After the puzzling vote that had Xander ending up with his name on zero ballots, I thought I should go back and look at the games of all three finalists to see if I missed something.
DeShawn can be dispensed with quickly — his one and only contribution to the season was stirring up trouble multiple times! He didn’t deserve to be in the final three.
As for Erika, she helped her team early by being good at puzzles. She saved her bacon by breaking the hourglass to give herself safety when she was all but certain to be voted out. She won an endurance-based immunity challenge. And when she got advantage at the end, she took advantage of it to win that challenge. Two of the above were situations caused by sheer luck (the hourglass and the advantage). Still, I say bravo to her for making the most of her chances.
But… Xander did much more. He chose to risk his vote at the start of the season to gain an extra vote. He made it to the merge despite the rest of his tribe planning to get rid of him for weeks (it’s crazy that Evvie, Tiffany, and Liana, all on the jury, didn’t give him respect for that). He fooled Liana by giving his advantages to Tiffany, and in the very same tribal council he persuaded Tiffany not to use the idol she was holding, which was the right move. He won an endurance immunity and also the final immunity. He was only the second-best player behind Ricard, but no way should Erika have won over him.
Good things about the season:
I think the two things I will remember about this one a few years from now are Xander’s “no, but you can have this fake” moment and the three-way idol storyline that continued for a few weeks, with players having to nonchalantly say lines like “I am as confused as a goat on Astroturf.”
One other good thing is that there were fewer idols than in some previous years — things had gotten a bit ridiculous so I’m glad this was scaled back.
Bad things about the season:
Never has a season concerned itself so much with the players’ personal stories and what they have done outside the game. Jeff Probst obviously loves getting into that, but guess what, every reality show tries to tug people’s heartstrings, so to me it has nothing to do with what makes the show interesting and unique.
The season didn’t have any real “can’t wait to see what happens next week” moments.
Also, while new twists keep things fresh, this season’s pretty much flopped. The break-the-hourglass twist and the do-or-die that DeShawn had to do were both unfair to the players, and the shot-in-the-dark die was only used once, by Sydney, and even then it turned out she would have been better off doing without it.
I also wearied of the self-congratulation this season: Probst tried so hard to tell us viewers how exciting and great and socially relevant it was.
So where does this rank among the Survivor seasons to date? Very, very near the bottom. I have it second to last, ahead of only One World, and I am wavering even on that. For now, my tiebreaker is watchability — if I were forced to watch one of the two seasons again, I would pick this one over One World.
Rankings Update
Ricard played an excellent game, but not on a level that would qualify him for my best players of all time list.
Also, he and Shan had a great run to start the game, but they turned on each other so early, they don’t make my best alliances of all time list.
Also, the likes of J.D. and Tiffany were not bad enough to make my list of the worst players of all time .
You can check out my full rankings of the seasons (including this one) here.
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