Review: Survivor, "It Feels Like A Rollercoaster" | Season 42, Episode 1

or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Accept Survivor's Pivot To Twists, Twists, and More Twists

Did one of these players know they were about to be medically barred from competing two days in when this photo was taken? I have questions. Photo: CBS

Welcome to my first review of Survivor here at Episodic Medium. I’m thrilled to be writing about the show every week after dropping in on the past few seasons for The A.V. Club, and am excited about the prospect of creating a lively and engaged comment section here at Episodic Medium. However, I’m also locking all future reviews—and comments on this one—behind a paywall, because that’s what allows me to write about it.

If this review suggests you want to be able to read my thoughts on each week’s episode and be a part of this community for both Seasons 42 and 43, a yearly subscription is $50, or you can join for $5 a month while the two seasons are airing. However, I know that many of us have people we talk to about Survivor, and who may also want to be a part of that conversation, and so here’s my deal: for anyone who purchases—or has purchased—a year-long subscription, they can choose one Survivor viewer in their life to gift a three-month subscription so they can join in. I’ll send more information on how this can be redeemed tomorrow.

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In the marketing for Survivor Season 41, ads for the show kept referring to the game as a “monster,” trying to create a horror movie vibe. It honestly never really made any sense, especially once the game started and the monster was more of a jester forcing players to say weird phrases and throwing everything at the wall to see what stuck.

In my review of the finale, I suggested watching Survivor 41 felt like playing Calvinball, the fictional game from Calvin and Hobbes where the rules were always made up as they went along. I understood the goal was to disorient the players, but it simultaneously disoriented the viewers, and the experience of watching the show shifted away from the “social experiment” between actual players to a “gameplay experiment.” The game may not have felt like a monster, but it was taking up too much space, even with the introduction of player backstories into the show’s bag of editing tricks.

But when the three tribes arrive at the beach for the first reward challenge of Season 42, there’s a different vibe. Some of this stems from an extremely enthusiastic set of castaways, with the jovial Maryanne leading a group with enough superfans that there’s a full performance of the Survivor theme song (R.I.P.) during shelter construction. But the show uses this early hangout vibe—constructed by picking and choosing light-hearted moments from Jeff’s opening banter with the contestants—as a calm before the storm, emphasizing what makes Season 42 different: this time, those of us watching from home have a pretty good idea of what to expect, while the players who flew to Fiji last summer are completely in the dark.

And while I remain firm in my belief that piling up advantages to the point where chyrons are necessary to keep track of who has what is not beneficial to Survivor’s storytelling, resituating the viewer within the game’s disruptive qualities has produced a far more enjoyable experience at least to this stage of the season. For better or worse, part of the joy of Survivor is the rhythm of the game, and seeing how new sets of players and (a reasonable number of) new gameplay elements change that rhythm. And while Season 41 felt like an arrhythmic mess, it nonetheless established a new baseline for us to work from, and viewing Season 42 through that lens could power through some of the wonkiness of the twists to get back to doing what the show does best.

Let’s Twist Again

There are three main twists¹ that play out in “It Feels Like a Rollercoaster.” The first is the new “Advantage Amulets,” which are gifted to players in the reward challenge with seemingly no consequence given that we see no players question what took them so long to complete their leg of the relay. Hai, Drea, and Lindsay are each given an object that holds power, but only if they’re all played at once, and that power evolves as there are fewer left in the game. Essentially, the three players—who immediately were all“we’re an alliance at the merge”—have to coordinate on when to play them, or they can vote each other out and the power evolves from extra vote (3) to steal-a-vote (2) and then finally to an immunity idol if only one person remains.

There’s two things I like about this, even if adding extra anything to the game is a violation of my Survivor principles. The first is that it has a long-tail strategy impact, with ramifications as the game moves forward. It doesn’t completely throw off the balance of the game to try to create a huge big swing—looking at you, “Ask a person for their Idol and they have to give it to you”—but instead seeds conflict for tribe swaps (when two could be on the same tribe and one could strategize against the other) and especially the merge. The second value is that regardless of how it plays out, what results isn’t outside of the normal advantages given in the game: it’s just something a player could have earned anyway, making the impact less about the end result and more about the player dynamics.

As noted above, the best Survivor twists are the ones that actually play out as social experiments, shifting how the players relate to each other. And there’s a reason why, when Season 41 reached the end point, it was entirely unclear how any of the players actually felt about the final three, or how their decisions would be made. The Amulets feel like they have a much higher chance of creating more meaningful impacts on the game’s most interesting element, and thus I’m optimistic.

There’s less to say about the first of two returning twists, the Ship’s Wheel Prison Experiment, although it does throw two extra votes in the game when Jenny proves a shrewd judge of character by realizing that Drea’s “I am here to win” energy and Maryanne’s “I’m here to prove myself” energy would both lead them to risk their vote and protects hers.² However, whether it was due to something we didn’t see or just a sense of self-defeat, Zach became the first played to use the returning “Shot in the Dark” dice, unsuccessfully casting his die and ending up the first person to be unanimously voted out of Survivor in the process.

Farewell to the Fallen

The early edit made it clear that the Ika tribe, despite a comeback win in the first immunity challenge, had accumulated a collection of potential vote-offs: Rocksroy delivered a truly next-level frustrated Dad performance in setting up the shelter, Tori went on a quixotic search for taro as though anyone would believe she wasn’t looking for an immunity idol, and Zach—thrilled to have reached an all-time high weight of 118 at the start of the game—put the blame of the immunity loss on his puzzle skills instead of the fact the tribe had fallen so far behind during the physical part of the challenge that it really didn’t matter. But after Zach stumbled through some social dynamics—having admitted that building relationships was awkward as he aligned with Romeo over their scrawniness—and made his loyalty questionable, it was seemingly the end of the road, and he takes it with grace.

This was not, however, the only elimination in the episode, and the other is much more complicated. Jackson’s departure from the game is going to be interesting to parse in the aftermath, given the circumstances. We meet Jackson for the first time around the campfire on night one, when he discloses to the tribe that he is a transgender man, and that he had first applied for Survivor before his transition. We get a full backstory of his transition, its impact on his relationship with his parents, and his reconciliation with them when his mother got sick and he became her full-time caregiver. It’s a heartwarming story that—as with Ricard’s family story last year—it is important for Survivor to be telling so openly, especially given its history with Zeke’s outing on Game Changers. But it’s also a story that got very complicated when not long after, Jeff is arriving on the beach to inform Jackson that due to failing to disclose the fact he was taking lithium, he is being pulled from the game because the consequences to both detoxing from and taking the drug make him a medical liability.

There’s a lot to unpack here. The show positions it as an extension of his openness regarding his transness, with Jackson speaking honestly about his reasons for taking the medication in the hopes of dispelling the stigma surrounding mental health treatment. But if we take that out of the equation, Jackson lied to Survivor producers about his medical status by failing to disclose the medication, which due to side effects when combined with stress and dehydration make it impossible for him to be medically cleared. He offers the justification that he and his wife had decided there was a chance he would be successfully weaned off the medication by the time he played, but the simple truth is that he lied about it, only told them when he arrived in Fiji, and producers chose to let him start the game anyway just to remove him two days in once he had given them his campfire story they had already packaged up in their heads during casting.

I have a lot of questions about how this played out—former Survivor Max Dawson wrote a thread about his own experience with prescription drugs on the show and notes that many other castaways have gone cold turkey, so this seems like it has been an ongoing conversation within the Survivor community. But even if we just focus on what we know and what happened on the island, nothing about the narrative being presented makes a lot of sense to me. Was Jackson aware that there was a good chance he would be removed from the game when he started playing, or was he given hope for a reprieve? Was he given a choice over whether to start the game and be removed on day two, or was it producers who made that call on their own to generate storytelling? And was he given the choice on whether to do it on camera with Probst, or was that something producers asked for in order to maximize the story’s impact?

There’s an unavoidably cynical feeling to a trans contestant telling their emotional story, establishing Survivor’s commitment to increasing the diversity of its contestant pool, and then being booted from the game before they’re able to play as though Survivor only cared about that campfire moment. I don’t buy into that level of cynicism: they never want the game to be disrupted in this way, much as they don’t want there to be medical evacuations like Daniel potentially veered close to with his dislocated shoulder (which you could see him favoring in the immunity challenge even once it was popped back in). Whatever conversations happened between Jackson and producers, this was the result they landed on.

Logic would suggest that Jackson would be a prime candidate to return to play again, given the circumstances. But given that he withheld medical information from producers, effectively breaking the rules, would they let him come back? As I said, there are a lot more questions than answers here, but it’s a wrinkle in a premiere that otherwise fell into a mostly comfortable rhythm that makes me excited to write about the rest of the season.

Stray observations

• The choice to give the two tribes who didn’t win the supplies in the reward challenge an opportunity to do so with the Savvy/Sweat option ended up being a productive one. The show is leaning on The Amazing Race’s detour logic here, and while having them pick different options would have provided some variety (and activated Sweat’s “someone isolated from the tribe” dynamic), the editors had a lot of fun with the on-screen graphics and the great cut from Hai’s “The orange tribe is screwed” to Taku struggling.

• It also helpful since the episode balanced out perfectly, with Taku (Orange) and Vati (Green) losing the reward challenge and getting the extra time on the puzzle, while Ika wins reward but loses immunity and gets the extra time at the end of the episode.

• Speaking of balance, notetaking meant tracking talking heads, and on Ika only Drea and Zach ended up getting introduced by producers—the other four weren’t properly introduced until we saw them introduce themselves during their arrival at their beach.

• The two-piece Immunity Idols always have one part that is superior to the other, but usually they’re like a larger and smaller version of the same thing, as opposed to “an elaborate ouroboros” and “the mostly flat stand it sat on.” If I finished second, I’d be pissed.

• I went back and checked and I never actually used “like a snake eating its tail” to describe the chaos of Season 41, but trust I was thinking about it, and took that idol as a sign.

• I consider it an attack on anyone trying to write about this episode of television for the show to not put up a chryon for Rocksroy before Jeff referred to him by name, creating a moment of absolute panic in my notetaking (I went with Roxroy).

• Speaking of Rocksroy, the speed at which he identified himself as the “old person” and then immediately started talking about being of another generation is a reminder that even when you take the themes out of Survivor, the contestants will naturally take on those roles. Seeing him get away with treating the younger people on his tribe—his comment to Swati about her shoes was so bizarre—just because he’s strong is a reminder of the privilege that Swati herself called out in her first chyron, and I hope the tribe reaches a point where they can hold him accountable for it.

• Also, anyone who gets mad at people singing the Survivor theme song on Survivor doesn’t deserve to be on Survivor.

• Maryanne is truly an emotional rollercoaster all by herself, and I’m really curious how it ends up playing with the rest of the castaways: there’s definitely a moment of culture shock stemming from her intense enthusiasm, but as the episode progresses the earnestness never wavers, and she’s still shrewd enough to navigate her desire to go on the Prisoner’s Dilemma trip such that she doesn’t volunteer too quickly or let her emotions override the need to let it be others’ decision. That makes me hopeful that she’ll be able to navigate the game ahead, in a way that not everyone with that much zest for life necessarily can.

• I’d love to have gotten a clearer sense of what was happening for Taku to fall behind Vati in the immunity challenge after Jonathan had muscled them through so much of the challenge to that point—bad strategy? Hard to pinpoint how they slowed down so much, even if the puzzle got them back into “Ouroboros” territory.

• “Good lord these people are not puzzle people”—I appreciated that Jenny was able to successfully navigate having to tell the rest of her tribe that they were slow without being ostracized for it.

• I was wondering why they chose to show us Jenny’s decision regarding the Prisoner’s Dilemma instead of leaving us in suspense until someone got to tribal council, but it made sense when Drea completely changed her strategy on wanting to vote out Rocksroy because she wasn’t sure if she even had a vote that night. The editors chose to have that moment carry more meaning—turning it into a potentially game-altering strategic decision we might look back on—as opposed to waiting to see if we remembered it at tribal itself.

• It’s probably not the shortest tribal council ever, but for a two-hour-long episode it was definitely the shortest proportionally, and it was clear Zach’s dice roll wasn’t going to work given how close we were to the end of the hour.

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1. Every time I write the word twist I’m reminded I’m two months out from emergency surgery to fix a twisted intestine, so thanks, Survivor.

2. Between this and her immediate recognition her tribe did not understand the triangle puzzle, impressive performance from Jenny here.