Review: Survivor, "Show No Mercy" | Season 43, Episode 4
A reward challenge—what a concept!—sparks a fall from grace for a "dominant" tribe
Look, Survivor seasons get fundamentally more interesting when there’s reward challenges in play. It adds another “event” into each episode’s narrative, lets the teams compete with another and reveal potential weaknesses, and I just like seeing the challenge designers able to explore new dimensions to the blocks and sandbags of it all.
In this case, though, the concept of “reward” was turned into a different kind of game, with the winner of the season’s first pure reward challenge also gaining the ability to steal an item—or, rather, multiple items if they were from a single reward win—from another tribe. It’s not a game-changing twist until Jeff reveals that the winning tribe can choose to take anything from a tribe outside of their flint, which includes both their machete and their pot. And as though the producers wrote the script, recent losers Vesi power to a win on the strength of Cody’s pitching arm, giving them both reward and the ability to disadvantage one of their r…