The new season of Survivor premieres tonight. 20 previous winners returning for a new season for $2 millon prize.
Honestly, I’m a little ambivalent about watching. I’m still disgusted from what happened last season, and to be honest I didn’t miss the show once I stopped watching it after Kellee was voted out. I’ll probably watch the premiere and then decide from there.
That’s my take as well. I really don’t like returning players at all, and the show has gotten so cliched and predictable that it really needs to be put out of its misery. Nothing the producers do makes it any better.
You want Survivor, make it real. Drop 18 people on an island with remote cameras. Come back when there is one left alive.
So a question I had back when they announced the cast - how are they going to prevent Amber & Rob from conspiring together? One of the bedrock rules of Survivor is “You can’t agree to share the prizes”, and IIRC, they’ve even somehow prevented winners from giving gifts to the losers after the season was over. Make sense - 2 people in an unbreakable alliance, planning to split the winnings if either wins, will be much stronger than any other 2 players. But you can’t stop Rob & Amber from sharing the prize, so what’s to stop them from working together for either to win?
All the other players who know they already have a built in alliance and would be idiots to not vote at least one of them out right away.
Also, I’m assuming they updated their rules regarding coordination during the Blood Vs. Water season.
Man oh man, I wish they would simply drop a crew of total unknowns into the barrel.
mmm
It’s been 20 years guys. We know what the show is now.
I’ve been super excited for an all-winners season for awhile now. Then I grew a bit disappointed when I heard they were bringing back gimmicks like Edge of Extinction and adding fire tokens and the like. But… I think it might actually work for an all-winners season. The fire tokens makes Edge more interesting (they’ll have more to do, and more influence in the game) and there’s now an interesting dynamic where voting someone out because of their super tight bond with someone else isn’t a deathblow, as that person still has influence and can help their ally out (as already demonstrated by Natalie and Amber immediately giving their coins to Jeremy and Rob).
I still think there’s a few too many newer winners, especially ones who were relatively weaker like Michelle, Adam, Nick, Ben, but overall this is a pretty good cast. And I am stoked to see folks like Yul and Kim back. Really worried for Kim though, I was thinking she was gone, especially after not getting any screentime until very late in the second hour. I do feel a bit bad for Amber coming back and getting voted out because of Rob, though.
There’s a lot of interesting dynamics at work. Old-school vs new-school. Veterans vs one-timers. Pre-existing alliances, whether real or perceived. For all the talk about how the older guys need to catch up on the speed of the game, it almost seems like the older ones might have an advantage because they’re icons in the eyes of the newer players. You could see how completely star-struck folks like Ben, Adam and Sophie were.
I’m still a bit worried that all the real star players are going home early and we’re gonna get a winner from the more recent, less interesting group (kinda like Sarah winning Game Changers), but so far I’m pretty stoked.
With this particular cast, I think it would be fun to have Jeff say “drop your buffs” every other challenge and remix the players. I also think it was pretty bitchy for Sandra to manipulate the Amber vote just because Rob didn’t tell her he was going to play this season.
So they brought back a terrible gimmick, and added another terrible gimmick. Seriously, the “fire tokens” are like when a video game series runs out of ideas so they add crafting to a game where it has absolutely no place. I assume they brought back Extinction because they want to make sure everyone stays in the game (and on camera) as long as possible so their fans don’t tune out. I’m not holding out high hopes for this season.
I read an interview with Probst in which he admitted that a lot of the champions weren’t interested in returning if they couldn’t be guaranteed a least a few days of screen time. No one wanted to do one episode, be voted out and then have to cool their heels in a hotel while production wrapped up. So exile island ensures that people stick around at least for a couple of episodes.
If I was playing I would want to vote off Sandra, Rob, Parvati and Tyson first. Those players are all huge threats. I was impressed that Rob was already bossing around and intimidating his tribe? I liked the clip of Parvati and Rob talking where they admitted that the other players should be coming after them.
Okay, now that it’s established Rob genuinely DOES have “mind control” as his super power…
So he was annoyed they voted off his wife? That’ll last … until he starts getting fire tokens or Immunity Idols or some other gimmick advantage from Amber.
Really, there’s no way that putting a single unbreakable twosome in this game can be fair to the rest. As someone up above pointed out, there’s no way the prize won’t be shared between them so basically they get twice the odds of winning as everyone else.
That scene where Rob interrogated Ben on the beach was classic!
And then he goes back and confronted Danni for putting his name out and she caved immediately. A stronger player would have turned that to her advantage to put the target on Rob.
Dalton Ross’s recap here: https://ew.com/recap/survivor-season-40-premiere/
Interesting that the first challenge wasn’t first to 3 but actually first to 5, and they cut out a few rounds. Some good stuff about what was cut out of Tribal as well:
“Edge of Extinction became a major topic of discussion at Tribal. It started when Yul called out Chris Underwood’s win as very controversial and polarizing. Sandra then weighed in on EOE, going on about how someone should be out when they were out, and now because of the twist, she had to be nice to people instead of mean. Jeff then polled the tribe, asking who among them liked Edge as another chance to get back in the game. Sarah, Amber, and Nick raised their hands. The other 7 did not. Jeff then asked Sarah and Amber what they liked about it.”
I’m still holding out hope that the EoE ends at the merge, rather than going all the way until only a handful of people are left like last time. Probably too much to hope for.
So from the recap, in the very first challenge the winning team had a huge advantage due to the direction of the incoming swell. So why not switch which pole you’re trying to reach each round?
I thought that was a massively entertaining season premiere, and if it’s any indication of the rest of the season, it’s going to be a wild ride.
As for the cast, I went through the list of past winners and the only one I’m really disappointed about not being on this season is Cochrane. I suppose I’d rather see J.T. than Nick, or Natalie or Jenna over Michelle. But I don’t feel all that strongly about it. Even the weakest winners are winners and deserve to be there.
What I like is that they’re all good enough to notice pretty much everything, which is both a blessing and a curse. When Parvati said, “None of us should feel comfortable, but there are people who do,” it set off a wave of paranoid chatter and whispering, with everybody wondering what she could possibly have meant by that, and she must have something up her sleeve, when in reality I think that was a simple observation meant to be taken at face value. But these players aren’t going to let even the most benign of comments go by without analyzing and dissecting, and that could make for some fun situations.
Spoiler-boxed comment on next week’s preview:It appears that Rob is not taking Amber’s ouster well. Part of what has made him such a great player is that he always keeps his head and never lets emotion dictate his actions. It will be quite interesting to see if this changes and how it will affect his game.
I’m curious how the producers ranked the 38 prior winners in desirability, and how far down they had to reach. I’m sure they would’ve loved to have gotten Cochrane instead of some of those in the current cast who are remembered only by the truly obsessive.
Everyone’s trying so hard to keep a low profile, there hasn’t been a lot of fireworks yet. I’m especially hopeful that Tyson cranks up the snark to his previous levels.
I’m guessing he’s saying it, but he doesn’t really mean it. Either he’s saying it in a confessional, and Rob is the master of “saying stuff that the producers love, so he gets a lot of screen time and gets invited back a lot”. Or he’s saying it to other players, as part of a misdirection. But Rob & Amber had to know they’d be targeted for being an unbreakable alliance, so I can’t imagine he’s actually taking it personally.