Survivor Retrospective: All-Stars

Rating: 3/10

Coming off the heels of the franchise's two best seasons, featuring a hand-picked cast of stalwart players, with the nuts & bolts of production and editing mastered, Survivor All-Stars appeared as if it would be infallibly entertaining. But while the previous two seasons impeccably navigated the hazards of predictability, castaway distress and casting doldrums, All-Stars found them all. Hotly-anticipated by casual and diehard fans, All-Stars quickly fell into treacherous waters and never recovered. It was a massive clunker.

Mark Burnett & co. didn't make many casting mistakes, but the few they did came back to haunt them. It felt like Jenna Lewis got the nod due to nostalgia for the debut season rather than anything she did to accentuate herself there; in All-Stars she persisted all the way to final three without a memorable moment. Sue was as caustic on All-Stars as she was in that debut; this time her infamous moment came through a sexual harassment scandal rather than an angry speech. Alicia was on hand because of her fitness and demographic; she failed to provide anything compelling before busting out seventh. Jerri was selected to fill the femme fatale role; she organized a blindside or two of superior players before being pathetically discarded. Many former castaways - including champions Sandra and Vecepia and luminaries like Colleen, Greg, Heidi, Brandon and Kim Powers - would doubtlessly have made the season more watchable. 

The first half of the season was submarined by a series of unfortunate exits. Two of the exits were unfortunate for the castaways themselves, as Jenna Morasca decided to leave the game for her cancer-stricken mother (arriving home eight days before she died) and Sue quit after a naked Richard Hatch rubbed his genitalia against her during a challenge. Nevermind that Hatch is gay, that Sue hardly reacted in the moment or that Hatch was voted off before Sue exploded - once again a cast member felt they were violated, and once again Survivor did nothing about it. All-Stars is further evidence Survivor's handling of sexual harassment is long, checkered and deficient. 

The Alpha-males of All-Stars set about to devour each other as soon as they got off the boat. There wasn't enough room for two Robs in an initial tribe of six, so Cesternino was offed by the Robfather before sinking his strategic claws into the game. The aforementioned Hatch lost an alpha-battle to Colby, who had his own back stabbed at the next Tribal Council. On day 21, Ethan became the final former champ to fall. None of it was particularly captivating; the show's most engaging moments centered around Amber & Rob's love story (begun before the halfway point of the first episode), Hatch winning a protracted battle with a shark and Rupert failing on a shelter.

The castaways received a surprise when, with ten left, they swapped buffs instead of merging. Coincidentally, every member wound up with their previous tribemates except for Amber. She was the obvious target, but the Robfather made a dramatic move. During a transition after the immunity challenge, Rob pleaded with Lex to spare her in exchange for a future favor. Amber scrapped, charmed and promised as best as she could with her new tribe. Lex talked it over with Kathy and they decided to take the gambit, ousting Jerri instead of Amber. The tribes merged in the next episode. Instead of a favor, the Robfather served Lex a summons to be the first member of the jury. Kathy was next, but not before shedding many tears over ravaged friendships. 

It was hard to sympathize with them. Having watched Marquesas, Kathy and Lex should've known Rob's word was meaningless. Kathy even played alongside him that season. Kathy and Lex could've voted Amber off and controlled the post-merge game, but they fell victim to Survivor's most classic mistake: misjudging the significance of a short-term relationship within the sphere of the game. Apparently their relationship with Rob had developed outside of the game, illuminating another way in which All-Stars misfired: players who know and know of each other are less interesting to watch because their interactions are less deceptive. Kathy's agony felt more deserved than Lex's, as he'd presided over half a dozen eliminations of "friends" in the name of strategic gameplay.

The second pivotal moment of the game came with five left. Incorrectly concerned Big Tom might turn on them, Amber and Rob elected to go with Jenna and Rupert to the final four. Jenna cemented her undistinguished, unprincipled legacy by stabbing Rupert in the back rather than drawing rocks. Then she screwed up an endurance challenge and busted out third. Rupert's exit didn't contain the tragic element it did on Pearl Islands, as his personality and providing lost some of its vibrancy and he was clearly in over his head strategically. Rupert got the last laugh when fans awarded him a million bucks in a surprise special America's Tribal Council four days after the reunion.

That reunion finale was actually the best episode of All-Stars. The season's preeminent storyline gained weight when the audience saw Amber & Rob were still together; when he proposed to her and she said yes, it truly appeared a duo had won the game together. Indeed, they had played the entire game together. Their alliance was greater than the sum of its parts. Rob was in peak form throughout the season, more nuanced than the heavy-handed soldier-in-training we saw in Marquesas, dominant in mental and physical challenges, just as providing as Rupert if he set his mind to it. Amber played a brilliant social game, massaging and blinding the other castaways from the finality of her alliance with Rob. Moments after becoming his fiancée, Amber defeated Rob 4-3 to become The Survivor All-Star. It was the proper result, as Rob's social manipulations had been too ruthless for the Jury to stomach, his Final Tribal performance so wretched you wondered if he was trying to throw the vote.

Amber & Rob wrote the book on Survivor coupling - how to start, how to play and win the game, and how to make it last afterwards. It was an impressive achievement, an alliance of mind, purpose and spirit never seen before or since. No two players have ever immersed themselves so deeply into the game, erasing and rewriting the boundaries between game and life. Their legacy is two championships, two of the hardest dominations in Survivor history, and decades of castaways insistent on breaking apart any hint of a potential couple.

Survivor Retrospective: Pearl Islands

Rating: 9.5/10 

Pearl Islands accelerated the momentum generated in The Amazon, parlaying the whimsy of its opening pirate theme into a thrilling and dynamic closing stretch. While The Amazon was clearly engineered to dramatize sex, Pearl Islands relied on the charm of its castaways and the skill of its editors to produce the best season of the first seven and an entry into the pantheon of all-time greats.  

The banality of Survivor's initial meet & greet got a shot in the arm when the Pearl Islands castaways were forced to barter for supplies in a Panamanian town. The Drake tribe got off to an imposing start thanks to Sandra, whose Spanish and disposition obtained them an array of useful supplies. The Morgan tribe splintered haplessly and returned with few possessions - not even their shoes, which had been pirated by Drake's Rupert after Morgan left them unwatched.

Rupert's first impression was that pilfering, but he quickly endeared himself to his tribe and audience by providing. Rupert immediately distinguished himself as the premier provider in the game's history, casually catching enough seafood for all of Drake to feast on every day. Drake's only hiccup came when Rupert reluctantly allowed doofus Shawn to fish with his prized spear; Shawn predictably lost the spear, but Rupert located it on the Pacific Ocean floor after several hours of searching in a grid. 

Drake decimated Morgan with six straight challenge victories to open the game. To make matters worse, the reward challenges included the right to plunder one item from the other tribe. Drake lowered the bootheel by thieving the most prized of Morgan's few possessions. The dichotomy of the first two weeks was stark: Drake's castaways lived more comfortably than any survivors in history, while Morgan's suffering was so acute it spawned the first quitter in Survivor history, Osten. 

Drake's first challenge loss was purposeful, as they elected to tank an immunity challenge despite Rupert's reservations. That proved to be the crack Morgan needed to get back into the game; they edged Drake in the next two immunities to settle the player score at 5-5. 

Then came the twist, the most hair-raising of the first seven seasons: all the players who'd been eliminated suddenly strutted back into the game as the "Outcasts" tribe. One Outcast would be eligible to return to the game per tribe they defeated in a challenge. The Outcasts prevailed over both tribes in the challenge, so two got to return to the game in place of Drake and Morgan members voted out that night.

The twist backfired when the Outcasts "voted in" unentertaining Lill and scheming Burton. Socially-incompetent Lill persisted all the way to Final Tribal, while conniving Burton joined forces with a supervillain to orchestrate the murder of the show's most celebrated hero.

By the time his back was stabbed, Rupert's heroism bordered on mythical. He'd been briefly swapped to Morgan, who he rescued from destitution before returning to Drake. His confessionals revealed surprising vulnerability, a former fat kid who fashioned himself "The best damn Survivor player ever." Rupert was more than the game's greatest provider: he was a challenge beast, a loyal ally, a wonderful companion and an articulate tactician. Rupert set a record for per-episode screentime before his downfall, edited to be a Shakespearean tragedy in the vein of Julius Caesar.

Rupert was assassinated by an unholy cadre of Morgans, Outcasts and his own Drake companion, Jonny Fairplay. The latter slowly emerged as the preeminent villain of the game's first seven seasons, an egocentric cancer who delighted in strategic exploitation. Fairplay launched his most legendary gambit during the family visit episode, faking his grandmother's death for pity so the other castaways would let him win the challenge - giving up their own rights to see family members so Fairplay could hang out with his friend.

The season lulled briefly without Rupert, as Fairplay and Burton brutishly took control of the game while their bromance bloomed. They may well have ridden the wave all the way home if not for committing a classic mistake: the devious duo went on an extravagant reward together, leaving the other three castaways together at camp. Darrah, Lill and Sandra quickly conspired to vote Burton out. The female plotting was interspersed with decadent clips of Burton & Fairplay congratulating each other on their control of the game while blasting the women as helpless, thickheaded sheep.

When the men returned, each woman played up the stereotype they knew Burton & Fairplay considered them to camouflage their alliance: Darrah played dumb and detached, Lill acted increasingly erratic and antisocial, while Sandra pretended she was giving up before "accepting" a final three offer from the men. Burton & Jon sniffed out the ruse, noting the melodrama in Darrah & Lill's performance. But Sandra obliterated the men with detailed, nuanced lies built on the foundation of her ruthless reputation. It was a stunning, glorious late-game rise for one of Survivor's all-time greats, the third and most unexpected of Pearl Islands' classic characters to emerge.

Sandra laid low for most of the season, but her performance down the stretch revealed her to be one of the shrewdest thinkers to ever play the game. Sandra found herself on the wrong side of the numbers several times down the stretch, but always found a way to linger at the back of the slaughterhouse line. She never received a vote against.

For once the edit played it straight, casting incandescent light on Burton's impending demise instead of trying to blindside the audience. The men appropriated the unusual edit with bushels of wildly chauvinistic confessionals, entertainingly cut with clips of Sandra dunking on them. Burton's torch was snuffed at an epicly satisfying Tribal Council, with Jeff Probst joining the dunk contest: "For the second time, the tribe has spoken."

Fairplay was spared at the next Tribal in order to oust Darrah the challenge-dominator, leaving a disjointed final three of Fairplay, Lill and Sandra. Lill outlasted Fairplay in the endurance challenge, then surprisingly chose to go to Final Tribal with Sandra. Lill claimed her decision was motivated by honor at the Reunion Show, but had said on camera she was choosing based on who she could beat. Four jurors said they would've voted for Lill over Fairplay, so perhaps Lill gave up $900k by choosing Sandra. In confessional, Sandra said she'd surely vote herself out and expected Lill to off her. In any case, Survivor fans are forever indebted to Lill for choosing Sandra. If daft Lill or evil Fairplay had won, it would've felt hollow after such an illustrious and dynamic season. Instead, Sandra's dominant Final Tribal performance and 6-1 vote trouncing capped a thoroughly satisfying finish to a classic season.