Tatiana Maslany eats rotten elk bone marrow broth and other tales of survival Sunday

If you are what you eat, we’ve got bad news for you, Tatiana

Ah Sundays, that long and lazy day for slow-cooking a delicious Sunday sauce if you’re a pasta fan. Or maybe it’s the brood gathering around the dinner table for mom’s pot roast or grandma’s brisket.

Or, if you’re Tatiana Maslany in the Laramie Mountains of Wyoming during winter, it’s the perfect day of the week to tuck into a rib-stickin’ meal of rotting elk bone marrow. Because hey, a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do to survive an episode of Running Wild with Bear Grylls: The Challenge.

Maslany was there to face a few of her fears, and ended up facing a dead and rotting elk on the mountainside. After seeing that the soft tissue and organs had long been eaten by another animal or rotted away, Grylls was able to crack open some bones with a rock and extract the elk’s bone marrow. He called it “arguably the most nutritional part of the animal.”

When it came time to enjoy this fine dining treat, Grylls boiled up some bone marrow in water and offered to take the first sip. He admitted that it did taste like "it's been around a bit longer" and "a little bit on the edge" in terms of freshness, but that its fine because they boiled it.

Then it was a very un-reassured Maslany’s turn to take a drink, which she begrudgingly did.

“I was nervous to drink it, cuz I don't love tasting things that are maybe rotten,” Maslany said. “It was pretty unspectacular.”

This lIttle piggy went MIA

Speaking of grub, survival shows are always centered around competitors rustling up some or dying trying, and on Naked and Afraid: Castaway, the teams did not disappoint tonight.

For seemingly ever now, Bulent has been trying to catch a wild pig in an aircraft-cable snare, but the little porker keeps evading capture. And he has become so obsessively focused on the task (“If it costs me an arm and a leg, I’m still getting him. It is my pig,” Bulent declared) that when teammates Kera and Ma’im announce they are breaking camp in search of sustenance and sunshine, Bulent stays put, opting for BBQ over a breakup. Which may be a good thing, since constantly bickering Bulent and Na’im have been looking like they were ready to BBQ each other.

Meanwhile, Justin of the now two-person team that includes Rachel (last week saw Candice getting an emergency medical evac due to a bacterial infection) rather unwisely tasted forbidden fruit by way of a tempting but poisonous treat hanging from a tree. The misstep might literally have been deadly had he eaten a larger quantity, but discretion was the better part of starvation, so the small amount he consumed didn’t do him in. Phew.

And finally, the team of Andrew, Heather and Patrick has been eating like kings on beached parrot fish, a knifed flounder and more clacker claws than you can shake a Red Lobster Crabfest mallet at. So why, then, does Patrick decide he wants, no needs, to hunt down and eat a saltwater crocodile, one of the most vicious apex predators out there? That’s what his teammates want to know, and they’re getting pretty PO’d by his obsessive and dangerous quest.

But hey, hunger — and the presence of a camera crew — can make a person do strange things.

With friends like this, who needs cannibalism?

Over on Survive the Raft, it was hunger of another type, as players started turning on each other — as you do after multiple days in a confined space with people of divergent personalities and a big ol' money bounty at stake.

Having previously kicked out the only two people of color with seemingly limited awareness of what they had done, the now all-white crew was recently joined by Jimmy, a man of Syrian descent, and, tonight, by Jason, a good-natured “Southern charmer” from Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Though Jimmy was clearly hellbent on stirring the pot (which he did by pitting Tara and CJ in a near-death match) and was arguably the strategically wisest guy to give the boot, some players were clearly uncomfortable with the optics of kicking out yet another non-Causcasian. Meanwhile, Tara had hoped the group would band against backstabbing CJ, but in the end, the majority played it safe and kicked off the newbie Jason.

It’s a player-eat-player world out there.

Running Wild with Bear Grylls airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on National Geographic; Naked and Afraid: Castaways airs Sundays at 8 p.m. on Discovery; Survive the Raft airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on Discovery.