After four straight weeks of major, game-disfiguring twists, Episode 12 of Survivor 50: In the Hands of the Fans finally just let the players play. Normally, starting the actual post-merge portion of the game at final seven with just five days left to play seems like a bad idea, but we'll happily take it!

And then ... in back-to-back days, we lost two of the biggest players and characters, in Rick Devens and Cirie Fields. Sigh. I can't fault the players, these were the right moves to make for just about everyone else (although Bryan and Josh at Future Past Survivor had a great move that Rizo could have pulled off at F6).

I would argue that Cirie called it correctly a few episodes back when she was happy about the ruckus Rick created at Tribal, because anyone who takes the spotlight/target off of her is an asset to her game. But realistically, Cirie was the only person who any interest in keeping Rick around (as a shield), and Cirie is elite at taking the pulse of the tribe (she is a nurse, after all), and most likely realized she couldn't move the vote anywhere else. Tiffany had a plan to blindside Rizo, but that only works if Cirie is on board (she wasn't), AND they needed four votes, not three. And without Cirie, there was no majority. Sigh, again. If only Ozzy had played his idol, Cirie would have had more numbers and options, but here we are.

As the season limps into the finale, this is a good time to look back, and try to pinpoint all the production interference that led us to this sorry state. There was a lot of it, so this will take a while. To be honest, the chances of anyone in production reading this are slim. The chances of them agreeing with my critiques and making adjustments in the show going forward? An infinitesimal fraction of that. Buuuuuut ... the chances of all that happening *this* week as opposed to post-finale or any of the previous weeks seem slightly higher, though, since filming for Survivor 51 just wrapped, and filming for S52 doesn't start for a few more weeks. So with that in mind, where did Survivor 50 go so wrong?

Where did Survivor 50 go so wrong?

I realize that this is a chicken/egg thing. Production doesn't trust the contestants to create compelling drama (which is absolutely insane with an all-returnee cast, but whatever), so they load up the season with twists (taking away people's votes, mostly) and spectacles that are guaranteed to generate a response, even if they interfere with gameplay (such as the MrBeast coin flip). In response, the contestants then play more timidly and conservatively, because they have no idea if they will be able to vote in the next round, and if there's an obvious boot that needs to be made, they stick with that, rather than taking a big swing. Which makes production even MORE eager to have dramatic events.

Let's rewind to early September. This milestone season, Survivor 50, started off with a huge amount of publicity, and had sky-high expectations from fans. All returning players, for the first time since S40: Winners at War! A whopping 24 of them, the most ever for US Survivor! We, the fans, voted on stuff! (Even if it was mostly irrelevant, like tribe colors, or whether to have "Simmotion" as the F4 IC for the 397th time.) And through those first few episodes, the show felt like it was delivering on that promise. The cast, as expected, was delivering. It almost felt like maybe, just maybe, production had actually met that impossible mark.

And then, from roughly the merge on, fan sentiment soured spectacularly, and now people are comparing (disparagingly) this season to the likes of S34: Game Changers, with the median opinion ranked far, far below the heights achieved in S20: Heroes vs. Villains. I think that assessment is pretty much correct, although for me the tipping point was Christian being forced to vote for himself. Since then, the season has been in freefall. It might even be worse than Game Changers. Which is a stunning fumble for a season that started off so well, and featured a vastly superior cast to S34. Again, where did it all go so wrong?

Everything wrong about S50 was captured precisely by Jeff Probst himself, in the Variety article on Survivor this week. It rivaled Donald Trump's "I don't think about Americans' financial situations" as the most tone-deaf, completely having-it-backwards quote of the week. Just an astounding thing to say publicly: "we experiment with all kinds of new ideas, and we tried to usher in the most unpredictability we’ve ever had ... Whether or not you like the season is subjective, but it’s not that something didn’t work. We’ve made bad choices in the past. I just don’t think we did in 50."

It's the first part that's the most alarming. Forced unpredictability is exactly the problem. Survivor is a social-strategic game, not a game of chance. If we wanted to watch a game of chance, we could just dispense with all the challenges and tribes, and just have people draw a rock (or lift a box) each week to determine who leaves.

Forced unpredictability was also the common thread that connected the biggest production blunders of the early new era: The hourglass twist (less the "unpredictability" than the 100% probability of someone choosing to give themselves immunity and reversing the outcome of the IC, after a rock draw prevented them from participating in that challenge - although the rock draw was itself forced unpredictability) and the absolute worst, "Do or Die," where someone was punished for poor challenge performance by having a 2-in-3 chance of leaving the game without even being voted against. (Incredibly, it failed to do that both times it was used.) These twists were really dumb, because they betrayed the tacit understanding that it's the players who determine their own fates, not random twists that take away all player agency, replacing all the plotting and scheming for which the game is famous and beloved with pure chance.

We just spent nine long seasons gradually whittling down most of those poor choices from the early New Era. The hourglass and Do or Die were wisely hacked away almost immediately, and a lot of other slightly better but still ill-considered ideas (forcing people to say dumb phrases in public to activate their Beware Advantage idols, which prevented the idols from remaining secret) were gradually retooled as we progressed through the 40s. It really felt like production had seen the error of its S41 ways, and was gradually letting the players play the game again. So it was utterly deflating to see the increasingly poor decisions of S50 (Blood Moon, One in the Urn, MrBeast coin flip - which was just Do or Die with better odds - and last week's Power Broker) all but back-to-back-to-back, gobbling up almost the entire post-merge. When they merged with 17 players left, no less! You remember the post-merge? The part of the season where people used to say "this is where the REAL game starts"? Well, apparently, that started at Final 7 this season, and spanned just two episodes. RIP, real game. We barely knew ye.

Then to add insult to injury, we hear Jeff Probst spouting off that "We've made bad choices in the past. I just don't think we did in 50"?! I know he's been busy filming 51 while this was airing and the fans were reacting to it, but for the love of god, man, take a second to read the room! This season is called In the Hands of the Fans, after all. Isn't our reception of the season *somewhat* important in evaluating it? Oh, right, never mind: "It’s fascinating to me that a couple of people, most of them either former players or people who will never play, criticize the show, and it gets momentum .... I tell anyone who wants to listen: If that’s your goal, to somehow impact our point of view, it will fail. We trust what we’re doing."

The bottom line is this: This was a really strong cast. Colby! Cirie! Ozzy! Mike White! Christian! Rick Devens! Dee! Emily! Genevieve! Tiffany! Kyle! Kamilla! Big characters like Coach and Angelina and Q! I have no doubt fans would have loved this season if the players had simply been allowed to play the game with as few restrictions as it had in 49. Instead, we had a kind of uncanny valley Survivor, where we recognized the players, and the locations and challenges were almost all 49 reruns (or 48, for the ones Joe had previously won), but the game itself had been bent, folded, spindled and mutilated almost beyond recognition. Instead of 49, it was all most unfair parts of 41 on steroids ... as written by an AI that had been trained solely on the "these new seasons/players are too soft!" comments from the Survivor facebook page. Less "they must adapt or they'll be voted out of the tribe," and more "Are You Smarter Than Jeff Probst's Bag of Rocks?"

Unpredictability is good in principle, sure. Fans hate boring Pagongings, where the outnumbered players have absolutely no way of escaping the tyranny of the majority. But changes of fortune have to come from the contestants themselves, whether it's having multiple overlapping plans - which should have been almost automatic with a 17-person merge - finding helpful idols (there were none) or advantages (virtually none), or simply doing wacky tactical things, like Devens and his fake idol ploy (or even better, the fake Beware Advantage find he thought about trying, which involved splattering himself with paint). The unpredictability can't come from production raising artificial barriers to strategy every round, such as random draws for teams after an individual immunity challenge, or for that matter before one. Nor from paired immunity. Any more than one round of this in the post-merge is too much. Constant twists before every vote just make it impossible to plan ahead, and if nobody has confidence they can make a plan in the morning that can be executed that same evening, or will be able to in the next round, then everyone just reverts to the easiest, safest plan.

That's probably partially why we lost two big players this episode. There were three obvious threats lingering: Rizo's idol, Rick Devens, and Cirie. (Tiffany was the fourth threat, but took herself out of contention by winning immunity.) The players could only tackle two of those with 100% certainty. They probably *could* have flushed Rizo's idol at the same time, but in the F7 round, everyone was clearly so shell-shocked from the previous round's split Tribals that they were desperate for a clean vote, and Rizo was repeatedly assured he didn't need to play it, so he didn't.

Heading into this season, I was cautiously optimistic that S50 would be an opportunity for the show to reinvigorate, try fun new twists, litter the beach with exciting new idols and advantages. I trusted that the celebrity guest appearances, while grating, would at least have minimal impact on the game. Instead, most of the changes have been huge steps backwards, especially just about everything in the post-merge, which has been a gameplay disaster. And Jeff Probst's take? The one thing he'd change would be to tweak the Zac Brown appearance to give him a direct influence on some aspect of the game itself.

After my initial euphoria at the rumor that Survivor 51 would start with two tribes ... I am now very, very pessimistic about next season and every successive one onward. How many of these awful post-merge twists will we see there, and how many more seasons will it take to remove them?

The record-breaking has mostly ended

With Cirie sadly headed to the jury, there's not a lot left to shoot for record-wise in the finale. Cirie leaves having established a new career record in voting people out (43 times). Regrettably, she has also tied Ozzy in most times voted out (6), even though one of those times she received zero votes. She also established a new record for days played (159, if you don't count time on Edge of Extinction after being voted out, or secured second place if you do, six days behind Parvati). Aubry is still in the game, but the only movement on those charts she'll be able to make is breaking her tie with Coach for in-game longevity.

As discussed below, I've decided to take away an individual IC win from both Joe and Tiffany for their paired necklaces in Episode 8. So with their wins this week, they're both back down to two individual IC wins each this season, which keeps Joe tied for third place at 6 wins, with Joe Anglim, Spencer, and Parvati on the career charts.

Speaking of challenges, Rick did surpisingly get on the leaderboard (at #14) for one of the worst single-season performances in individual challenges, which is odd, because he won four individual ICs (and an RC!) in S38: Edge of Extinction. But the most fun part of this is ... look who he knocked down to #15! (Maybe he was sandbagging for exactly this purpose? - I know, in his exit interviews he talked about the lack of puzzles being the main problem, but still!) And if not for back-to-back non-elimination order-based challenges (where everyone who doesn't win ties for second place), Rizo would be threatening to stamp his mark on this leaderboard in back-to-back seasons. He still might, we shall see.

They keep doing this

I hate to keep pointing this out, but another week, another subtle hint from the editors that Jonathan is going to win. (I would love to believe this is all being done to lead me, personally, astray. So let's hope that's actually the case.)

This time, just as last week, it was again in the opening minutes of the episode, in the middle of Aubry's confessional ostensibly talking about how the Ozzy vote was her doing (a reasonable claim) and how she's learned the lesson of S32: Kaoh Rong (she's learned *a* lesson, at least). Importantly, her confessional is dubbed over nightvision footage of her and Jonathan bonding at the water well over booting Ozzy, and pledging to keep working together: "I went to the very end of this game and I lost, because I was sitting next to the wrong people. But I've learned my lesson. This time, I'm ruthlessly focused on one thing: Getting rid of every threat in this game."

As she says "every threat in this game," the camera pans from Aubry to a head shot of Jonathan (above), and then switches back to Aubry: "and that ember of fire inside of me is getting bigger...." Note that Aubry works closely with Jonathan throughout this episode's two votes, and at no time considers voting him out. Sigh. (It would be even more perfect if Jonathan beats Aubry at fire, I guess.)

As for Aubry (and Jonathan again), as Probst is doing his pre-challenge monologue for the F6 IC, as he says "you will be in the Survivor 50 finale ..." (shot of Jonathan, accurate) "... with a shot to win this game ..." (over a shot of Rizo). Then it cuts back to Probst, as he says, "Losers? Bigger stakes. After 23 days..." (cuts to a shot of Aubry, with her eyes closed) "your dream of winning Survivor 50 will come to an end." Not the most positive of indicators for Aubry, right?

On the surface level, this episode was a non-stop barrage of Aubry confessionals about how she's focused and will win the season. Which, to be fair, all made good sense, and Aubry gave smart insights on how to approach the endgame - remove the threats, keep around the people the jury doesn't like. Pretty basic, but also accurate. At the more subtle, foreshadowy level, it feels like it's either Rizo's or Jonathan's game to win.

The tempestuous teapot of tepid takes

- Underwhelming? Inconceivable! - We've now seen the teeter tunnels and the station where the players have to turn discs to match spokes on a pole and remove them (above) in back-to-back seasons. They're sort of visually interesting, but ... they're not really effective. Everyone gets through them at approximately the same pace. What's the point? (And what is the larger point of every new era challenge being either standing in one place or an obstacle course with a puzzle at the end? What happened to slingshots? Trivia? Literally anything else?)

- Fun with arch puzzles - Having said that, fans seem to love mocking the contestants for being unable to have their arch puzzles spell the same word on both sides, so ... I guess it's good that the fans had *something* to enjoy this season? Still, it's pretty challenging just to get all the blocks into place without falling. The extra effort of then having to be able to spell INCONCEIVABLE backwards and forwards at the same time is kind of a big burden to tack on. The answer had four double letters (I, C, E - yikes! - and N), which meant you had to be sure the I/E blocks were on each end, followed by the N/L block (but not the N/V one) working left-to-right, then the C/B one (not the C/I one!), and so on. Even knowing the word and being fully rested and fed, it's really hard to do that in your head ... while hoping the blocks don't fall down.

Side note on this: AU7: Blood v Water did this in the tribal stage of the game, and the two tribes just had to spell their names (BLOOD and WATER ... yeah, that was dumb) plus a few logo blocks on each end. But this was harder for one tribe (Blood) than the other (Water), because there are no repeating letters in WATER, but there are in BLOOD. Naturally, the Blood tribe screwed that up. Having everyone spell the same word at least eliminates that unfairness.

- In the hands of the fans who wanted a no idols game - Despite the fans allegedly voting for lots of twists (did we really?), that vote apparently did not extend to idols. We now have just one in the game, Rizo can only play it for himself, and it expires at the next vote. Great. Rick put in the effort to find a rehidden one after playing his MrBeast idol, but did not succeed. Was there even one there to find? He asked production after the game, and didn't get an answer. So by all appearances, zero idols were hidden in any camps after Day 9 (when Genevieve found the one she sent to Rizo). Idols actually give people on the bottom hope for the future, and from Rick's exits, production told him they appreciated him driving the gameplay with his chaos. But they appear to have hung him out to dry, nonetheless. I have never been a "no idols!" person, so for all of you who are, I hope you're luxuriating in this moment.

- This is going to hurt - So we're one vote away from the final four, which means the final fan vote (forced F4 fire-making, yea or nay?) is ready to be revealed, and let's just say: I hope the idiot fans who (allegedly) voted for No Food and for No Supplies were too distracted by torturing small animals or stealing candy from babies or whatever and forgot to cast their ballots on this one.

- Scoring change - This episode, Probst, Joe, and Tiffany all differentiated between the number of times the latter pair had worn the necklace (thrice each) and the number of times they had won individual immunity (twice each). I had previously counted their dual necklace win as an "individual immunity" win (but didn't count it for MPF purposes), because of the necklaces. But if they aren't doing that themselves, it seems silly to keep doing it myself. On the minus side for both of them, one fewer IC win knocks Joe down in the career leaderboard, and knocks Tiffany off of it, which is kinda lame. (This reminds me I should probably change the paired "individual" immunity win in AU12: Redemption scoring, as well.)

- Reading the room - The start of the F6 IC was pretty funny. Probst kicks it off with the question, "Is anybody a little surprised that they're still here, in the game?" Everyone except Rizo immediately raises their hand. Rizo smiles, looks over at the jury, then *very* reluctantly joins them. Oh, Rizo. If only you could bottle and sell that confidence.