Which Survivor are you?

the Julia Carter blog post, btw, is here.

I just wanna say that as somebody who watched 5 seasons of this at the beginning, enjoyed it, but had enough, I'm happy there are deep students of the entire corpus like you guys

haha. it is weirdly the area where i think i might have the most comprhensive knowledge of any random hobby thing of which i'm a "fan." my knowledge of Beatles lore in my teens probably could compete but a lot of that has faded big time.

season 5 (Thailand), btw, is an extremely common point at which to bail! routinely shows up in the bottom 3 of many people's lists to this day, for a variety of reasons (speaking of problematic incidents and problematic handling by the show). when it was not ugly and uncomfortable, it was also just plain boring and unsatisfying. possibly the only highlight is the "quirky old lady" type, Jan, who occupied her island time not with strategic scheming or conserving energy for challenges, but with establishing a small burial ground for local wildlife. i guess it was cool when psycho shithead skater dude Robb got taken down by a stingray. otherwise easily one of the most DUD seasons ever.

should you find yourself at all hankering for that old-school Survivor flavor, S7 (Pearl Islands) is widely regarded as the best of that whole period, with a very strong cast, interesting story arcs, and a brilliant use of a pirate theme, to which they have oddly not returned. it's on Hulu missing only one fairly inconsequential episode early on. of course all seasons are on Paramount Plus but who has Paramount Plus??

Pearl Islands was fantastic, yeah

a bunch of seasons are available on hulu, i think, though not all of them. netflix, weirdly, has heroes vs. villains and cagayan (the first tony season)

yeah, hulu has everything up thru the early 30s. a bunch are missing episodes, some of them more crucial than others. Marquesas is missing like the first three episodes, boo!

the netflix season picks are sooooooo bizarre to me. we hated the outcome of cagayan but, ok, it is generally a very popular season and certainly lively. but HvV is all about returning player fun, like seeing formerly great players make all-time blunders, or seeing one legendary "character" develop an unrequited love for another. the final showdown is super satisfying on its face but even moreso knowing who those people are and how they understand their own positions in the game. sigh.

found my pen and paper list of all the seasons from early pandemic, when i was just trying to figure out what was missing on Hulu. i'm posting it here for posterity, now elaborated with some super nerdy RECOMMENDATION INFORMATION for anyone who reads this and is thinking about digging a little deeper into the show. to be clear, overall most of the seasons are overall 'good,' so lots of ones i really like have no markings here at all. just trying to narrow down.

♥: start here! ideal for newcomers/non-obsessives. great cast, good antics, some interesting moves, and generally compelling Survivor.
◘: overall fantastic seasons that are just not "starters" - either too many returnees, or you have to know the game to 'get' it.
♫: fine wines/deep cuts. maybe some dull stretches or flop ideas, but lots to appreciate and sink your teeth into if you love the show.
▲: awful. do not watch. these are in a lot of "bottom" lists AND have ugly, objectionable content.
■: pretty bad, and again, in a lot of "bottom" lists. if you got HOOKED, and yet were still looking to cut a few out of the queue, these are the ones.
†: is missing episodes on Hulu. seasons 35 forward are not on Hulu at all.
( ): contains returnees from these seasons

if i were helping mentor your Survivor journey, I would start with the ♥ seasons in any order. if you get through those and are like "this is fun, i'd watch like 2-3 more," then go to the ◘ seasons (just being mindful of returnees). if you get through the ♥ seasons and are like "i'm definitely hooked," then you honestly should just start at the beginning and go chronologically, skipping the ▲ and ■ seasons. (it helps that 1-7, while slow by modern standards, are GREAT reality television, really interested in their characters and their storylines.) i'd only do the ■ ones if you get finished and are STILL hungry. or in some cases you might want them to prepare for a returnee season.

with returnees, i really think you wanna see all prior seasons of anybody there to appreciate what's going on. this can mean watching an entire bad season just to know what's going on, but usually not. it's tough to write a list like this without being way more specific about WHO'S coming back, because that can be a major spoiler. so this list has the weird conceit that for any returnee season, you look backwards in the list and if any of the referenced seasons is itself a returnee season, wellp, gotta deal with those first. if this all sounds like a headache, it is - so just do what i said above and start with the heart seasons and then go chronological. it's a blast.

01 Borneo ♥
02 Outback ♫
03 Africa ♫
04 Marquesas ♫†
05 Thailand ▲†
06 Amazon ♫†
07 Pearl Islands ♥†
08 All-Stars ▲† (1,2,3,4,5,6,7)
09 Vanuatu ♫†
10 Palau ♥†
11 Guatemala †
12 Panama/Exile Island
13 Cook Islands
14 Fiji
15 China ♫
16 Micronesia/Fans vs. Favorites ◘ (7,9,12,13,14,15)
17 Gabon ♫
18 Tocantins ♥
19 Samoa ■
20 Heroes vs. Villains ◘ (2,4,7,8,10,11,12,13,15,16,17,18,19)
21 Nicaragua ■
22 Redemption Island ♫ (4,8,19,20)
23 South Pacific ■ (13,16,18,20)
24 One World ♫
25 Philippines ◘ (2,13,16,19)
26 Caramoan/Fans vs. Favorites (16,17,21,22,23,25)
27 Blood vs. Water ◘ (1,7,8,12,13,18,19,20,24)
28 Cagayan / Brains vs Brawn vs Beauty ◘
29 San Juan del Sur ♥
30 Worlds Apart / White Collars vs Blue Collar vs No Collar ■
31 Cambodia / Second Chance ◘ (1,2,7,12,15,18,19,25,27,28,29,30)
32 Kaôh Rōng - Brains vs Brawn vs Beauty
33 Millennials vs. Gen X
34 Game Changers ■ (2,7,12,13,16,18,20,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,30,31,32,33)
35 Heroes vs Heroes vs Hustlers †
36 Ghost Island † (all new players, but see note above)
37 David vs. Goliath ♥ †
38 Edge of Extinction † ■ (29,31,32,33,34)
39 Island of the Idols ▲ † (all new players but see note above)
40 Winners at War ◘ † (2,3,4,7,8,11,13,16,18,20,22,23,24,25,27,28,29,31,32,33,34,36,37)

NOTES:

* All-Stars is the one real "problem" season: a bad time in SO many ways, but also really important to the mythos and to certain players' arcs. also key to the shift from Survivor as a groundbreaking TV phenomenon, to Survivor as just another show, and a 'game' with a growing history/lore/strategy playbook. one option would be to JUST watch the postmerge, which lets you avoid the ugliest parts of the season, and will more or less set you up for the future. i would say definitely watch at least that before you watch Heroes vs. Villains.

* Pearl Islands is truly great, and missing ONE early episode on Hulu which has a great challenge and some character development.... but you can get away with skipping that one. otherwise, though, the Hulu deletions are unforgivable.

* Ghost Island has only new players, but the gimmick is that people go to the titular island and encounter important artifacts from past seasons; since they're supposed to be tied to legendary moments, the explanatory flashbacks spoil those moments. helpfully, this seasons is pretty middling so you're not gonna want to skip there anyway.

* Island of the Idols ALSO has only new players, but the gimmick is that people go to the titular island and receive training from legendary players, spoiling their legendary past performances. i'm not listing out their seasons because this season also has a massively, massively problematic incident right at its center. so despite a few fantastic casting discoveries, i can't really recommend it until you're running out of seasons. by which point you will know the "idols" anyway.

doc c, i'm curious to hear more about your negative reaction to all-stars. i mean i kinda get where you're coming from, but i definitely didn't think it was the absolute worst season

great question! it's a few things... spoilers behind hidden text... in terms of the game, the premerge is fairly interesting (though it's a bummer when several very big names get targeted only because of their big-nameness). there are some great moments, and a few people get memorable character development. it's especially fun to see former nobodies or merely "colorful" characters find their strategic footing, while former fan favorites character screw up challenges and build comically inept shelters, etc. but then strategically, very little "happens" in the post-merge. the Chapera alliance is SO locked down and it's not that fun to see underdogs repeatedly struggle unsuccessfully to get any of Rob's pawns to realize where they really stand.

meanwhile there are SO many unhappy ugly moments. like really "not my idea of a good time" things. at the end, the jury is in an extremely unhappy, ill-tempered headspace; whether that's justified or not, it means the final tribal council is a big negative hatefest, not a fun way to finish a season. much more important: an incident that i think today would be reasonably characterized as sexual assault and would lead to a player being pulled from the game. here it's treated almost like comic antics, and you have to watch the victim pull herself from the game in a visibly distressed state - her suffering and anger is REALLY raw and painful to see - as other players and the show react in almost a "gee, what's HER problem?" manner. basically a repeat of the situation in Thailand, which was also handled incredibly poorly. that's the worst part by far.

another player also pulls themselves out of the game because one of their family members is dying from cancer. and a beloved fan character complains that this person is a "cancer" in the tribe. probably just a sloppy choice of words but again, like.... this is downer shit, i don't wanna watch it again.

and then because of all that, i also experienced the season back then as a crushing disappointment --- the gulf between "omg this amazing cast! omg for the first time people are coming back!" and the season we got was just really jarring, and kinda deflated the show for me.

an incident that i think today would be reasonably characterized as sexual assault and would lead to a player being pulled from the game. here it's treated almost like comic antics, and you have to watch the victim pull herself from the game in a visibly distressed state - her suffering and anger is REALLY raw and painful to see - as other players and the show react in almost a "gee, what's HER problem?" manner.

ah yes, i nearly forgot about that. that was very gross, and i'm surprised that it didn't elicit more of a negative reaction from probst and the contestants even at the time.

with regards to the jury being angry/unhappy, i'm not as troubled by that, and i enjoyed watching the power couple gleefully burn bridges, even if it was frustrating to watch supposedly smart people like lex get hoodwinked.

i do totally agree that it was a major step down from pearl islands, and isn't nearly as good as other returnee seasons like fans vs. favs, heroes vs. villains, and second chance.

re: the finale - I think it was just so weird and jarring to see outside-the-game relationships come into the game in SUCH a negative way. like genuinely "we had a meaningful friendship that meant a lot to me and now it's fucked" vibes. it clearly took the players by surprise too. hardly anybody had any fun out there! those later returnee seasons - which i agree are all classics - don't seem to have this problem; i feel like people adjusted their sense of what "it's just a game" meant to them and it all settled down a little.

it was a bit annoying that so much outside-the-game stuff made it into the finale, sure, but since i came back to that season after watching several more recent seasons, my feeling was more along the lines of "what the hell did they expect?" lol.

it can't really be overstated how much boston rob changed the game–he was really the first to think of the show as a competition to be won, not just an ordeal to, well, survive.

huh, i don't think i agree with that! plenty of people from the previous seasons fit that mold imo!

maybe he was just more ruthless, or better at giving confessionals lol

all-time confessionalist. spoilers for S22, it's worth watching Redemption Island JUST for him owning the camera for like a third of every episode. when he throws what would normally be a critical game item *into a volcano* i'm basically on board for him completely steamrolling the entire season and blocking out half the other characters from existing, which otherwise is unforgiveable editing imo. also has a pretty enjoyable long-term arc, between the cocky kid in Marquesas, who gets taken aback by how much he hurts people in All-Stars, settles down with his dream girl, returns as the determined young father and team player of HvV, learns a few lessons, comes back in S22 and finally wins.... and then when we finally see him again in 39 and 40, he's settled into his mature, middle-aged cockiness.

update: seasons 41 and 42 have now both wrapped up filming. 41 to premiere this fall, i think sometime in september. you can find cast photos/names/professions for 41 on sites like insidesurvivor. really really nice to see the 50% BIPOC casting standard changing up the mix, feeling cautiously optimistic for the season despite the expected shorter time on the island (under 30 days according to all the rumors, none denied by production).

mark your calendars! season 41 premiere is Wednesday 9/22, 8-10 pm on your local CVS affiliate! worth playing for???

the season 41 cast is now official! the one thing they seem to have in common is that nearly all of them sound like survivor super-nerds, just from the name-checks in their interviews. or maybe filming in the quarantine era meant they had a lot of time to binge-watch before they did their pregame interviews.

i may be the only one who truly cares but the premiere is TONIGHT at 8 pm eastern!

doctor casino i'm right there with you brother

oh man i forgot it was back

i'm feeling really amped. the cast looks great, and while some of jeff's hype talk is predictably worrisome, I am LOVING the news that the winning votes will be read on the island, on the last day of the game --- first time since season 1. nothing has ever come close to that suspense/release, emotionally.

very strong premiere imho --- cast totally popping, lot of interesting people. i could have done with ONE less imposed dilemma, just for the sake of some time watching people interact building the shelter or looking for food, but overall it worked. felt very fresh and fun. if i had to pick a winner RIGHT now it would be Shan, Ricard, or Evvie, but there are definitely others who could soon come into sharper focus. felt so bad for the team whose last paddle was totally camouflaged by the similar colors of the set dressing!! that felt bogus.

good to have this back.

rooting strongly for Shan and Evvie at this point. Liana also seems to have good instincts; the other two youngsters are great, engaging characters but feel like they're playing WAY too big too soon. there are several other promising but currently underdeveloped characters... the cast really does seem good but is very much getting crowded out by the barrage of wacky dilemmas and rulesy advantages. blue tribe in particular is profoundly mysterious.

a truly great episode tonight - first time since the premiere that we got a reprieve from wacky dilemmas and advantages and just let this terrific cast drive the story. and all three teams delivered the goods.

penultimate episode tonight, finale next Wednesday. if they stick the landing i would consider this a very, very good season. despite all the time wasted on wacky advantages and game-theory exercises, the cast was SO strong and SO ready to play that (almost) all of them still came through very strongly. some pretty powerful emotions shared as well.

agreed, once this season got to the merge it started to get really excellent. some players at the bottom like xander & erika are likable and good players, sorta classic survivor underdogs. ricard has been in a really interesting spot. i didn't even really mind some of the wackier idol stuff at the beginning, and some of the "damned if you do, damned if you don't" and game theory-ish rewards i thought were actually kind of cool. and the last episode where they talked a lot about the break up of the black alliance was interesting especially in light of the recent season of big brother (which i don't watch) where the black contestants on that show also banded together in an alliance to get to the end together, assuming this commitment to cast diversity will continue it feels like a theme that will continue to run thru the show

Xander has been a really delightful surprise. i don't really want to root for the confident young white app developer in the first season with the new diversity standards, but he really is a LOT of fun. seems to always have a clear sense of where he is in the game, which yielded a lot of fun comedy since for most of the game he was in an absolutely terrible position.

i really wish Erika had gotten more premerge camera time. i really like her and think she's playing very smart, but she doesn't have the full-season buildup of Danny and Deshawn (also from original Luvu). i feel like one of these three is probably the winner because Ricard is SUCH the obvious target for tonight. would find any of them satisfying, i just would want to see Erica really catch fire in these last couple eps.

for a while my theory was that Heather was going to do something really heinous and beyond the pale, and that she'd been edited out of almost the whole season as a result. when she opened her mouth to speak about race at last week's TC, i was convinced this was going to be the time.

super legit winner imho. i have some gripes with the edit/storytelling of the season as a whole, but i think it was a good'un.

everybody's so nice on this season!

yeah it's like the British Bake-Off of Survivor in some weird way

xander really misjudged the jury huh. I wonder if they edited the final council to make it looks like more of a catastrophe for him than it really was, but it was a bad time to display arrogance. he also could have prepared a better account of his game.

I think what made Erika a good player was a bit too subtle for a survivor newbie like me to understand

yeah, i do think a clearer theory of the case from Xander might have gotten him a vote or two --- they seemed to respect it when he finally explained that his F4 choice was about trying to limit Erika's threat level. they thought it was wrong, but at least it was reasoned-out. but it was going to be an uphill battle --- the Luvu people had marked Erika as a threat way back before the merge, whereas nobody ever seems to have been very worried about Xander despite his challenge strength and public idol. he didn't actually do all that much! and i think his age was a problem. there have only been four winners age 21-22. (one of them won in pretty wacky circumstances, and another was up against two other early-20s folks.) it's pretty tough at 21 to make the kind of connections with people where they'll want to give you a million dollars, *and* to have the social poker-player skills that the game demands.

Erika's win is kind of a classic Survivor win in terms of it being unclear! a lot of her story, especially pre-merge, was totally buried by the edit for no good reason, a problem that plagues a few winners (especially women). and her game was not a headline-grabbing one of big flips and idol plays. you're right that it's an aficionado's game. imho, she won because she always knew exactly where she stood in the game, was always on the right side of the votes, and benefited from how the vote went. in at least two key cases we saw her control the outcome: plussing Ricard's vote-out-Shan move to also burn Danny and Deshawn's bridge with Liana, and steering the "Danny vs Deshawn" vote towards Danny. this left her with the best possible field of final TC partners, and she seems to have been very cognizant of that.

i do think they TRIED to show her game in the last few episodes...if you think back she is super super clear about narrating what's actually going on in the game, whereas Xander's reads (of who's in control, who's a threat to win, how people will see his game) all turn out to have been really wide of the mark.

poor Deshawn. he came through really vividly as a person, and the season did a beautiful job telling his story, which turned out to be a Survivor tragedy. he was clearly doomed with the jury, either for the perception that he'd unnecessarily tanked the Black alliance, and/or the total desperate messiness of his gameplay near the end. my take on Erika's win is that Deshawn was too hot, Xander was too cold, and she was juuust right.

yeah responding to Deshawn trying to blow her up with the truth bomb by choosing to keep him over Danny was a great move. she recognized he'd have burned too many bridges to present any kind of a threat. and even that move wasn't emphasized in the edit as a conscious decision, it was something I had to go back and think about to realize what she did.

it's a great example of something shown in the edit but not, as you say, emphasized. we got a confessional earlier in the ep where she's like "my mission now is to convince everybody it should be deshawn and not danny." but we don't hear much about it from other people, or have xander's take on it soundtracked with "can you believe this moron" music, etc.

i think she'd got it well lined up before TC... and therefore was ready to respond to Deshawn's "truth bomb" in the perfect way to highlight her strengths and his weaknesses. she probably knew it was coming --- apparently Deshawn had made this pitch to Heather during the day, so i'm guessing it got back to her.

I wonder if there's always an edit bias towards entertaining confessionals...like the people who got a ton of screen time all were good at being funny while narrating the action, like Evvie, Shan, Xander, DeShawn...But that definitely got me feeling sure that one of them was going to win.

oh, that's absolutely a thing. i'd wager a lot of the people who get a broad-based "wait wtf why didn't they win?" reaction are giant-sized compelling confessionalists that the show just couldn't resist. (a very high proportion of these are confident white dudes.)

yeah a cool thing about this season was how diverse the great confessionalists were.

season 42 begins this Wednesday! cast looks decent, if not as immediately exciting as 41's.

this was shot back-to-back with 41 and again will have the 26-day format. hopefully we'll be back to 39 days once they go back to a quarantine-free schedule, but we'll see.

The rare occasion where I'm disappointed a thread ISN'T on ILM.

three episodes in and already a very lively season. the wacky advantages and game mechanics seem to be interlacing well with the personalities and social dynamics. if you haven't been watching, i think it's worth catching up on!

I liked the cast more last season, but I'm enjoying the gameplay. Last ep's tribal council was a gut punch

i feel like this cast could have a lot of "growers," and there are a few shining stars already, but I agree that the 41 cast popped more right out the gate.

fun season! an excellent final jury performance for the win

just got together with our Survivor buds to watch it last night! we had a blast and started the ep rooting for the eventual winner but also on board for the eventual runner-up. so the mood was buoyant. lots of applause at the big moments. the way the final 4 challenge played out delivered some serious emotional lows and highs!

overall a very very strong season. the rich characterization we saw some people get last season was spread around a lot more evenly, with a lot more camp life and personal interactions, letting people's stories come through. pound for pound i think 41's cast is better, but 42's werr much more in focus. maybe one of the best-edited seasons ever?

next season's cast looks amazing too!

I'd still love to see the game design calm down postmerge. there are so few rounds where you just go to tribal council and vote someone out, which means way fewer chances for the players and their skills of maneuvering and persuasion to drive the story and boot order, rather than the votes being overdetermined by the game mechanisms. how much of a "resume" can anyone really have at the end?

season 43 premiered tonight and it rules so far. cast is fire.

also never thought I'd see "pretend to like Mastodon and the Dead Kennedys" employed as a strategy but I'm here for it.

these days lots of people pretend to like Mastodon

maybe they wanted an observational look at what happens when a purportedly representative sample of Americans get marooned, but accidentally included the greatest strategy game mechanism in existence. it's funny how many s1 contestants have contempt for the idea of alliances, or of basically making any effort to win the money. slacker generation in action.

fortunately this was the last time that Mark Burnett's great TV show ideas had any impact on American history

maybe they wanted an observational look at what happens when a purportedly representative sample of Americans get marooned

i think they did! one of my fav things i've read about survivor is this article about how each contestant's wardrobe is supposed to convey something about their profession

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/17/style/survivor-clothing.html

“The idea is, what if you were shipwrecked with a group of strangers?” Mr. Probst said. “A lawyer’s clothing should look very different from a nurse, who looks different from a pizza maker.”

i think, over time, this dynamic has sort of been shed as players more so think about themselves in terms of what archetype of survivor player they are as opposed to who they are out in the real world and what that means on the island. i think the show still tries to be a bit social experiment-y but, you know, they're not doing race war seasons anymore

indeed, thank goodness they aren't!

but i know what you mean about the clothing. really peaked with season 7, the first time they did the "jump off the boat in the clothes you thought you were wearing for a cast photo" thing. tie-dye, Armani suit, douchey polo, scoutmaster uniform... all very handy shorthand for characterization, even if they weren't always for straightforward "types."

Mary in this last season had the greatest island wardobe, excellent tribal council outfits.

I was unaware of Rupert's 2012 Indiana libertarian gubernatorial run.

Season 50 so far: the cast remains a frustratingly motley bunch in terms of splitting the difference between "all-timers" and "New-Era Second Chances for characters who popped." So it doesn't really do either of those things in a way that feels satisfying. And Jeff is drifting further and further into cringy enthusiastic grandpa (or maybe Michael Scott) territory.

BUT... The first three episodes have been extremely entertaining! The storytelling is putting character interactions and conflicts front and center, thankfully not completely swamping them with game mechanics, and just letting a ton of human comedy unfold from these familiar people thrown together in unlikely combinations. It's working for me! I also always really love when people come back after a LONG time and you can see the years on their faces; it cancels out a lot of the "them? Again? Really?" feeling I had just looking at the list of names.

I'm enjoying this season! Hubicki is fun to watch. Rappin' Jeff Probst is doing his thing but is thankfully not the focus, unlike with some of the low-on-charisma recent casts

I really liked Rick Devens speaking for the audience bitching about how boring Joe's supposedly honest gameplay is. Now Coach and Joe can form their own honor and integrity caucus, whose first act is of course to tell a woman to tone it down.

i nearly cringed to death during probst's rap.

rooting hard for my girl cirie, wonder if she will do some jedi mind tricks to make it to the merge.

loving this season many lols

that Coach/Chrissy scene was sooooo awful omg. he even did the "yap yap yap" hand gesture!!

I found myself liking Coach more in recent seasons when he's demonstrated some level of self-awareness, but he was such a condescending sexist prick in the original Tocantins season.

... Okay, the celebrity guest appearance last night was a bit much.

It really did go on forever

what is the Dr. C season review?

personally I enjoyed it! Aubry was given the gift of Ozzy's arrogant attempt at jury management and ran with it. Christian getting screwed by TV funnyman Jimmy Fallon was tough, a blindside attempt would have been better television. Probst screwing up the live broadcast was the perfect capstone to his season of cringe.

ha, thanks for asking!

i also enjoyed it, mostly! as returnee seasons go, it's certainly better than Game Changers. too much in the way of gimmicks and new-era sheen/sameyness, but the cast brought it and i don't think there were any true dud episodes besides the Zac Brown showcase and all the Mr. Beast content in the Mr. Beast episode. guy seemed like an AI-generated charisma vortex. whoof. the Billy Eilish idol was embarrassing but ultimately in a kind of amusing way, like the Doritos and Charmin sponsorships back in the day.

i do think it's tainted by those celebrity appearances and a couple of terrible twists, especially the Jimmy Fallon one that took Christian out. the sheer quantity of randomly subdivided groups, as in many of the last ten seasons, adds some "please just let the players play" frustration.

the cast generally exceeded my expectations for entertainment value, with Ozzy in particular going from "him again?" to "i seriously want middle-aged Ozzy to win, if Cirie can't." i wish Jenna and Colby had made it deeper for the same reason... I'm a sucker for seeing these familiar old faces come back with some years on them (except Stepehenie - blecch!). from the 40s, i most wished we'd gotten more from Q and Kamilla. they're so great.

winner-wise, Aubry didn't "do" a ton, but had the right reads and the right yes/no instincts for the various plans that were pitched to her. i am perfectly happy for her to finally cinch a win (a big one!) to reward her long story arc and hard work, and cement her place in the pantheon. i think she's already being underrated as a winner, but taking first place in any all-returnee season means you're doing SOMETHING right. and she'd already made the final 3 once and the final 5 another time. EoE was her only straight up bad performance, and she had the bad luck to land on the tribe that just coalesced early around a "get the returnees out" mentality. when the dust settles, i hope the conventional wisdom becomes that she's a good player and this was a good win.

the finale did fall a little flat for me, mainly because with Cirie gone, i was rooting against Jonathan more than I was rooting for Tiff and Aubry. the production goof-up with Rizo actually added a lot of charm to me! thought Jeff's riffs on it later were genuinely amusing. the bigger fail of the evening was not actually doing any "reunion" shit with the cast! granted i was glad to escape the sad awkward spectacle of watching the losers eat pizza and process the loss in real time on the island, and get back to the big release of the winner rushing out into the audience to embrace their family. but c'mon, give us some face time with all these characters you brought back!

oooops that should all be spoilered. I guess the hidden text tag dies at the end of each paragraph.

very deserving winner, happy they finally came up on top

I think Aubry's biggest play was turning Rizzo against his own throuple alliance. Stephenie at FTC was embarrassing, at least pretend to be objective! I can respect Jonathan's game, despite his MAGA-codedness...his reads all season were pretty on point. But his big reveal of supposedly faking a blow-up with Dee is a good way to alienate any chance he might have had with the uncommitted jury members, very dickish move that I had honestly mainly forgotten about.

I suspect there was a lot more of Aubry selling her game at FTC that we didn't see, because it would have revealed how unbalanced the contest was. Revealing the Ozzy-Cirie intel to Rizo so that he wouldn't clue Ozzy in to play his idol is way up there, yeah. Also gassing Devens up and then letting him hit the spotlight, which she'd articulated to camera as an intentional move when it happened, probably other stuff like that. And like, being horrendously on the bottom of her starting tribe must have been part of the narrative.