Examining the Final Immunity Challenge

While a lot of the game has changed since they put in the forced fire making tie breaker, there is still the classic idea of the final immunity challenge where we have one of the players win against the others. But things have changed over the years.

When it started out, there was a final two and the winner of this challenge would pick who would be against him or her in the final tribal council. In the first four seasons, they all made the wrong pick as the person who sat next to them wound up winning the game. But as the show moved along, many people found it easy it take a goat to the end where they would then win in a landslide.

Thus, as the players evolved, the game evolved too, with the producers bringing in a new twist for the game where they had three finalists instead of just two. This also changed the final vote and gave the winner less control over it. I am thinking that there could have been a twist where the winner of the final immunity challenge also cast the sole remaining elimination vote among the three of the remaining contestants in the game, thus still getting the choice that those in final two seasons would have gotten. But this twist never came to be.

Instead, in order to prevent the last voted out from being a great player that could make a great winner, the game changed again. They didn’t do four finalists. Instead, they made the final immunity challenge less valuable by giving one of them safety by the final immunity challenge winner and giving the other two left a chance to win another challenge to stay in the game and win. This has lead to all three of the outcomes where the final immunity challenge winner wins the game, the fire making challenge winner wins the game, and the person who is picked as safe wins the game.

Now how do we examine the final immunity challenge itself? Some of them work better than others. But I do believe that there haven’t been any suckers for challenges then. I’d have to do more research into it, but even those that become final immunity challenges on a regular basis, such as hand on a hard idol or simmotion, have always worked.

What’s interesting is just how much it can change the game. As mentioned before, it is common for the winner of it to not win the game and effectively chose the wrong person or people to sit next to them. Plus, a lot of people wouldn’t have been voted out if they had won this. Of course, this is how the game works and pretty much any challenge can change the game at any point any time. This one is just how so many of the last people voted out (before the rules were changed) wound up losing.

Well, I hope that there was a good point to this post in the end. I might have lost focus and can only hope that providing some content in this blog is better than doing nothing at all. You can let me know and I’ll figure things out if I still keep writing all of my blogs. For now, this is Adam Decker, signing off.