originally aired March 1, 2023 to May 24, 2023
The order players were eliminated and the impact they left behind:
- Bruce (Tika) If people begin suing Survivor, it might be this guy at some point. The edit clearly shows exactly how and when he smashes his head and gets a concussion, which ends up leaving him medically evacuated, to dramatic, apparently entertaining effect (the smash, not the evacuation). And he's immediately shipped right back to play in Season 45!
- Maddy (Ratu) During the earliest part of the game there was tremendous gameplay, leading to a tribal council where nearly everyone had and/or played advantages, leaving to Maddy's exit. Tremendously misleading, as it turned out, for the season as a whole.
- Helen (Tika) As I've pointed out before, watching Survivor these days means a texting party every week for me, and this season I spent a lot of time complaining, since I thought this was a bad season. Helen's ouster was the result of Carson deciding to keep Carolyn around. Long-term this worked out extremely well for both of them. As a viewer I couldn't possibly have enjoyed the results less. Carson was an early candidate for someone I could actually root for, but he turned out to be someone I couldn't care less for, since he formed an alliance with two players I loathed. And who both outlasted him.
- Claire (Soka) Ha. The player who thought she didn't need to compete in challenges. Turns out to not be a winning strategy. At all.
- Sarah (Tika) At this point it was very clear Tika was made up of knuckleheads. Who in this kind of season ended up producing the winner.
- Matthew (Ratu) This knucklehead, however, played for a different tribe, and very early in the game foolishly climbed a rocky protuberance, fell from it, dislocated his shoulder, and kept participating in challenges. This in itself doesn't sound laughable. It sounds courageous! Valiant! But he kept using his bad arm. And eventually got medically evacuated because of it. I see no good defense of any of that.
- Josh (Soka) A player who was kind of almost worth rooting for.
- Matt (Soka) This season's showmance was one of the few highlights. One of the very few positive, viewer-friendly things to emerge from it. More on this when we reach his sweety.
- Brandon (Ratu) The extreme problem this season was that they didn't cast players who viewers could easily root for. Or at least featured an edit worth savoring. Brandon was one of the many bland personalities who might have otherwise been worth rooting for.
- Kane (Ratu) Almost by default someone I could bother watching without disdain. Kind of interesting. Didn't really know how to play. This was a whole season of players who didn't really know how to play.
- Frannie (Soka) Matt's sweety. If either of them had been as strategic as Frannie tried to be before she was voted out, they could've basically had the game in the bag. But that's the kind of season this was.
- Danny (Soka) I dubbed him Ninja Dan based on one fleeting sequence in the edit. I loved this guy. An actual personality! But surrounded by knuckleheads. A whole season of knuckleheads. Aside from "Mannie," really the only reason to care this season happened at all.
- Jaime (Ratu) Hey, look! Another bland personality!
- Lauren (Ratu) Hey, look! Another!
- Carson (Tika) The cheat code challenge player who basically wasted all his geeky knowledge by having no real idea how to play the game socially, eventually putting all his chips in the Yam Yam/Carolyn bucket, which, as I noted in a text, gave the two of them more power than the one of him. Which led to his ouster.
- Carolyn (Tika) If even a smidgen of her personality was an act (which she was oblivious enough to admit at final tribal, which probably cost her all remaining hope of any votes), then wow! did she wildly miscalculate. The edit was almost Carolyn all season (with most of the rest of it given to Yam Yam), leaving viewers with someone most of them probably couldn't stomach. Who made that call???
- Heidi (Soka) Bland personality like Lauren the editing half-heartedly tried to redeem with a sympathetic factoid. If the edit had bothered with any of them, I don't know what kind of viewing experience this would have been, but it would have been far less obnoxious. Which I think would have been better than what we got, regardless of outcome.
- Yam Yam (Tika) Wow. So obviously from the very beginning Survivor has tried to present a representative sampling of society, and this is sometimes peppered by quirky casting choices, including the lively foreigner, which almost always backfires. Yam Yam checked a lot of boxes for the casting director, none of which entertained me in the least bit. I couldn't stand the guy. You're gonna see his name listed at the very bottom of winners. I have a new all-time low. If Carson hadn't legitimized Yam Yam and Carolyn, they would never in a million years have lasted to the finals. Not even to score easy votes. They maneuvered, but only out of sheer lucky opportunity, since this season was chock full of players who didn't have the first clue what they were doing. I have in the past bitterly complained about "master strategists." This season I found out I would vastly prefer "master strategists" to clueless knuckleheads. I really blame the edit for how this season played out, though. Heavily featuring two players guaranteed to alienate even some parts of the viewership is a terrible idea. They were not even remotely balanced by anything else. Carson certainly couldn't. They didn't even try with Ninja Dan. "Mannie" almost did, but very inconveniently both were voted out early in the jury phase. Yam Yam was the yuppie's delight. For the more affluent members of the fanbase, I'm sure he was a delight. For me he was just an entitled brat who smiled his way to victory. He isn't even particularly representative of any Puerto Rican I ever met, which is the even more insulting part of it. He doesn't have to represent Puerto Ricans as a whole, but if you go out of your way to cast a Puerto Rican, and you have someone like Heidi sitting next to him in the finals and you give her all of two minutes to voice the authentic journey he claims to represent...Just a total disaster of a season. The Ulong of seasons, really.
