Survivor Season 42 - 2022

As my death march nears its end, the pace has accelerated and I find myself behind on jotting down my thoughts. If you have been frantically refreshing your RSS reader for the past month, I apologize from the bottom of my heart.

This season gives us a unique information asymmetry: the audience has been fully brought up to speed on the new New Era mechanics, but the cast has not. This doesn’t manifest in any obvious way but important to point out that going forward, everyone will be on the same page. Now that we’ve gone gimmickless (for a while, anyway), what differentiates each season is basically just the players themselves. Now that I have most of the 40s under my belt, I’m surprised how well this works. For some reason I can map Rachel to 47 and Eva to 48 and Rizgod to 49 without the need for additional mnemonics. Unfortunately, due to worldwide RAM shortages I can only do that for a few contestants per season. So let’s talk about some of them, because 42 serves up some choice specimens of a few specific archetypes.

First off is the physical threat. Someone who is good at strength and endurance based challenges, who you want on your tribe when they are separate and off your tribe when they are not. This person can keep your team intact and well-fed, but given the opportunity they will keep winning immunity until they are sitting at final tribal with a good story to tell.

Hulking Beachman Jonathan may end up being the strongest person to ever play Survivor, and he is the only player from this season to bring his unbelievable physique to Survivor 50. Real Gaston hours over here. Perhaps his most impressive feat was singlehandedly dragging a boat ashore in a choppy water challenge which gave his team an unbeatable lead. After they finished Jeff had to pause the challenge and allow the other two teams to skip that portion because they simply couldn’t accomplish as a team what Jonathan could do by himself. Post-merge, Jonathan’s social game suffered and he went down in the fire challenge.

First-Muslim-To-Make-Merge Omar is an exquisite Rat Boy, double-talking his way into multiple alliances and pulling off some devastating betrayals. Unlike others of his ilk, Omar is genuinely charming, and I hoped that he could make it to the end and prove his game was worth rewarding. Alas, one of his victims spilled the beans as she was taking her torch to be snuffed, and Omar couldn’t survive the fallout.

Exuberant seminarian Maryanne was what I will charitably call a “big personality” contestant. Her terminal inability to take a chill pill early on made her a fun foil for her more lethargic tribemates, and her squabbles with Jonathan were great TV. I assumed that Maryanne would eventually get chucked just to make camp a little quieter, but she calmed down as the game progressed and revealed her deep savvy. Her final tribal performance, where she walked the jury through the many branching paths that she had available to survive the endgame, clinched her well-deserved victory, but I was struck by a tribal early in the second half where Maryanne and fellow woman of color Drea called out a tendency I had also identified (unfortunately on subsequent seasons): an admirably diverse cast ejects most of the black cast members after merge. Maryanne and Drea cast their immunity idols in protest and messed up plans to send a third black contestant in a row to the jury bench.