Examining the Edge of Extinction Twist

Since I’m still doing some of these posts that relate in some way to the most recent season of Survivor as I don’t know of much else to talk about the upcoming one that I don’t yet know much about, I might as well get to a more proper examination of the twist from the most recent season. Can you think of what all it meant? Well, I might as well state my opinion of it.

The general consensus is that the twist sucked royally. I didn’t really like the twist that much myself. I still maintain that there were plenty of worse twists, but this might have to be on the list of the worst twists. It seems like after the disaster of Ghost Island, the response of the producers was “Hold my beer.” Are they just going to come up with something worse than the previous bad thing every time there is some rightful complaint over it?

A lot of us might have liked it if they had shown the outcast tribe before their challenge in the game. It did seem like this season might have been their way of doing something like that. They made this aspect part of the outcasts and then part Redemption Island. Everyone knows that the best thing to do when you have two twists that people don’t like is to combine them into one even worse twist. Wait, what? I mean, seriously, what were they thinking?

Not only do we have the outcast element of a group of people being abandoned in the game, we also have the Redemption Island element of the voted out players competing in a challenge to get back in the game if you were voted out. Only unlike some of Redemption Island, you got a second chance to get back in the game if lose the first chance. Added to this are secret advantages. They didn’t seem to add much of anything to the game outside of stupid moves people did with them.

Was there any good that came of this twist? Well, it actually did what it sought out to do and got a man who was voted out of the game the ability to win it later that season. This wasn’t seen as a good thing to any since it was seen as highly unfair. Is Chris Underwood the worst winner in Survivor history? I don’t think so if only because I hate others much more.

I think that part of the issue was that we saw too much of the Edge of Extinction while at the same time, we did not see enough of it. The twist and the people weren’t in certain episodes, yet often ate up at lot of time in other episodes. None of this really focused on Chris as he got very little airtime. I don’t hate the floater game and may yet write a blog post about it. What he did wasn’t a floater game as he wasn’t in the main game for a lot of the series. It seemed similar simply due to lack of airtime. All I know is that he wasn’t seen as much as he could be even when the Edge of Extinction was shown.

The biggest potential issue with this twist is the jury problem that the twist creates. Somehow, all of the people in the game weren’t able to deduct that those in the jury would want one of their own to win versus someone in the game. Thus, when Chris was able to win his way back into the game, he got a lot of favor with the jury and had insider information that those in the game wouldn’t have. Thus, he was able to take out everyone he needed to in order to upset the rest of the competition.

This leads to some Rick ponderings about the game. Would he have been able to do well without Chris coming back in the game? Would he have been a good winner despite also having been voted out at one point? A lot of people hate Rick, but I’m not one of them. I would have loved to see him win. But I guess that his edit might be for a returning game instead of anything else. Why did they give him so much airtime and paint him as a mastermind of sorts only to have him fall short? I haven’t seen an edit like that since Terry’s in Panama. Rick did make mistakes and it is quite possible that he would have pissed off too many jury members to win. But he might have made the twist work better if he had won in the end. Instead, we got someone who was barely involved with most of the game.

I have no idea what else there is to say about the twist in general. I think that I did a good dissection of it for others to enjoy. Did you like the twist? I haven’t heard of anyone who has, yet. Why do you think that it failed so much? Did any fan like the idea of it before it was shown? I guess that’s all for now to say about that as we move on to other things. For now, this is Adam Decker, signing off.