I don’t remember her season, what is the source of the criticism of her win?
Of the final four, I ranked them
Tony
Sarah
Michele
Natalie, because I don’t think that EoE is the same as being in the tribe
Not great players, per se, but sometimes players Jeff liked.
… and huge credit should go to Jeff’s makeup person for the past 20 years. Without them, he looked REALLY rough in his garage. Never noticed how pronounced his cheek-crease is in the other shots, but that garage cam was totally unforgiving.
Good point, I’d love to know what Michele and Natalie’s decision making process was there deciding to take out Denise instead.
Michele’s first season was the Brawn v. Beauty v. Brains season, and her final 3 was against Aubry and Tai. Aubry played a great strategic game, and a lot of viewers felt she should’ve won. Tai was a good challenge threat, found a lot of HIIs and was a good character - so even though he was an obvious Final 3 goat who wasn’t going to get votes, he still overshadowed Michele, whose game is pretty much all social and doesn’t translate well to TV (though, as here, she did have a couple of clutch challenge wins at the end). The main thing though is that it seemed like the jury was full of dunderheads (especially the ‘Brawn’ tribe).
This recap has a pretty good example of how a lot of people felt (starting with “Michele won 5-2 and…” Uneven 'Survivor: Kaoh Rong' Finale Mutes An Otherwise Strong Season - Recap
Good point, I’d love to know what Michele and Natalie’s decision making process was there deciding to take out Denise instead.
I’m fine that Tony won, but looking at his house made me roll my eyes at his claim that he needs financial security for his family. Looked like he was doing fine. I also wished he would have mentioned sharing his good fortune with a charity or something.
I think that Natalie should have kept Sarah and sent Tony v. Michelle. Michelle was less of a threat to her, and if Tony would have won, the jury would have had to decide between Tony and Sarah. Splitting the vote was her best option.
As I said before, I hate EoE and I hate the new currency that allows booted players to aid popular players still in the game.
And I think that they need to make HII harder to find.
Oh, I hope we can go back to finding new, interesting non-returning players.
I hope fire tokens return (and I’m sure they will) in a non-EoE season. Here’s some ways to change it up to make it work:
- Start everyone with 2 tokens
- When you get voted out, you have to give all your tokens to different players.
- Instead of HII, hide different advantages that can be bought with fire tokens. But the twist is the price will always be more than the average number of tokens the players have. So the only way you can buy them is either have enough from voted out players or work together with other players to get their tokens.
That jury was incredibly bitter. I think the biggest change happened between Kaoh Rong (Michelle’s season) and Millenials vs. Gen X in that players really started to appreciate game play again. The last 8 seasons have had remarkably less bitter juries (and the jury format change helped with that a lot).
I kind of like this – mostly because HII have become played out. They’re too expected and too easy to find. In the dark, with the light from a glowing burnt tree branch? And no one noticed?
(Although anyone who’s willing to stick their hand into a tree crevice in the jungle in the dark has earned whatever good things come of it. When I saw that, I thought “oh, HELL no”.)
Last night’s jury was a total love fest. Standing O? A far cry from the “rat & snake” days.
10 Ponderosa videos have been released nicely listed in this tweet by Nick Maiorano (Survivor 32 Koah Rong)
It goes all the way from Sandra (#0) to Sarahs (#9)
Some comments:
Rob lost 34 lbs and gained nearly 10 lbs back on the first day!
Wendell and Danni might have “Kicked It”. They seem to be really close.
There is no way I thought their marriage would last, but Rob and Amber look to be still on their honeymoon.
My sister died a few a years ago, although she couldn’t be replaced, I think Denise would be close. She is probably the one Survivor player that I would most like to know IRL
I have quite a few thoughts on the finale.
First and foremost, I’m glad Tony won. I grew to like him and root for him over the course of the season. He clearly played the best game and was in control nearly every vote. Not a single vote was ever cast against him, which I find astounding. He truly embodied “Outplay, Outwit, Outlast” this season, and deserved the votes he got at the end. Well done.
One might argue that other players’ passivity kept him in the game longer than he should have. That’s partly true, but it’s also a testament to his masterful gaslighting ability. Nobody had a ghost of a chance to win a jury vote over Tony, but at least Sarah and Denise were convinced they could (Ben is another story. More on him later). Tony somehow kept a ride-or-die foursome consisting of himself and three goats intact to the final six. Yes, I’m calling Sarah a goat too – but only against Tony. She could have won if Tony was gone. Denise might have won if Tony and Sarah were both gone. Hell, even Ben might have had a shot against Michelle and an EoE returnee who wasn’t Natalie. But none of that happened because Tony was somehow able to keep his alliance in line. That’s a social game.
Which brings us to Ben. Offering himself up as a sacrificial lamb to help Sarah’s resume was beyond lame. If you’re not playing to win, what are you even doing there? Even if he didn’t think he could get any jury votes, giving up like he did was cringeworthy. The real power move would have been turning on Tony, which they could have done easily at either of the previous two TC’s. In fact, Ben could have done that without Sarah, which would have given him something to hang his large hat on at the final. But they both played with their emotions and not their brains – because Tony was playing them like a pair of fiddles.
Finally, I’ve been going back and forth on the validity of the Edge of Extinction structure. Nobody can deny that Natalie kicked ass at EoE. She never lost focus, never let up, did everything she needed to do to get back in the game. Natalie won EoE hands down.
But the whole time, she wasn’t playing Survivor. This is the part I can’t get past. She worked hard and kudos to her for that. But having the EoE winner in the Survivor Final TC is kind of like saying the winner of the World Series should get to play in the Super Bowl. Of course they shouldn’t, because it’s an entirely different game. And if somehow they did, they would quite predictably get crushed. So even though it made for some good entertainment this year, I’m coming down on the side of hoping we never see Edge of Extinction again.
I also was disappointed they didn’t do a virtual reunion. Probst claimed it was because they had to devote three full hours to the finale, but that’s ridiculous. They could easily have chopped at least a half hour, even more if they had aired the EoE challenge last week, which IMO they should have. For some reason the producers didn’t want a reunion. And it made the end of the season feel abrupt and less satisfying than it should have been.
Anyhow, this post has been too long already. In conclusion: fun season, yay Tony, please no more EoE. 
My guess is they wanted to do a reunion but logistically couldn’t make it work right with 20 people calling in.
IMO, Survivor is whatever TPTB says it is. They have 51% of the vote. I can’t think of too many games that haven’t evolved in some sort of fashion. Football, Baseball, Hockey, Basketball have made rule changes where they are not exactly what they were years ago.
Its not like the people on EoE are eating 3 well balanced meals and sleeping on pillow mattresses.
I remember some people were outraged at the one person swap twist in Survivor Africa in season
You know, people have thrown out the “split-vote” jury strategy a few times but it hasn’t happened yet. With these bigger juries I wonder if we’ll ever see a winner with just a plurality of votes.
Thanks.
Even though this may open a can of worms, I also wanted to comment on Sarah’s remarks about gender bias.
What she had to say was definitely meaningful and heartfelt. She wasn’t wrong, and neither was Probst’s response. It was a nice moment.
But I’m not sure how it fit the situation. Natalie claimed that in the eyes of the jury, Tony was running things. Obviously, this triggered something in Sarah, who made it about Tony being a man and her being a woman. Now, I don’t want to minimize her feelings. She felt what she felt, and that’s that. No judgement there. But in this particular case I don’t see that being about gender because, well, clearly Tony was running things.
Hopefully I’m not setting myself up to get trashed here… What do you think?
I think it was a calculated speech to raise her profile with the jury. I read an interview in which she said as much, that she realized she’d been playing too under the radar and needed to do something about it quick. That’s not to say it wasn’t true.
ETA: here’s the interview https://ew.com/tv/survivor-sarah-lacina-finale-winners-at-war-interview/
Reddit thread collecting some interesting things said in post-game interviews.
Apparently the reason Natalie and Michele voted for Denise instead of Sarah was because Tony made a fake idol for Sarah and they were worried about it.
EDIT: This is mentioned in the Sarah interview madmonk28 posted above.
Boston Rob comes off like an ass in that Sarah interview, his sexism is one of the reasons she made the speech.