🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐
Jill Ashock and Amber Asay don’t win Outlast, but calling them the losers would totally miss the mark. Suffice it to say that their fates include plenty of strategic game play, shocking sabotage and unexpected backstabbing — but in the end, the rise and fall of Alpha camp produces the type of refuge that can survive the toughest conditions: a lifelong friendship.
In order to fully understand Jill and Amber’s bond, you have to first get the circumstances that brought them together. The pair first caught a glimpse of one another after landing in Juneau, Alaska, where each of the 16 Outlast contestants stayed for roughly 10 days before being dropped along the remote Neka river. Jill is a private investigator, EMT and mother of three, and brought both outdoor experience and professional building skills to the show. Amber, on the other hand, turned to the wilderness to heal; after battling a heroin addiction and being shot in the face by her former partner, she says pushing herself helped her regain a sense of purpose and confidence. For Jill and Amber, it wasn’t exactly besties at first sight, but both agree that they acknowledged something special in the other right away.
“At first, I thought this was just another chick,” Jill tells Tudum. “She’s out here to win a quarter of a million dollars. I’m out here to do the same, and she’s going to tell me whatever I want to hear.”
Distrust in other team members is sowed from the outset, when contestants have to split into four teams and make their way to separate locations in an attempt to survive, all with the hope of beating the other camps and taking home $1 million. Out of the four camps — Alpha, Bravo, Charlie and Delta — Jill and Amber both find themselves in Alpha, along with teammates Lee Ettinger and Justin Court. Right away, Alpha camp faces a set of unique challenges that sets the course for the rest of their experience.
“I don’t know about Jill,” Amber says, “But all I remember about arriving is a flashback to walking through all of that devil’s club and trying to find a camp and not having any sufficient place to set up for the night.”
Devil’s club (also known as devil’s walking stick) is a shrub native to the Pacific Northwest rain forests, and it grows in abundance along the Neka river. Its woody stems are covered in hundreds of noxious spines that are not only painful and difficult to remove, but leave behind a nasty rash. Says Jill, “Once it’s in there, it’s in there until you can either get it out or your body expels it somehow. You’re constantly irritated by it. It’s the devil.”
Defeat by a thousand devilish irritations is something of a metaphor for Jill and Amber’s experience on the show. After struggling to find a suitable place to set up a shelter, the women of Alpha camp meet with what feels like a long-running list of adversaries — human, environmental and otherwise. Early in the competition, Lee decides to depart the show, leaving Alpha camp with just three members. It was a somewhat vulnerable position to be in, but Jill and Amber join forces with their remaining teammate, Justin. For some time, the bond and skill set shared between the three of them seem to be a winning combination. However, peace in Alpha camp doesn’t last for long, and what transpires between them during the rest of their residence on the Neka river has lasting consequences.
“Neither of us have spoken with Justin,” Jill says. “I think for myself, I never will. I have nothing I want to say to that man at all — I don’t even know if I want to call him a man.”
Without giving away too much, it’s important to note that for Jill and Amber, the man of it all was the least compelling part of their experience. Despite the fact that survivalist environments tend to lean stereotypically hypermasculine, both women agree that in different ways, they were both there to prove they could accomplish their goals without a man — and ended up doing so with each other’s support.
“We’re both women that came from a background of distrust in men we [had] devoted our lives to,” Jill says. “And there, we were surrounded by nothing but men that were looking to take us out by any means possible.”
Amber says that Jill’s support and skill set were crucial in her own success on the show in more ways than one.
“I feel like what I brought was more of the emotional and mental strength to keep us on track when people were starting to crack up, because a resilience of spirit is what I had,” Amber says. “The outdoor skills I have I learned in Alaska, and that was because of Jill. So when Jill goes out and hunts, I’m going to go forage. We’re that support for each other through the end.”
Unfortunately, the end does come for Jill and Amber, but they don’t go down without a fight. The pair say they stand by the game they played, acknowledge their mistakes, grieve their losses and move forward with their new friendship, especially once Justin makes his true intentions known.
“That was pretty cool when Justin finally left us alone,” Jill says. “We could build our own place, just us, and it was so much better. We fortified that thing so much better than any man ever thought of doing.”
