The following contains spoilers for the finale ofSurvivorSeason 41.After 26 days of gameplay,SurvivorSeason 41 finally came to an end. Much like the rest of the season, the finale had its highs as well as its more underwhelming moments. The three-hour finale provided a lot of entertainment and successfully wrapped up the stories of the final five players, resulting in a fairly stacked final three, each with pretty goodSurvivor"resumes" to put to their names. This season has made it clear thatSurvivoris embracing many of its traditions while also starting to move in new directions and experiment with new elements. A lot of this season actually felt like a trial run to see what new elements the audience would want to see stay in the game in the future.
The theme of this season wasa focus on the players and their personalitiesbecause centering the show around truly interesting and dynamic players is as important as fun challenges when it comes to making an entertaining season. This season more than any other took the time to truly humanize its players and make the audience fall in love with them so that fans were truly invested in their fates in a way that wasn’t just superficial. This is most effective when the end of the show arrives and the audience is equally as invested in the outcomes of the games of all three of the finalists. Rather than just going through the events of the finale chronologically, it might be more useful to examine the season as a whole now that the story is finished. Did the ending feel earned, or were there some gaps that might make the audience wonder why the show finished the way it did?
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But first, the episode starts with Jeff Probst once again breaking the fourth wall and speaking directly to the audience, revealing that the final votes will actually be read at Final Tribal rather than at the reunion show months later. This is actually a fun twist, but the reveal would have been much more fun if it had happened in the moment at that Final Tribal rather than being spoiled immediately at the start. This is yet another illustration of why these talks with Jeff thathave been sprinkled throughout the seasonhaven’t been super successful, because they’re either spoiling a surprise or explaining a part of the game that most of the audience is already aware of. It seems like an earnest attempt to make the audience more involved in the game, but it just seems forced and awkward.
After winning the final Immunity Challenge, Xander decides to take Erika with him to the finale, which ended up probably beinghis million-dollar mistake. Deshawn and Heather compete in a fire-making challenge (one of the more tense and interesting ones in recent memory), and Deshawn wins seconds before Heather’s rope burns through. At the Final Tribal, there is a great discussion between the jury and the finalists, where Deshawn is interrogated a lot and Erika comes off as very articulate and argues very well for her game, which likely helped her image (and on the flip side, Xander’s lack of articulation in certain moments may have helped him towards the zero votes that he got). At that very same Tribal, Erika is crowned the Sole Survivor, making her the first Canadian and the first Filipino winner of Survivor, as well as the first female winner in 6 seasons.
Erika, who was fairly absent from the first half of the season by virtue of being on the Luvu tribe who never lost a challenge, was actually quite present on-screen in the post-merge section of the game, and particularly in the finale, which wasa big clue towards how the season ended. It’s once again a credit to theSurvivoreditors that they manage to give major players screen time without making it totally obvious who was going to win the season. In fact, the winner was kind of a wild card, since all of the final three had good games, a good amount of screen time, and good relationships with multiple people on the jury. The fact that the votes weren’t more split in the end was the most shocking part.
While Season 41 was constantly marketed as “the most dangerous ever”, it seems a little doubtful that that statement is actually true, because it felt like the show kept telling the audience that rather than actually showing it in any way. It’s not that fans particularly want to watch the players suffer every day, but it felt disingenuous tohave the marketing be the way that it waswhen it wasn’t clear that the players were actually struggling that much. In past seasons, players would sometimes forfeit the game because they couldn’t take the conditions anymore, but no one even came close to that this season. Of course, part of that may be because Season 41 was comprised of super-fans of the show, and none of them wanted to give up on their life-long dream.
In all,SurvivorSeason 41 felt very experimental. They wanted to switch up the game, and they certainly did, but some elements worked better than others. Hopefully the team behind the game takes a look at the fan reactions and figures outwhich twists to keep and which ones to put aside, or at least improve upon in some way. Season 42 might be more of the same because they’re filming it before the current season has finished airing, but hopefully this game will be able to find its stride again. It feels like starting over, in a way, as they try to work out the kinks in the new version of the game that they’ve created. In all, it made for an entertaining season full of interesting characters with a satisfying ending, but they still have a long way to go if they want to perfect the formula that they’ve been playing with for 41 seasons.
