Jeff Probst took note of a big accomplishment in real time this episode: He successfully banished cheering from the Ep3 reward/immunity challenge. I hadn't previously been aware this was a goal for the show, but apparently it was. But to hear Probst tell it, starving people to the point of collapse and watching them lose challenge after challenge as a result of being depleted is great! As he said on his On Fire podcast for Ep2 (around the 7:00 mark), "It's exactly as designed, because it forces adaptability." By his reasoning, "the rice negotiation" in the new era shows that, because later season players have rejected the bargaining for rice. (Missing entirely that perhaps they do that because the entire process is excruciatingly dull, and they want to spare the audience, not because they've adapted.)

If that sounds familiar, it's because he said essentially the same thing three seasons ago, with different words:

"Let me get a bullhorn: The new era is here. Earn everything, penalties for losing, expect more of that. This is what Survivor is about. If you want a ‘fun’ experience, go find another show."

As Emily Flippen would say, "Can I push back on that a bit?"

For one thing: That's not what Survivor is about. The show he's describing is Eco-Challenge, Mark Burnett's show before he started making Survivor, where people put themselves through barely any sleep, minimal food, and hiking/paddling/climbing for hours on end to win a week-long adventure race. It was interesting, sure, for the reasons Probst is talking about. But that show is not Survivor. I'm sure DVDs of Eco-Challenge still exist, Probst! Go watch those!

In contrast, Survivor is a social-strategic game where people vote each other out, after initially having to work together in teams. That's it, that's the game. There's none of that in Eco-Challenge (which may explain Probst's recent fascination with preventing people from voting). Sure, there are challenges to win supplies and/or immunity, but as Rob Cesternino likes to say, he'd be fine with them just drawing rocks instead, so they can get back to the real game. That strategic maneuvering is the point of the show. The challenges may lure them in, but the strategy keeps audience coming back. It's hard to believe that Probst forgot this after 40 seasons on the show, but maybe Long-COVID brain fog hit him particularly hard, or something.

Hopefully fans have voted out the no fire/no rice punishments for Survivor 50 (it doesn't sound like it from the way Probst talks about wanting to see how Jeremy Collins would fare on 50), but clearly in 49, it's a choice, and one the host vociferously endorses. Which brings us back to the dawn of the new era again.

Mike White (who *is* on 50) famously gave Probst a single, evergreen note as Probst was whiteboarding complex twists for Survivor 41: "Is it fun?" And if we're talking about the stupid "earn it" mantra of the new era, the answer here is very clear: It's not.

It's not fun for the players who were stuck on these tribes (some of which were obviously going to lose, even before the game started, like Vula in Survivor 48). Mostly, what Probst is missing the mark on the most here is the audience perspective: It's not fun for the viewers, either. We're stuck spending most of the first few episodes with a group of people who are absolutely miserable. Players we enjoy who are on these tribes get cut early, because their tribe keeps losing. And we don't even get to see much of anything of the people in the other two tribes, because they never have to vote. It's the worst of all possible outcomes, and to be honest, a lot of people have started giving up on seasons when they see this going on. In total linear viewers, Survivor was *third* in its timeslot this Wednesday, behind Chicago Med on NBC, and the Yankees-Blue Jays playoff game. When Survivor is hemorrhaging longtime fans like this, maybe they should ... I dunno, try something different?

Which brings up another thing: for the first 40 seasons, if you hated the structure and/or structure-driven outcomes of a season, you could at least take comfort in the knowledge that these things (two vs three tribes, swaps, twists like Exile Island, etc.) would likely be different the next season. There was variety. The show tried new things. We're now in the NINTH straight season of three tribes of six, losing tribe loses their flint, nobody has rice. At some point, fans are just going to give up when they keep hoping to see the fun social-strategy game they used to enjoy, and instead they're repeatedly fed the same morbid car crash on a loop, just with different victims each time. Can anyone blame them?

But Probst told us all to go find another show, so here are a couple of suggestions. Let's just watch The Traitors or SurvivorAU, since they routinely have Survivor legends on them, and are far, far, FAR more fun. People there are allowed to cheer, and stuff.

The swap shall save us

What fixes a disaster tribes misery? A swap. And we're getting one next week. And surprisingly, the show's previews have so far maintained the mystery of whether it's a swap back to three tribes (an extremely awkward 5-5-4 split), or a clean shuffle down to two. That was true of the post-Ep3 teaser, and it's true of this week's press photos and press release, which tell us only that there's at least still a yellow tribe in Ep4.

(Traditionally, the weekend TV ads do show footage from challenges, which will probably spoil this mild bit of intrigue, but I'm trying to say something positive about the show for once.)

Notably, the teaser showed exactly five people in yellow buffs: An ecstatic Sophi, a plotting trio of former Ulis (Jawan, Savannah, and Rizo), and the guy they're talking about, Matt. We also see (with no buffs) Kristina and Steven apparently listening to one of Shannon's breathwork classes ... but with no visible buffs (although they're most likely at Uli beach). What's fun here is that these few shots shown tell us nothing about whether it's two or three tribes after the swap. We were shown exactly five Nu Hinas, but we don't know if there are more we weren't shown. We were shown no blue buffs ... but also no red. So is it two, or three?

If it's three tribes, the five people on Hina would be dominated by the three original Ulis, and either Matt or Sophi is in trouble. If it's two tribes, they're just five out of seven total, maybe there are two other original Hinas there with Matt, and it's a tight 3-3-1 split?

Regardless of how the swap actually turns out, it's at least fun to have these ambiguous glimpses of the future. Part of the fun of Survivor is the week-to-week speculation, and this kind of teaser construction really helps feed that. Well done.

The land of tepid takes

No Canada: It's hard not to notice that on the same night the Toronto Blue Jays eliminated the Yankees from the MLB playoffs, BOTH Canadian players on Survivor 49 were removed from the game. (Jeremiah is from Toronto, too!) Not sure how they managed to wrangle this when this show filmed over six months ago, but it sure feels like retaliation, eh?

Tick-tock, people: It was pretty clear early on in the "Beware idol" era that as the time limit to activate all three drew near, production was re-hiding the Beware packages in increasingly visible places, so that someone would find them. (I'm thinking particularly of Naseer's, which was sitting on a branch right by the beach, found the day it would have expired.) So it's a bit eyebrow-raising that, the day before the swap, *both* Uli and Hina decided to hold group searches for idols, and again, both were in very visible spots. You have to wonder how much producer prodding during confessional interviews was required to produce these outcomes.