Does Tonight's 'Survivor' Live Up To The Wild Amounts Of Network Hype?

It's been my firm position that this season of Survivor (the nineteenth!) has been the worst ever. The contestants blend together, the purported "villain" is all talk, and there's not a single person who has emerged as someone to really root for.

But fear not! CBS has been promoting tonight's episode as terrifying and incredibly dramatic, to the point where ... well, watch for yourself.

Can the episode possibly live up to this kind of promotion? Having seen it, I can tell you what I think.

What I think, after the jump.

 

The short answer is that what happens here isn't quite as massively terrifying as this would lead you to believe. It left me thinking that this, while upsetting, could only conceivably be the scariest thing Jeff Probst has ever seen on the show because he wasn't there when contestant Mike Skupin passed out and fell into the fire, and because he responds to things based on how they look and not the actual danger they pose. (My guess is that several medical situations in the past — including a couple of raging infections and an intestinal blockage — have been at least as genuinely dangerous as this is.)

The rest of the episode, however, where everyone is miserable and shivering? That does live up to what they're promising. For many, many seasons now, the conditions for contestants have seemed vaguely unpleasant, but not harrowing. You'd be filthy, lonely and bored, but not necessarily suffering. (Conditions were harrowing back in the second and third seasons, in the Outback and in Africa, but after that, things got easier.) In recent seasons, there has been a lot of time spent lying on the beach, frolicking in the water, and — at worst — lying around doing nothing.

This is the first time in many seasons that the contestants have looked this legitimately miserable, when you can imagine people quitting because they just don't want to be there. For viewers whose enjoyment of the show is partly based on battling the elements, there's more here than there has been in years. The guy in that promo who says he spent 22 hours hiding in the trunk of a tree isn't kidding around. He's still a Survivor contestant and therefore slightly difficult to take seriously, but he wasn't in the tree for kicks.

The problem, of course, is that if you don't care about the people, all of this is less effective. If they'd spent the first five episodes developing the story and not just watching the other Russell (the bald, preening fellow) talk about how smart he is, this would be more interesting. As it is, it's more like, "Wow, I feel bad for that blonde lady whose name I don't remember. She looks cold."

It's not enough to save the season, and there's a big cheat that I won't reveal that may pull the rug out from their efforts to promote this episode as a game-changer, but if you like the parts of this show where people are genuinely trying to figure out how to remain upright and conscious, this may just be the episode for you.