What’s with all the Strange new Twists?

I’ve been wondering about this for a while now. Survivor seems to be about one strange twist after another nowadays. It didn’t used to be this way, right? Surely Survivor wasn’t just about one new twist after another in the past. This makes me wonder why it is so terrible with twists in the present.

Some may wonder if this show would have lasted without twists. It wasn’t that long into the series when they introduced twists. It was the third season when they introduced tribe swaps. It wasn’t that much longer when they did other twists as well. They did the fake merge, outcasts, returning players, lot of different things and kept going at it with new twists. But there were things that made the twists very different in the future.

First, it was the hidden immunity idol. Before this, the vote was always simple and straightforward. If you won immunity, you were safe and couldn’t be voted out. Everyone else was vulnerable and could be voted out as a result. The idol changed it where people could be the target and play the idol in order to change the vote effectively. This changed the game forever and made otherwise clear vote outs even more complicated. I don’t know if this is where twists went wrong as not much of the game was that different in the future. But it made things different and while it helped make some tribal council more interesting than they could otherwise, it might have tainted the game in some ways.

Where I think twists went wrong was when they started doing all these advantages. It seems like more of a recent thing in my mind. When were they introduced? I forget exactly when, but I think that it was in the more recently airing seasons. This seemed to expand on the already questionable idea of hidden immunity idols by making one person getting a secret advantage that often doesn’t stay that way. But they seem to be a way to just try to make the game more interesting with them forgetting that the game is already interesting and what they are doing is instead making long time fans question whether or not the game is getting out of control with its twists.

It may seem like a more recent thing, the overuse of twists, but I felt that it was first seen badly in the eighth season, Survivor: All-Stars. They wanted to keep these returning players on their toes so they put in an overload of twists and I don’t think that most of them played out well.

Of course, what might be the problem with some of the cases isn’t that the twists show up once, but that they become what the game is always now about. The voting out a jury member was horrendous and never should have happened. But it only happened once. As for the twist where there is a more open forum for the jury at the final tribal council, that wasn’t such a bad idea as it seems to have fixed the problems of landslide wins or, at least, made them less likely to win as easily as they have in the past seasons. Still, it is kind of annoying that something that worked for 33 seasons is suddenly gone. What is even more horrendous is the new final four twist which messes with the format far too much.

This could just be me not like the Ghost Island twist which I really hope is never used again. I’m not even sure what they thought would work about it. But they had all of these advantages used again and they mostly just failed again over and over again. It wasn’t so much that they were trying to fix what was broken and that they were using what was broken again and hoped that it would get fixed.

It is hard to tell if getting rid of these twists or twists in general would work at all. What I do know is that a back to the basis twist might be something that they want to try if they don’t want to lose the fans of this show. They might not be able to get rid of the hidden immunity idol, but that arguably isn’t an issue the way others of these are. Maybe either stop doing so many twists or advantages or just do the more simple ones that you have in the past. I still like the tribe swap if it isn’t used too much and other, new twists might work. They just have to be careful with what could happen.

Well, I think that’s about it for this post as I don’t know what else I could add outside of this closing. I do hope that they can stop doing all of these strange, new twists and get to do something more basic and simple. It might be better for them not to have as many twists since a lot of people like the show better before they were introduced. For now, this is Adam Decker, signing off.