Redemption Island Challenges: What Works and What Doesn’t

While Edge of Extinction is a horrible idea that creates far too many problems, there may be hope yet for the concept of Redemption Island. While we are more likely to see Edge of Extinction again than we are with Redemption Island (probably, if I had to take a guess), if there is hope for Redemption Island, the hope rests entirely on the challenges that they use for it. While it takes out the concept of all of the advantages that we see in the show today, that can be quite a good thing. But let’s get to the main point of this post. What works and doesn’t for a Redemption Island duel?

Let’s start with the failures. The reason why I hate a leg up more than any other challenge (possibly, as I might hate other ones and will find out as I do research on various challenges and do hate that one monstrosity where they simply picked rocks for the loved ones challenge) was because they put an untested challenge as a duel. And it wasn’t just any duel. It was the final and arguably most important of all the duels that was brand new. This was despite an assurance that every duel was a challenge that had appeared on the show before. (They do seem to lie to us at times on Survivor. I could point out some examples of it, but that’s better for another post.)

In addition to challenges that were brand new, there were other challenges that just didn’t work out for other reasons. Maybe they should have known that it wasn’t just a good idea for an individual challenge or should appear differently than it has before to work as a duel. The other main problem is that there are some that only work for when there are just two people competing in a duel. We saw this in Blood versus Water where one could get second place and stay in the game by seeing what the first place person did with their puzzle. Thus, you could see exactly what happened when the first place person did what they wanted to help a specific person stay in the game and off the jury for now.

Of course, there are good things that can happen with Redemption Island duels. What works as a good challenge? It is hard to go wrong with an endurance challenge. What better way of proving that you deserve to stay in the game then by simply outlasting the other players? There are some ones that are bad endurance challenges to use, as stated above, but most of them work and are such staples of the show of Survivor that they should be used.

If we don’t want an endurance challenge used, then it makes sense to keep using prison break or any other simple challenges that work on an individual basis. The tribal challenges would be used a whole lot less in seasons like that, but there are ways to change some challenges that are tribal to be done on a more individual basis. We have seen this before and we can see it again. We can only hope that it does not change what we already like about a challenge.

While I don’t have the time to find and go through all the duels they’ve used in Survivor in this post, know that I am planning to go through a lot of them in future posts including one that you’ll see in the next post that I do of this blog on a Friday. I am ending the post here since going through all of the duels is best done for other days in the future and other posts of this blog. I hope that what I wrote here is good enough. For now, this is Adam Decker, signing off.