Extracted season finale - Fox, 1 hour, 4/21/25
Before get to it, here’s, a quick recap: Hunger. Pain. Sickness. Misery. Blind luck. Contestants who are too weak to do anything. Tiresome drama about this or that drop. Bickering. Blind luck. Meters showing exactly how much they’re suffering. 
No medical extractions whatsoever. More bickering, more drama. Blind luck. Weepy confessionals. Shots of boring wilderness with absolutely nothing in it. Teasing at savage animal attacks that never happen. More goddam freaking blind luck. 
The worst part wasn’t even the exploitation, it’s that I wasn’t even sure what I was supposed to be feeling. Was I supposed to mock the contestants for their whining? Sympathize with them? Pick favorites? What about the voyeurs in the peanut gallery, was I supposed to identify with them, loathe them, laugh at them, what? There was a pervasive aimlessness throughout this whole exercise, to the point where I honestly couldn’t get angry at anyone.
All right, here we the heck go…
=== ACT I ===
Four contestants made it to the final day, but only two can contend for the quarter million. The task which will make this final cut will be box with a satellite phone sealed with a 5-tumbler lock. Each tumbler has all 26 letters of the alphabet, and the “helpers” have to…set a word…they think the contestant…will…guess. (It cannot be the name of anyone involved in the contest, and the host didn’t explicitly say this but I’m presuming that it has to be an actual word.) The helpers will…have no contact whatsoever with…the contestant…
Good lord. 
No clues, no direction, no help. One of the most important tasks of the entire season boils down to PURE LUCK. Here, I’ll give you some idea of how royally messed up this is. Say I’m a finallist. Here are some words that would work for me:
The land my parents immigrated from
My second favorite Vocaloid (after Gumi)
What would be my third favorite Vocaloid if her producers had any damn respect
What nearly every championship-caliber team I built any rooting interest in ended up doing (frigging Phoenix Suns… 
)
The lynchpin of the grandest video game, music, fanart, cosplay, doll, concert etc. etc. phenomenon ever
A very serious sleep disorder, the recognition and proper treatment of which quite literally saved my career and possibly my life
A wonderfully diverse and highly economical artform, easily what I spent the most money on at both comic book stores and Borders Books and Music
What most of the medication I’m taking right now is meant to fix
Something which is ABSOLUTELY CRUCIAL to have on certain types of meat and is ABSOLUTELY CRUCIAL not to have on certain other types of meat, and any moron can taste the difference
My favorite golfer during the only period of my life I avidly followed golf
A succinct description of every weight loss, exercise, learning, and dealing-with-literally-the-worst-scumbuckets-I’ve-known-in-my-life “program” I was force-fed as a child (frigging Shapedown… 
)
A vital citizen’s duty I help my mother with every year
The tech company that taught me about creativity, wonder, fun, joy, color, and limitless potential as a child and obscenely overpriced defective crap much later
What I miss about American Idol, Wipeout, and America’s Got Talent, personified by the fighting game character who, due to his out of control flatulence and frequent urination, I identified with more than any other
The theme of my favorite Rolling Thunder-esque platformer, my favorite licensed beat-‘em-up, and a reality show I swear to Okina I once genuinely loved.
How do I decide?? I’m not a damn mind reader! And what if my family choose something that I’m always so passionate about or would naturally gravitate to, like a hobby I haven’t given a crap about for the last twenty years or a relative I never liked that much and am trying to minimize contact with now? Goddesses, this is so stupid.
=== ACT II ===
On to the actual contest, which is divided into stages. Stage 1 is to inflate a raft with either a large bag or a breathing tube (the former being much faster). One contestant rips her bag, putting her at a colossal disadvantage, or rather it would if the second task wasn’t…yeah, you guessed it…the 5-letter word lock. Needless to say a couple contestants flail useless at this test of LUCK LUCK LUCK LUCK LUCK LUUUUUUUUUCCK, for which they receive tons of ridicule. Aside: It’s amazing how healthy and energetic all the finallists were, which of course immediately set off my BS alarm. One or two lucking out on the supply drops and being in better shape than the others is believable, but all four being fired up for a pretty intense physical contest after all the agony they’ve endured doesn’t wash at all. At any rate, top to advance, bottom two get a slightly less gargantuan middle finger than who’s going to finish second.
=== ACT III ===
Going right into the homestretch, where the task is to use the helpers’ instructions to decipher a Morse code message, then decide whether to head upstream or downstream. An exciting moment…or rather it would be if one contestant didn’t have a colossal lead after that truly bone-brained lock guessing task and was able to get started several minutes faster. Neither has any trouble with the message (I’m pretty sure anyone who’s made it that far isn’t going to mess up “dot” and “dash”), making the race to the line the most boring anticlimax imaginable. The producers do make a feeble attempt at a horse race narrative, but with no bunch-up points or other contrived nonsense, #2 has just run out of chances. To his credit, he puts on a brave face and tries to pull the I’m-just-glad-it’s-over card, but anyone can see that the cold reality of second place being the first nuclear missile enema recipient has to be eating him alive.
And there you have it, the cross between a show I’ve never heard of and a show I have zero interest in! In fairness, I can’t say that it’s a bad show, but that’s mainly because all the misery and politicking and bickering got so numbingly repetitive that I couldn’t watch more than five minutes an episode. Even the Primetimer faithful could barely be bothered to watch, and several of them said point-blank that they’re not watching another season, something I’ve never seen before. To put it bluntly, this is a reality show in search of a purpose, and if you know me you know I have no patience with this nonsense. If “it gets good” 3/4 of the way into the season or two episodes into the next season, it’s a waste of time. On the plus side, it didn’t actively aggravate or offend me like many past flashes-in-the-pan did.
My advice, watch it if you like listening to loud klaxons, laughing at the suffering of others, or getting preachy about contestants who get all whiny about hunger and inadequate shelter.