Review: Survivor, "Friends Going to War" | Season 46, Episode 13
Another season, another debate on the terms of engagement in the show's endgame
In last week’s review, I made the suggestion that this season would only have a satisfying winner if Charlie or Maria were to be the sole survivor, and the comments made a fair point: why wouldn’t Kenzie be a satisfying winner? Here’s someone who started on a losing tribe, survived based on the strength of her social game, and thought about the game strategically but didn’t overplay her hand when the game needed her to sit back a bit.
However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that a Kenzie win this season is contingent in a way that Maria and Charlie’s wouldn’t be. If Kenzie were to beat either Maria or Charlie in a final three, I might disagree with the decision in terms of what I personally value in a Survivor game, but I’d respect it as a meaningful end to the chaotic storyline of the season. But the most likely scenario in which Kenzie wins the game is if a combination of the Final Five vote and the Firemaking challenge eliminates both Maria and Charlie, leaving her to fight against Ben and Liz. And while Liz’s particular brand of chaos is useful in a narrative sense, and Maria does manage to sell Ben’s charisma as some sort of weird x-factor in the early scramble here, there’s just no way that this season ends in a satisfying way if Kenzie triumphs over two tagalongs.
I’m actually curious how much a winner matters to everyone’s final evaluation of a Survivor season. My favorite players have fallen short in almost every season of Survivor, but that doesn’t always mean that the season as a whole is tainted in the process. But there are certainly examples of players—Ben, Gabler—whose wins have broken my spirit in a way that made it hard to see the season in the same light, and the latter case in particular has put me on edge for the foreseeable future. As I write this in the early parts of the episode, I don’t think there’s a player here whose win could fully turn me against Season 46, but Post Gabler Stress Disorder is very real, and this idea that somehow Liz’s megalomania could translate into jury votes still knocks around in my mind.