lacking." 

She continued, "I'm not trying to yuck anybody's yum or tell people what to do, but Maddy and I handled pressure very similarly, where it was put your head down, figure it out, and that was the only thing to do, that was the only option. And that seemed to be something lacking [in Leiya]."

It was always going to be difficult for Leiya to join a new team and instantly fit right in, especially given the way she was treated by Team Charlie, who doubted Leiya's skills and rarely let her have a say in the group. And while Charlie and Bravo were rocked by intersquad drama, once Team Alpha's Ben flared out when Team Charlie kicked him out of the game, Team Alpha found a groove and got stronger and stronger.  

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"Nikki and I just had such a good team dynamic going into it that it was a difficult time at the end of the game to bring in another person that kind of felt — what's the word — that kind of felt maybe less tenacious than us," Maddy said. "I felt like [Nikki and I] were a super strong team, and at the end was not a time that it felt safe to feel like a weaker team than what we had previously been."

As of the premiere of Outlast: The Jungle on Netflix, Maddy and Nikki hadn't seen or talked to Leiya since they left her in the jungle, but the two only wish the best for her. 

"I would love to reach out to her and let her know that I have the utmost respect for her, and I think she's a great person," Maddy said. "I don't have any hard feelings. I don't know if she feels the same way about me, but I mean, I absolutely love her as a person."

"I really love the time we got to get to know her, and I think she's a badass in her own right, right?" Nikki said. "Like, I think if we had had more time with her, if she had been on our team from the beginning, I think there are skills that she definitely has that could have actually been shown and utilized, but those skills weren't useful in the end, right? Like, that's not the skill we needed from her. We needed the grit and we needed the mindset." 

That said, the vibes at Alpha's base camp toward the end of the game with Leiya were great, they said. And watching the drama with other squads reminded them how good they had it.

"It's been great to watch [the other teams on Netflix], but they had this back and forth that we just didn't deal with, and it really was so lovely, while like dying, right? Like, it's lovely to be able to just say, 'I'm gonna go lay in the sun.' 'OK, I'm gonna go collect snails.' We consistently started eating once we had fire, and then especially after we got fishing gear, we were having — we kept calling it Girl Dinner - we had second dinner. We would have our fish, it would be this fish oil broth. We cooked it with sea water, so it was nice and salty with electrolytes, and then we would throw in like foraged veggies." 

"I would still eat that," Maddy said. "I would still go eat that." 

The first season of Outlast: The Jungle is now on Netflix.