Finale Twists and Gimmicks

There isn’t much to add starting out. You may have noticed that there wasn’t a post of this blog on Sunday like there was at one point supposed to be. Well, I was just swapped with so much and didn’t really need it done at all so I didn’t write a post by then, much less have it published. I’m going to go back to posting just the random posts on Wednesdays and any old season posts whenever I have them ready in the future. Now let’s get to this post.

 

I’d have to check for sure when this was first used, but I’m not sure of when there were first twists in the finale. There are different types of ways that they have been done. I might as well touch upon all of them in this blog post.

 

The original one that I hated was finale reward challenges. It appeared in some seasons for a bit, but was not really seen as much until the season of Philippines when it started appearing a whole lot more after that. It seemed to always offer an advantage in the final reward challenge or seemed like a waste of time with not much happening regarding it. I never liked them and while they stopped doing them, one of the replacements for it was even worse.

 

Before I get to that, let’s get to some of the permanent changes that happened in finales. The first of them was how the final tribal council was done. Instead of each jury member getting to speak once and that was about it, we got more of an open forum instead. There are some improvements this way, but some setbacks as well. And then we have the new final four for some odd reason. It changed the whole format of how the final four was done. Practically everyone hates it, but it is here to stay.

 

The worst of all of these twists remains, in my mind, when a person was able to vote out a jury member. While this thankfully only happened once, it left me with more mixed feelings for a finale than I had ever had before or since. I liked the winner of the season, Kaoh Rong. But I hated the twist that appeared in it, even if I don’t think that it affected the game.

 

Now for the promised annoying replacement: For at least three seasons, hidden immunity idols were brought into the finale. It was an extra idol that could almost guarantee someone would make it to the final four or bring an ally there if they were otherwise safe. It was very unfair.

 

It seems that the current gimmick that we’ll probably have to put up with indefinitely is an advantage that someone gets before the finale five immunity challenge. They would all get a clue in the new place that they live at and one person gets it. It goes back more to the unfairness from earlier while at least not having the finale idols anymore. I don’t like it as much, but it seems to occupy far less time than a reward challenge while still leaving the actual final immunity relatively untouched. And it isn’t an idol. It also isn’t ever a certainty that an advantage in a challenge will win that person said challenge.

 

There isn’t much else to say as I end this post here. I have a lot to catch up on in terms of movies, shows on tape, and shows on my laptop. I may have to ignore getting caught up on shows on DVD including all of the old Survivor seasons for a while. But we’ll see. There’s a lot for me to do and I hope that I can get it all done. There’s still a good chunk of summer left so we’ll see how long it takes for me to get caught up on things or if I have to put it aside again. For now, this is Adam Decker, signing off.