Survivor Season 27 - 2013

Up to this point in the show, Survivor has gotten the most pathos from its Loved Ones segments, where late in the game contestants would get to hear from home. Originally this would be in the form of letters, but a lucky challenge winner would sometimes get a surprise visit in person. The logistics of this setup meant that several loved ones were flown out, with only one allowed to interact with their contestant if they won their challenge. At that point, you might as well bring them all out, so the show quickly pivoted to flying out one loved one per contestant and having them all compete in a challenge together or something, with more face time for winners (Modern seasons have reverted to letter writing, presumably for cost saving reasons).

Making your starving, paranoid, unkempt contestants cry when they see their parent or their spouse or their sibling is tremendous television, so it was only natural that we eventually arrive at “Blood vs Water”, where each returning contestant is paired with a loved one, who will play the game alongside them. The twist, naturally, is that the loved ones will form a tribe to compete with returning players. This mechanic, alongside the reintroduction of Redemption Island (a Valhalla Realm for dead players to fight for a chance to return to the game) gave everyone an acute conflict of interest, and to top it all off, any time a player was voted off, their loved one had an opportunity to take their place in Hell. If you’re guessing this led to some messy gameplay, you’d be right, but I was surprisingly into it.

There were two mother-daughter sets, and in head to head challenges the moms kicked the daughters’ asses (hell yeah), but later in the game a daughter had to vote her mom out, and a redemption island challenge saw a parent pull ahead of their child and wobble on if they wanted to eject their own kid from the game permanently (they did). A returning player who lost their redemption duel openly speculated that this experience was going to make their boyfriend, a Big Brother winner that they had brought along to play, break up with them. Right off the bat, fan favorite Rupert ejected himself to save his wife, putting her on a hostile team for the remainder of her gameplay. Shit got weird.

The loved ones, being new to the game, got their asses handed to them again and again, and a dominant alliance led by professional footballer Brad Culpepper ejected not weak players, but those who would possibly entice strong players from the opposing tribe to sacrifice themselves. One of these players was Tyson, a gangly mormon who sneered his way through Tocantins and played a more subdued game with a major strategic error on Heroes Vs Villains . When his girlfriend was ejected, and he decided not to switch places with her to keep her in the game, he had the motivation to win the whole thing out of spite, which he absolutely did.

Of all the villains the show has crafted, Tyson is the one who is most putting on a show for the cameras. He definitely has a mean streak, which came back to bite him during Jury deliberations, but subsequent outings make clear that his first was subject to an edit that deemphasized his class clown demeanor and focused on his stinging commentary on other players. This time around, he was cool as a cucumber, knowing when to press his alliance for loyalty, when to scramble for an idol, and when to play it cool and let the game play itself. After the merge, anyone with a loved one still in the game became a target, and Tyson’s core group took the lead and ground down any and all opposition, with the only real resistance being a Hail Mary rock draw that backfired. Tyson brought his core alliance all the way to the end, owned his mistakes, and showed his softer side, and the game became his.