Survivor Season 22 - 2011

Besides a very stupid mechanic twist, this season was a character study of two Survivor power players. Russell Hantz and Rob Mariano had a legendary showdown two seasons ago, and both men wanted a rematch. Two seasons later, they emerge from a helicopter as surprise contestants and are assigned to different tribes. The way things shook out ring true to their characters and playstyles, even if it was not always riveting television.

Cheese Play

Let’s talk Starcraft. A notoriously difficult game to master, Starcraft tasks players with setting up supply lines to assemble an army and destroy the opponent’s base. You can spend a lot of time mastering the fundamentals and practice against worthy opponents, or you can cheese it. The most famous example is the “Zerg Rush”: playing as the swarmy insectoid Zerg, you flood out a relatively large number of cheap units early in the game and send them over, hoping to catch your opponent off guard. You can win games against very skilled players by doing a cheese move, but it doesn’t make you a good player to do it. By definition, cheese plays are all-in; if your gambit fails, the game is over. Skilled players will look for telltale signs of cheese and react accordingly, and they will absorb novel strategies into a comprehensive playbook instead of using one or two as crutches. Cheese also fares poorly in the metagame: if enough people pull off a cheap move, the player base will learn how to counter it, forming a collective immune response.

The more I watch Russell, the more I think of him as a cheese player. He came in SO HOT in Samoa, proving to be a tenacious and ruthless player, and his presence was captivating. He made it to the finals and was hoping to win over the jury by glaring at them. Then he lost and immediately came back and played the exact same game again. It’s commendable to make it to the end of the game twice in a row, but his total lack of remorse and inability to show any chill made the jury vote a hard wall. I speculated that a cast of players that had actually seen him play before would yeet him immediately, and his tribe took the first opportunity to throw a challenge just to get the chance to get rid of him. How’s that for an immune response?

Russell only has one speed, one mode, and while it was riveting to see his novel idol plays and loose-lipped wheeling and dealing the first two times, I get the sense that we’ve seen it all. He claims to respect the game, but I don’t think that’s true. His emotional departure was all frustration that the game wouldn’t bend itself to coronate him. I hope we’ve seen the last of him.

The Boss

On the other hand, Boston “Boston Rob” Rob recovered from his early exit from Heroes and Villains to play a perfect game, giving Russell a thorough education in expert Survivorship. It’s clear that there’s respect for Russell’s contributions to the metagame; Rob was caught off kilter on his previous appearance by the use of hidden immunity idols, a mechanic that was introduced after his last outing. Learning from Russell’s cheese play, he makes a concerted effort to get one, and when he obtains it, he holds the secret close and uses the threat to build up a wall of unassailability.

Rob is an authoritarian. The value proposition for his alliance mates is simple: be loyal to Rob, and Rob will advance you. In the early game, he powers his team to victory and spins his web. After the merge, he brilliantly axes one of his own tribe who was thinking about flipping, instead of going for the opposing tribe. He enforces a rule that no one in his alliance can talk to outsiders without another alliance member present. He observes any close friendships outside and inside his alliance as potential competing powerbases and nukes it. His alliance echoes Borneo in the way that it systematically mows down its enemies.

In the late game, Rob is just flexing. Each alliance member has been promised by Rob an exclusive deal where, in return for unshaken loyalty, they will be carried to the final three. Survivorship bias ensures that this feeling is reinforced for the people who Rob keeps, and the people whose promises were broken are ejected from the game. As a final show of power, Rob svengalis his most loyal minion to vote off her best friend in the game, just to prove that he can.

Rob takes with him to the final a literal teenager who did nothing without his permission, and Philip, a bizarre and thin-skinned weirdo who constantly humiliated himself and alienated every other castmate. I was wondering if there was a competitor named Phil, and unfortunately, Philip is not representing. Sporting a hawk feather headdress and horrible saggy pink underwear, repeatedly invoking his past as a Special Federal Agent (the producers add a question mark to his job title, which is hilarious), and starting bitchy catfights with everyone over nothing, Philip is an immediate addition to the pantheon of weirdos, and the perfect person to carry to the end, if you can get him there without pissing off everyone else. Rob brandishes him like a specimen before the Jury; if he can pull off keeping Philip in the game, is there anything he can’t do?

More importantly, and unlike Russell, Rob understands the function of the Jury in the game, and delivers a masterclass performance, alternating between flattery, responsibility for polarizing actions, and emotional vulnerability. His competitors can only praise his game, and one juror even forgoes questioning to sell Rob to the rest of the jury. It was a coronation, and richly deserved. Rob famously figured out how to share the prize money of All-Stars by marrying the winner, but his gameplay that season revealed a natural talent. I’m glad he got to pitch a no-hitter, and I wonder if we’ve seen the last of him.

Redemption Island

I hate this mechanic. When a contestant gets their flame snuffed at the end of a season, it is a Death Allegory, and their departure is somber and final. When players come back from the dead, like Lill in Pearl Islands, it gets weird.

Redemption Island is a purgatory realm for dead players, to battle each other for eternity in the hope of being returned to the land of the living. There are nuggets of good ideas here, but my main gripe is that it ruins the dramatic flow. When a torch is snuffed now, it doesn’t really mean anything. Early in the next episode, a challenge determines if a voted off player is truly eliminated or kept around for a further indeterminate amount of time. Eliminated players get to make a speech and people golf clap as they burn their buff and leave. Rancid vibes.

I’m glad, though, that the stupidest and funniest possible outcome of this mechanic happened: poor Matty, eliminated early and sent to purgatory, wins duel after duel to remain in the game, and is allowed to return to the tribe at merge. Due to some poor choices on his part and a lot of politics that were out of control, he is IMMEDIATELY banished back to the spirit realm, where he once again doggedly fights off challenger after challenger, and then at the final challenge, where he can once again rejoin the players, he loses. lol