Review: Survivor, "I'm The Bandit" | Season 44, Episode 12

A switch is flipped and the season's underdogs are suddenly in control

When I’m not able to watch Survivor live, as is the case for the final episodes of Season 44, I’m always tempted to fast forward. Every moment I sit watching the episode is a moment where I’ll be unable to avoid the siren song of my Twitter feed, knowing that a spoiler could find its way through. And the truth is that, while Survivor is content-rich enough that the idea of 90-minute episodes is reasonable, there’s still some filler if your goal is to simply experience the “story” that will carry us into next week’s finale.

There are safe spaces to fast forward, especially late in the game when the immunity challenges get pretty boring. It doesn’t matter if it was Jaime or Carolyn who dropped the ball first—I was able to comfortably skip ahead to the showdown between Lauren and Heidi, at which point I realized that I didn’t really care which one of them won immunity and just hit fast forward again until I got the answer. While it’s possible I missed a next level Yam Yam one-liner from t…