Episode 8 of Survivor 50: In the Hands of the Fans delivered a crowd-pleasing outcome in Coach's exit (finally!), but it did so despite an improved but still-flawed "new" (to US Survivor) twist, not because of it. And somewhat ironically, it partly avoided a less popular outcome because one player successfully borrowed a fake-idol tactic from the last season of SurvivorSA. So in effect, it was a celebration of international Survivor, in a week that happened to coincide with the finale of SurvivorAU: Redemption.

Okay, maybe that title is a little flip (sometimes adapting a Simpsons quote doesn't go as well as you'd like). A lot of Survivor 50's problems are self-inflicted, not imported from other franchises. And if we're being purely results-oriented, this was a fantastic episode. Cirie was safe, and gave herself a chance to save the vote from impending doom, and on top of that, the guy who had overstayed his welcome (mostly in the hammock) was sent to the jury, which is a haiku-free zone. What's not to like?

Well ... speaking as someone who has watched this show in real time from the beginning: When the audience responds positively to something, it's almost certainly going to happen again. That's a worry with the Double Duos twist, as I'll get into below. Although to be honest, when the audience really hates something (Redemption Island, forced F4 fire-making), it's all but guaranteed to happen again, because the dumb audience just didn't appreciate the genius of the idea, so they just need to see it again three or four or 15 more times, they'll come around!

Anyway, this episode of Survivor 50 definitely had some enjoyable moments. Although if we can somehow convince Paramount Plus to bring back SurvivorAU, SurvivorSA, and SurvivorNZ, there are also a huge number of enjoyable moments in those, which everyone should have the chance to savor, especially if the US alternative is New Era Forever. Sigh, maybe someday.

"Double Duos" is better than "Tied Destinies," but is still bad

As you've no doubt heard already, Double Duos (which is a terrible name, what part is doubled?) is not a "brand new twist," it's just new to US Survivor. The Survivor Wiki has a good summary of past international versions. Most memorably for US audiences, it was tried (and poorly received by fans) just five years ago, in SurvivorSA 8: Immunity Island, Episode 10. (A very prominent fan of the South African Survivor franchise at that time was one Rick Devens.)

To their credit, Probst & company considerably improved upon the SurvivorSA version: there, the vote at Tribal Council was a regular vote where everyone put a single name on the ballot, and the person with the most votes left, as always ... but so did their partner (who in that case received no votes at all). That felt particularly unfair, especially since, as happened here, the players were not fully informed about the extent of the twist before pairing up.

Another improvement here is that despite this being a notorious twist in international Survivor-watching circles, nobody saw it coming, in part because of an impressive long con on production's part: They've had a post-merge challenge that starts off in pairs or trios and ends up individual every season since way back in Survivor 43 (the challenge Gabler won by boring everyone else to death with his monologue). Everyone obviously *thought* that's what they were getting here, despite the vaguely dire-sounding warnings of the boat-delivered note. The trick here was they just didn't do the individual part.

So if production made improvements, and the results were enjoyed by everyone, why is the twist still bad? It's bad because it's inherently unfair. And as we'll get into below, it's also dangerous. Unfortunately, because it was so well-received, production will absolutely want to do it again. (As a distraction, they just have to trot out the 43-49 pairs/trios version again a few times first, to headfake everyone, I guess.)

The first problem, as Shannon Guss noted, is the Double Duos format limits choices: "New era Survivor: Where even a 13-person vote is a 6-person vote." But as Christian realized in real time, the available choices were even lower than that: He was safe, because he was with Jonathan. Neither of their alliances were likely to vote against them as a pair. Same went for Ozzy/Stephenie (even though Ozzy wasn't actually with Stephenie's group). With Joe and Tiffany immune, there were really only three options: Chrissy & Coach, Aubry & Rick, or Emily & Rizo. All three pairs' names came up in the scramble. Rizo was technically part of the "four horsemen" group with Coach, Jonathan, and Joe, AND sort of with "the middle" people (as is Emily), so his pair was the least attractive target to both groups. So then it was really all down to Rick/Aubry and Chrissy/Coach, and when Rick maybe has an idol that protects his pair? The choice is just one.

But it could have been much, much worse. What if Aubry had held on to her idol for one more round, and played it, eliminating both her and Rick from the pool of potential targets? And then that spooked Rizo enough to play his idol - protecting himself and Emily? And then Ozzy had followed suit, making himself and Stephenie also immune. Now the only viable targets are Christian/Jonathan and Coach/Chrissy. What if Coach and Chrissy had *both* played their Shots in the Dark, and one had hit on those 1-in-3 odds? (Correction: Josh Kettles reports this was explicitly blocked, so let's just pretend Coach hit on the standard 1-in-6 rate.) Now the only people who can be voted out are Christian and Jonathan - it's Advantagegeddon all over again, but with two victims. (Albeit neither named Cirie Fields, who would either get PTSD from sitting through it again, or chuckle winningly because it's not her this time, or do the latter to hide the former.) *That* is the main problem with turning a 13-person vote into a six-person one. Every public statement he's made about the original Advantagegeddon indicates Jeff Probst would see that as a thrilling victory, rather than a problem, but for us fans, it sucks.

The second problem (at least if it's going to be repeated) is that it worked in part because it was a surprise. If players know (or suspect) it's happening, the obvious play for a large majority alliance in this situation is exactly what happened here: Ensuring that at least two members of the smaller alliance are a pair, then getting two scalps for the price of one. It also - and this is an even bigger potential problem in the pairs-to-individual version from S43-S49 - encourages challenge sandbagging. If the smaller alliance has an obvious challenge threat, whoever partners with them can simply throw the challenge, ensuring some other pair wins, blocking the erstwhile challenge beast from individual immunity. Simple to accomplish in the S43-S49 format, more complicated here. In the Double Duos scenario, it still comes in handy if you want to target a lesser-threat pair. The person who throws is at some risk of being a target, but not if they're locked in with their alliance beforehand. Or alternatively, if this had been tried when Colby was routinely being told by Medical that he should be removed from the game, hobbling Colby falls on his sword and pairs up with a Christian or Cirie to "accidentally" chop off the head of the snake.

That would be a pretty dark place to go if it happened, because individual immunity is supposed to be the last recourse of someone who's an outnumbered target. Surviving one more day gives an otherwise decent player a chance to talk to people and turn things around. Seasons have also been won by winning out on immunities, thwarting attempts to target that player (JT Thomas, Mike Holloway, or Nick Wilson, for example). Taking away individual immunity and replacing it with something where by bad luck, or by your partner intentionally trying to lose, your own efforts are futile because your team/pair simply can't win feels like a betrayal of one of the game's central principles. Team immunity is for the pre-merge. Individual immunity is for the post-merge. Taking away individual immunity leaves someone on the outs with just idols (if you're lucky and they're not the crappy ones from this season), or the 1-in-6 odds of the Shot in the Dark. Pretty bleak.

Because of this, you would expect that the majority of the time, this kind of twist will make an already strong majority alliance stronger, and just speedrun the Pagonging of the smaller alliance. Is that really what we want? Does a fluke outcome like we had here - an extremely popular player is safe because there's an odd number of players (thanks to Kyle's medevac?) and a random draw excluded her from the challenge, while a pair that the audience doesn't love is targeted - really justify doing it again? It's never going to pay off this well again. That's not even considering the other things that had to break the right way, like Cirie finding the correct coconut before she collapsed/time expired. If Cirie's not in camp, Ozzy and Rizo are voting Devens/Aubry instead, and it's a 7-5 vote against Rick and Aubry, there's no incentive for Coach to play his Shot in the Dark, and most likely they're not sufficiently spooked by Rick's fake idol gambit to change their votes.

What did the fans really vote for or against?

One grating aspect of this season has been Jeff Probst continually trotting out things that were in no way on the ballot in the fan voting (celebrity guest appearances especially, but also twists like Blood Moon), and pretending the fans voted for them. Again this week, we had this introduction before the IC: "Today, another twist. Courtesy of the fans!"

The fans were not asked about this twist. We neither voted for it nor against it. Nor did we vote for any specific twist, except the tribe swap, which used Probst's new/old preferred nomenclature of "switch." (And I guess except "no rice" and "no supplies," sigh.) Anyway, "63% that said we love twists, bring them on" is not in any way the same as "The fans voted for two people to be voted out using the Tied Destinies twist that we borrowed from other Survivor franchises."

Even Coach was fooled by Probst's phrasing, in a post-IC confessional: "They voted for pairs? You're crazy! I mean another big round of thank-yous to the fans for making it so chaotic." We had no say! (To be fair, most of the players who aren't Coach likely participated in the voting, and would have remembered this.)

In fact, we voted on very little of the actual format of the game, and some of the things we did vote on made very little sense. And then, after we voted, the questions disappeared from the voting website, so it was hard to track what had been voted on. Reddit saved some early questions, including the "twist" one (below):

As you can see, this was a pretty loaded question, which was basically asking you to choose between, "I want every alliance locked in on Day 1 with nothing to mess things up! Please make the season as boring as possible" versus "I dunno, I might like to have some excitement occasionally." The problem is, production seems to have interpreted the very mild second option as: "Please use Jeff Probst's magic bag of rocks four times every episode! Nobody should be able to plan more than 5 minutes into the future!"

But that at least was a binary decision between two obviously extreme options. The "advantages" question (which was preserved at this blog, h/t to @notjakegyllenhall on Bluesky) was a three-way decision, with the winning option getting just 36% of the vote, meaning everyone voting found it almost as confusing as I did:

This one is also pretty leading (against the first two choices, which indeed lost), but each option at least had something in its favor: The first ("Minimal power") says "I want advantages to be rare and limited in power," which isn't terrible per se. The second ("Strategic power") says "I want advantages that are just powerful enough to create uncertainty and risk, adding a layer of complexity for the players to deal with." Nothing objectionable there, and if you didn't read carefully, how on earth do you choose between something called "strategic power" and "dynamic power"? That's the third choice: "I want to amplify the impact and fun of advantages so they offer enough power to shake up the game so that even the players on the bottom have a fighting chance." Who would be against that? Are there a lot of people who hate "fun"? It's also not that different from the second option.

So anyway, what did we vote for? Except for the very explicit early decisions (no rice, no supplies - [Erinn voice] who are these jackasses?) and the dark specter of the F4 fire vote (I can see it now, "With 92%, fans voted to KEEP forced firemaking at final four...") we voted for a lot of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Production worded the questions to elicit a specific response (the F4 fire one is archived here, and touts F4 fire as giving "players control of their destiny," sigh), and/or used extremely opaque wording to simply do whatever they felt like. To be fair, I guess there were also the nonsensical fluff questions (tribe colors, picking between two nearly identical immunity necklaces, and choosing between the fun Plinko challenge, an unidentifiable obstacle course, and *ugh* Simmotion for the F4 IC), and the one they were 100% sure everyone would vote for (live reunion). It's less "in the hands of the fans" and more "We're doing it our way, thank you for your attention to this matter." Long live democracy, I guess.

Australian Survivor raises the stakes

SurvivorAU: Redemption aired its final four boot, final three boot (!) and finale episode this week, with the latter including a live reunion. Both episodes with vote-outs delivered surprising outcomes, including an absolutely shocking F3 vote. You obviously will never see either of those things again in US Survivor (unless someone else takes the helm), which is an absolute shame. But there's one even bigger gauntlet that AU threw down that, because we're also getting a live reunion for S50, we *might* also get to see here: The ridiculous journey of the jury urn from Final Tribal to the reunion.

New host (and 3x former player, one-time winner, and possible future The Traitors US contestant) David Genat took the urn in Samoa, walked off set, then was shown hopping on a motorcycle and transporting the urn to Sydney Harbor, the location of the (recorded) live reunion (an absolutely glorious location overlooking the iconic Opera House, see below).

Not only all that, but David managed to host a reunion in which he talked to 23 contestants (for unknown reasons, Cat Hooker was not there, or it would have been 24). Given that this was a recurring problem for Jeff Probst when there were only 18 contestants, we'll see if US Survivor can top that mark. They should have 24 contestants! It's basically an open-court shot!

If you have a way to watch it, I strongly recommend AU12: Redemption as a season. Lots of big plays, some milestone-marking by the four returnees (a new global leader in individual IC wins), some really fun first-time players who make their own mark, and just a real going-all-out spirit that US Survivor endlessly talks about, but rarely delivers, at least in the last 10 seasons. Most importantly, almost of all of the strategic and Tribal Council shenanigans were contestant-originated and contestant-executed, not some random obstacle thrown up by production. I know a lot of people were (rightly) offended that the show fired longtime host Jonathan LaPaglia (JLP), but despite some initial growing pains, David handled his duties just fine by the end of the season. Hosts are replaceable. Fun gameplay isn't.

What's coming next?

I used to do predictions based on the ads and press photos, so I thought, "why not resurrect that for a season celebrating the show's entire run?" The obvious answer is: Because as with any returnee season, spoilers are rampant, but luckily for you, I'm too lazy/busy to seek them out, so my completely uninformed opinions are quasi-valid. So: This is probably wrong, let's get to it.

This week's preview and press photos show we're finally getting the bit with Jeff Probst competing alongside everyone in "Wrist Assured," as was shown in the preseason trailer (above). I would imagine it's not just a vanity thing, there must be some actual stakes to outlasting him. My guess is that this is a substitute for the pointless rice "negotiation," and if it is, I would gladly watch contestants trying to beat Jeff Probst in an individual IC for here onward, instead of Probst strong-arming people to sit out. (If that's not what's going on, please do that every season, thank you in advance.) Also from the press release (hinted at in the preview), there's yet another journey, which will be the fourth in just four post-merge episodes. Keepin' it 100! (It will likely introduce another "dynamic" advantage, whatever that means, or take someone's vote away.)

With the Integrity/Zoom/MAGA alliance down to three people (Stephenie, Jonathan, Joe), they're even in numbers with the "Cirie's Rizard of Ozz" alliance (which is cute, but I object to it because it's longer than just typing their names). Then there's the "middle" alliance (Christian, Rick, Emily, Aubry), and the wild card, Tiffany. The biggest carryover from the previous episode is: Everyone is going to be very mad at Rick Devens for his Tribal antics (particularly not playing the fake idol).

If you go back to Ep8, Jonathan has a confessional (above), where he allegedly says before the paired IC, "everyone wants Devens out so bad." In the shot, he's wearing a white shirt that he did not wear at any other time (in camp or at Tribal) that episode, so I'm guessing it's actually from after the Ep8 Tribal. Jonathan's our go-to narrator (eyeroll, sigh) for the state of the game in the post-merge, so of course he'll be conducting the Devens hate train. (Jonathan and Stephenie will be the new mom and dad of that alliance, I guess making Joe the baby.)

Also, if Cirie's trio is going to flip back and forth between alliances, this is (unfortunately) the perfect spot for them to do so: Even if Tiffany sticks with her pal Aubry, the two trios would have six vs. the "middle" plus Tiff's five. Rick seems like an easy target, especially if Joe is going to bat for Tiffany (due to their reward pledge). But it could also be Aubry - so it's basically a redo of Ep8, just with Coach and Chrissy out of the equation. With Emily in theory protected by her connection to Ozzy, the only other option is Christian. But Christian still has the "my fate in the game is in the hands of Jimmy Kimmel" plot armor from the trailer, so hopefully he's sage for one more round. But Rick or Aubry is probably out, unless they can the idol that should have been re-hidden.

Obviously, it would be a lot better if everyone just agreed it was time to get rid of Jonathan (when he's mad, such as when he snapped at Rick during Tribal, he's exceptionally menacing, which is absolutely terrible gameplay), but we saw Ozzy promise he had Jonathan's back at the merge, and that bond has yet to be tested. Jonathan's also a likely contender for individual immunity, unless his newly "strategic" approach includes throwing challenges (which would be hilarious if it led to him being voted out, Drew Christy style). Maybe we can all agree on Stephenie instead?

The tempestuous teapot of tepid takes

- A celebration of sitting out - Since the "merge" at 17, we have had: Two people exiled and three random teams of five; an individual immunity challenge where seven people were forced to sit out; one person exiled and six pairs competing for "individual" immunity, with six people (+ Cirie) sitting out of the final stage. At least one person has been excluded from every individual IC so far. This week we'll have the fourth post-merge episode, and Rizo will finally have a chance to compete in an actual individual challenge.

Again, as Probst likes to say, everything comes with a cost. We merged at 17 because production thought (not unreasonably) that it would be better to purge large numbers of players in the back half of the season, rather than up front (with the two losing tribes in three tribe challenges each going to Tribal). The approach they chose probably kept people like Cirie and Emily around longer than they otherwise would have, so I think it's still a net gain. But it's not *that* hard to have a 14-person or a 13-person individual challenge. I know it's simpler and easier to have fewer people, but you can do hard things!

- Please, no more - The fans also didn't vote for journeys. Especially solo journeys that are just one long endurance trial for one person (Stephenie's last week, Cirie's this week, there's another one coming next week). These are not entertaining. They are literally just there to fill time, and in doing so, it robs us of time we could be watching people scheme and plot in camp. I'm happy Cirie won her vote back, but I didn't need or want her reduced to tears before finding the lucky 1-in-2000 coconut.

- Ties exist - As far as my record-keeping goes, Coach and Chrissy tied as the 12th people out, and as the second jurors. I don't know how Probst decided that he had to snuff Chrissy's torch first (I have my guesses), but they were literally voted out at the exact same time, so snuff order shouldn't matter.