Survivor Season 26 - 2013

The back half of this season is a solid season, with a great arc for the winner and some nice alliance shakeups. The first half is a disaster.

A return to the “Fans vs Favorites” format, a tribe of returning players are handed shotguns and directed toward a barrel of new players. This matchup is unfair, not just from the experience gap but because one tribe thinks the other tribe are royalty, making it just about impossible for a fan to end up in a dominant position. Thankfully, to round things out, each tribe gets someone who is too unstable to compete on the show.

The fans get Shamar, who is an Iraq War veteran who is clearly still dealing with what he experienced over there. He’s loud and combative and annoying and is clearly lashing out because he’s in a bad place. He begs his tribe to ax him, and instead, naturally, he is kept around for several rounds as the perfect smokescreen for blindsides. I’m not sure if the cornea injury that got him medevac’d was real or some face saving, but he should have been blocked by casting from setting foot on the beach in the first place.

Worse, the favorites get Brandon “Scrappy Doo” Hantz, who spent his first outing being haunted by the demons of his past, crying at Tribal, and being berated by multiple family members on national television. This kid was left off even worse than when the show found him, and they had the audacity to bring him back to ruin himself again. Brandon develops a murderous rivalry with Philip (a very normal man that I am always happy to see) that culminates in him dumping out the tribe’s entire food stash, leading the favorites to forfeit the next immunity challenge. Brandon gets so worked up while they’re standing on their little challenge mats that Jeff summons him over to give him a shoulder massage and declare him out of the game right then and there. No doubt a necessary move; if Brandon was allowed back to the beach there would have been blood shed.

The tribal merge closed the book on all of that nonsense, and Philip’s Stealth R Us alliance was in control. Then we got a fun play where the Three Amigos alliance, a trinity of himbos who were on the outs for their athletic threat, managed to win the immunity necklace and play two idols during tribal, forcing the dominant alliance to scramble before the vote. They ended up calling the idol bluff to keep the peace, but it was tremendous television, and saw Philip ejected. From there, Cochran “Cochran” Cochran somehow became a challenge beast and walked away with a unanimous jury vote.

I really didn’t like Cochran during his first outing, where he played up his awkwardness and relished in being the Rat Boy. This time around he mellowed out, and so his moments of triumph were much more fun. A scrawny Harvard law student could win this game without winning challenges, but Cochran outplayed his rivals physically as well, and had a great talking head commentary going the whole time to boot.

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