A week before Survivor 49 started airing, Dalton Ross asked Jeff Probst about the excitement around Survivor 50, and how it may have eclipsed fan interest in the still-unseen season that comes before it. Probst's answer was, basically, "Well, you have to watch 49, because there are two people from it in 50." Not exactly a stirring endorsement.

Probst later follows that up with, "All I know about 49 is it's a really fun season and the back half is bananas." (1) That's all he remembers? and (2) Putting this through the Probst-hype-to-English translator, you get: "The first half is really rough." Which matches his comments elsewhere about the heat, which we saw a lot (or at least a lot of people talking about it) in Episode 2.

So here we find ourselves again - for the fourth time in the last five seasons - two weeks into a new season, with another disaster tribe that has lost every challenge, in Kele. They're starving because the new era took away their rice. They have no camp supplies, because the new era took away the traditional marooning. They have no flint, and thus no fire, because the new era also took away that. And on top of the starvation, it's oppressively hot, and the first two episodes have both featured tasks that involved digging in the sand, despite the show barely missing out on having three medevacs in a single challenge when they did this in the similarly sweltering S32: Kaoh Rong. (If you see heat in the forecast, maybe plan more water challenges?)

All that adds up to an entirely predictable - and avoidable - set of circumstances: One tribe (echoing the "Haves vs Have Nots" twist from S14: Fiji) absolutely depleted, barely functional, nearing catastrophe, while the other two are eh, fine, whatever, and talking about vibes. And while the host takes pains to acknowledge the struggling players' inability to function, he makes no mention that he (as showrunner) came up with or at least greenlit most of the punishments that put them there. It's not fun to watch, and it's all the more exhausting when it's the fourth time in five seasons. If Jeff Probst himself didn't think this suffering was particularly memorable, why the fuck can't he change any of the arbitrary rules that put us here?

I wasn't planning to recap this episode, because the outcome was so blandly predictable: The tribe you thought was going to lose kept losing, and the person you thought would be voted out in fact was. But having just watched SurvivorAU: Australia v The World, which was really fun from start to finish despite somehow forgetting to punish its contestants to the brink of collapse, I've come to an epiphany: I don't *need* to keep watching new era Survivor, especially if it's never going to change. My life is fine! I don't enjoy watching people suffer for someone else's sadistic pleasure. I see enough of that happening in the real world. Survivor is supposed to be a fun escape from that, not ... this.

I'll finish this season out. And I see that Survivor 50 has 24 players. I'm interested in seeing how they churn through that many people in 26 days. But if Survivor 51 is back to the same grim new era bullshit (three tribes of six, no food, no supplies, lose your flint if you lose immunity), I'm out, like so many other superfans have been over the past five years. I love this game, but I don't love seeing it slowly bled to death.

A whole lot of nothing (lots of reading, though)

Why is new era Survivor so bad? Let us count the ways. Back when Survivor was just an hour-long show, fans frequently requested fewer challenges in the early episodes, especially in all-newbie seasons. It was seen as a small miracle when the show complied, but it made sense: Fewer set pieces like challenges to get through allow much more flexibility in the editing, including more time to fully flesh out the new characters. (The decision probably hinged more on the calculation that fewer challenge builds makes the show cheaper to produce, but we'll pretend it was to improve quality for now.) In the era of always 90-minute episodes, though ... this practice feels a lot like Kele's food supply: A whole lot of nothing.

Survivor has adapted by filling the slot where you'd normally have a reward challenge with the much-loathed journey, which (especially in this episode) is just a mini version of a challenge. Less of a challenge than even the Redemption Island duels were, to be honest. This week's one (three-way solo "Nut Bucket") was basically a Temu duel. A bland flurry of coconut throwing where the audience has absolutely no way to tell who's ahead or behind until it ends. Riveting!

But even with all the time blown on instruction-reading (an exciting staple of everything in the new era) and each attendee reporting back to their respective tribes, the journey still felt like much less than a reward challenge, and there was a bunch of dead space to fill. Some of it was fun (the Uli tribe's deep dive into Nate trying to adapt to Gen-Z slang), some of it was excruciating (another unwelcome edition of Jake the Shoe Bandit). But while everyone's struggle with heat and starvation was mostly just talked about, you could feel the struggle to fill time, palpably.

Worst of all, as Shannon Guss and Josh Kettles discussed on Bluesky, the new era shift from separate reward and immunity challenges to a single combined RC/IC has had another (unintended?) consequence, one that accelerates the feelings of emptiness: When a tribe loses the IC, they not only don't have their flint, they also miss out on their one chance that episode for camp supplies. Imagine how much better Kele might perform if they could at least prepare sashimi with fresh-caught fish. But nope, the losing tribe has to keep losing, all because Jeff Probst seems insistent that everyone needs to know how *hard* Survivor is. (Hard doesn't necessarily mean good, Jeff.)

Jawan gets punished for winning

So we've established that the journeys are a time-filling, audience-unfulfilling substitute for reward challenges. But they're also bad for other reasons. And that's mainly that they've evolved into a mechanism to arbitrarily punish players, who often have no choice about whether they even want to participate. (This particular journey was an exception as everyone volunteered; last season production had a complicated system to force someone into the boat.)

A staple of last season's journeys was that at least one person was (almost) guaranteed to lose something, usually their vote. This episode's journey pulled a bait-and-switch on that format: After everyone was initially excited to read that there was no mention of people losing their votes for failing at the task (tossing coconuts), as Michael Block pointed out on Collider, a more sinister fate awaited: Jawan won the mini-challenge at the journey, but his "advantage" for winning was very much a disadvantage. He was given a choice of two options on his prize menu: Steal either Jake or Matt's next vote (giving him an extra ballot), or bestow a challenge disadvantage on one of the other tribes.

Given that none of the attendees to the journey were told *what* the advantage was until after the challenge ended, this was an exceptionally underhanded move by production. By winning the task, Jawan actually lost status in the game. While the vote steals would probably have been done privately, there was no real indication that Jawan would have to play the "challenge disadvantage" so publicly (although that was a reasonable assumption). Journeys! If you lose, you will be punished. Also if you win!

This is just one of so many problems with new era Survivor, but it's why I really hope everything gets blown up with Survivor 50, and we start over again with the basic format: Two tribes, RC, IC, TC. Throw in an idol or two, and let the players play. Enough with the constant artificial barriers to gameplay and booby traps. Enough with the torture. If Jeff Probst really wants to interfere with Survivor players' games, he should at least have the guts to make it a fair playing field, get off his stump, and pull a reverse David Genat - competing in a season after retiring as host.

Six-person tribes are not fun

I know production has kept this format absolutely locked down since Survivor 41 because they've convinced themselves that they are geniuses who have discovered the Holy Grail format for the pre-merge, but just because it worked in S25: Philippines and S28: Cagayan does not mean it will always be a good idea. The biggest problem with tribes of six is exactly what we saw with Annie: Once you have a core four, the two people who are outside of that core basically have no shot. Especially if the majority has possession of the sole idol, as Kele's does. Annie should have been aware last week during the Nicole vote that she was not part of that four - Jeremiah announced it at Tribal. Somehow she didn't catch on to this until after she was blindsided (to be fair, Alex put up an impressive smokescreen). But it doesn't change the fact that Annie had no shot.

Not only that, but as a viewer, if you *know* which tribe is probably going to lose, and which person is probably going to be voted out, *and* all these people are running on fumes, Survivor starts to feel less like a fun game of deception and persuasion, and instead starts to feel much more mean-spirited. If nobody can complete a sentence without losing track, they're not going to come up with complicated big moves to shake up the power structure. They will instead be on autopilot, and the most likely outcome is what you'll end up with. And then it feels more like the tyranny of the majority, and less like an amusing social-strategic competition.

It wasn't fun watching the Yanu tribe basically force Jess Chong to accept and play a fake idol (that she knew was probably fake), or Bhanu beg for mercy in Survivor 46. (Jake's "shoe bandit" assholery falls into this same category.) And when as a viewer, you no longer see the people on the losing tribe as being fun competitors, it's an exceptional drag that you're forced to spend the majority of a 90-minute episode with them. Even moreso that you'll probably be stuck with them for most of the next episode. Here on Kele, there was a brief glimmer of hope (for both Annie and the audience) that Alex might play his idol for her, but nope, that was just a ruse. Oh well.

Sure, even back when tribes had food and fire, there were tribes of six where there was an unpleasant majority group picking off otherwise likable players, simply because there was no way for the minority to escape. In S30: Worlds Apart, Joe Anglim was an dismissive dick to Nina Poersch, because he felt she was useless, what with being a woman over 40 and having hearing loss. (CBS/production was so proud of this message, Joe received a golden boy edit and was brought back for the very next season.) On the same season, Rodney Lavoie and Dan Foley were misogynist pricks to Lindsey Cascaddan. But because all those guys were in the majority, they had power in a "keep the tribe strong" situation, so they could be assholes and get away with it. Stripping away food and supplies has only solidified this sort of thinking.

In contrast, regular Australian Survivor seasons start with two supersized tribes of 12. There are enough people that there are multiple, often overlapping core groups, making the gameplay far more fluid and dynamic. Both of the last two regular seasons have had early shocking Tribal Councils where one subgroup flipped at the last minute, changing the outcome. You just can't do that with six (or fewer) people, not when everyone is starving and just trying to make it to the next day, anyway. They'll stick with the numbers if they're in them, and that's it. It's dull, it's grim, it's repetitive, and it's utterly predictable.

What it's not is fun. And if US Survivor can't see that, I guess I don't need to see any more US Survivor after 50.

The land of tepid takes

Not all grim: There was *some* fun to be had this week, and that came in the form of Matt Williams from Hina giving a callback to Cao Boi's fire-starting technique from the Ep4 RC/IC in S13: Cook Islands: aerating a smoldering husk by waving it back and forth. Probst voiced audible skepticism when Cao Boi did it, but it worked for Cao Boi, and it also worked for Matt. (And it also worked for Sarah Tilleke in SurvivorAU: Australia v The World in an Ep4 fire-making challenge.)