Pondering the Ending to the 38th Season

If you read my post on the finale, there were some things that I talked about regarding the win of Chris Underwood that I don’t think I talked about yet in this blog. This is only the second time that I’m doing a post like this, but I figure that it makes sense. What can we talk regarding his surprise win and various other facts about the season in question that I can only know now that I’ve had time to look back on what has become Survivor: Edge of Extinction?

Before this season, despite fan outrage claiming the contrary, no contestant was ever handed an idol from the producers before. Often, a contestant finds it only because no one else is looking for it. And if the other contestants know this, it makes you question why they let Russell Hantz or people like him get the idol in question. Now, this season has it set up that the reentry winner gets an idol that they have to split up before getting an idol they can use any time. This was questionable when they did it when Rick had reentered the game. When I learned that Chris got an idol like this, I felt like Jim Carrey’s character in Liar Liar, doing a spit take saying, “Oh, come on!”

Listen, I can understand not wanting the person who came back in the game after getting voted out to just get voted out again. But that part of the game should be on them and no one else. The immunity that Lillian and Burton had in Pearl Islands wasn’t that bad a choice as it was a onetime use thing that did not last longer than their first tribal council back in the game. In seasons with Redemption Island, there was no automatic immunity as they were left to fend for themselves. Many called this terrible as the first two seasons with it had these people all voted right back out of the game when they weren’t immune at tribal council.

This leads us to this season where the immunity that they have can be used any time outside of the first tribal council they have to survive. In Chris’s case, he got to survive the last tribal council with idols all because he has one. And then, due to the new rules of the game, he doesn’t have to worry about being voted out anymore. This also leads into the problem of there being too many idols in the game at once which is a whole nother issue entirely. I’ve posted on the overuse of the tribe swap. I might have to do one on hidden immunity idols too. But that’s not the point of this post, now is it?

If you kept track of my confessional counts, you’d know just how low in the game Chris would rank if he didn’t have this chance to get back in the game. When another Survivor blogger (Ryan Keiser) talked about the first reentry point in the game, he thought that Chris would win as he was a challenge beast. I was thinking that Chris wouldn’t have a chance winning his way back into the game as there was no real substance to his edit. You saw how low his confessional count was throughout most of the game. Rick had such a high confessional count that it only made sense that he’d come back into the game.

This makes me wonder if there was an issue with editing. Why did it seem like this was Rick’s game to lose for most of the whole postmerge part of the game? Why paint him up so high only for him to fall short on day 38? While Rick was undeniably a villain, I wouldn’t have hated him as a winner. He would have been a fine winner in the game. But it seemed like we had our finalists with no clear winner among the three of them.

When Lillian lost in Pearl Islands, it was generally thought that her poor premerge game was the reason why she got only one vote to win. Chris had an even worse game that she did, yet he got so many of the jury votes. Why was that?

Well, if people didn’t know it by now, so much of this season’s premise was flawed. I can understand it being boring for people to just be voted out of the game and that’s it unless they play again. But I think that this season proves what we knew all along: people voted out of the game shouldn’t get another chance to get back in it. I mean, we have three twists that bring people back (one used three times) and all of them get rightly criticized for one reason or another. Each new twist is received poorer than the last one. And when the twist finally brings a player back who wins, it is hated more than all the others are. What was wrong with something that actually went right?

For one, Chris had a better link with the jury than any other winner ever could have. When the outcasts were used, those who didn’t get back in the game were gone from it forever. Only your fellow outcast could be a potential ally going forward. In Redemption Island based seasons, the jury was only formed by the people who were certainly out of the game. In this season, everyone who didn’t quit was on the jury and got to see what happened in the game from what they could gather at tribal council knowing that one of them could potentially get back in the game.

As such, the main twist of the season was seriously flawed as a result. Chris knew stuff that none of the others who weren’t voted out could have known. And he was able to win with a result of the info. Why was it a bad way of doing things? Well, there shouldn’t be this many people on the jury. The very first person who was voted out of the game got a say in who won. This never happened before.

Another flaw with the twist was that those who lost the first reentry competition got to stay until a new one happened. How would Pearl Islands have been different if all of the outcasts got to vote? Would that be a fair thing to the other players who never got voted out? Why not start the game fresh with the same twist in place, but new people on the island that choose to go there? I know that there would be a notable difference in the jury configuration as a result, but it makes more sense.

Chris’s win seems so out of the blue and random for the show. It seemed to only make sense that he got the win based on the fact that the jury could root for someone who they felt they could be like. But we didn’t get a good ending to the show. Again, this was despite the fact that one of the twists that brought someone back into the game actually won the game.

Would Rick have made a better winner? We’ll never know. He might not have won if he were a finalist as he made a lot of dickish moves throughout the game. He still seemed in my mind to be a better way of how the twist could have gone better. I would have liked him as a winner despite his behavior in the game being too upfront and in your face. But he could have easily lost to someone else. Still, he might feel that he tried so hard and got so far, but in the end, it doesn’t even matter.

Before I end this post, I might as well mention my thoughts on what was the most memorable part of this season in my mind since I forgot to do that in my finale post. I forget who was voted out at the one tribal council that lasted for two parts on TV, but that tribal council in my mind can only be what the most memorable part of this season was. Nothing else could take the prize.

That’s all I pretty much have to say. There were too many flaws with how this season worked that it might not have been able to work in the long run with its twist. Survivor wants to try new things, but this might want to be the last time they bring people back in the game that are voted out. They haven’t yet found a good way to do this (although I liked the previous two attempts, to an extent on Redemption Island, at least), so maybe it’s best that they don’t mess with the basic format of the game. For now, this is Adam Decker, signing off.