For a season that has promised a "bananas" post-merge, the first entry in that seven-episode run was a bit of a dud. While there was a new alliance that emerged (the perfectly named Bottoms Up), the contestants responded to Jeff Probst's extremely explicit entreaties for them to make Big Moves™ by ... taking the safest option available.

That said, there were at least some small improvements in the new era "merge" episode(s) format, in that: (1) at least everyone received a merge buff at the immunity challenge (so, slightly earlier in the day after the actual merge), (2) everyone was able to vote (yay!), and (3) there was no mud. There were still the vestiges of the dumb "earn it" mentality though, in that for what used to be milestone celebration, still only half the merge tribe got to enjoy the "merge meal," for no obvious reason except that this allowed the show to cram in an extra challenge and thus eat away at their 90-minute time quota. That turned out to be a theme with a lot of the production choices made here, which we'll get into below.

But before that, I want to highlight a wrinkle in the storytelling this episode. Up until now, especially after the first swap, the core Uli players (Nate, Rizo, Savannah) have kind of been our main characters, along with Blue Sophi (who is not "Soph," which only Jeff Probst and apparently Sophie use). We've spent the most time talking about the game with them. We've all but ignored the entire Hina tribe. Sage vs. Shannon on their own separate tribe sort of felt like a sidequest that is now complete. But all of a sudden the merge hits, and ... here are the previously unseen Kristina and Sophie, giving tons of confessionals. We learn that Savannah is "scary" and has an evil "gleam in her eyes," and that Rizo - formerly just a lovable goof who is terrible at puzzles but smoked Alex at digging in the premiere - is a bad guy, just because he hangs out with Savannah too much. Everyone was against Uli! (Except Sophi.)

Even the subtle foreshadowing in the edit was in on the hit job on Uli. For example: How it started (consecutive shots)....

... and how it's going (mere minutes later).

After Jawan dutifully reanimated "the monster" talk from the early new era with his premiere opening monologue about Survivor being like a horror movie, we had a reprise of that theme here (to the delight of Probst at Tribal, I'm sure). We have now made it to the second half of Jawan's spiel: "But act two? That's where you flip the script! You ARE the monster!" (and start taking charge and voting prior allies out). He's definitely doing that, and maybe Jawan (or Sage, who took out Shannon last episode) is now on the path to winning this game. Or maybe with this apparent heel turn, Savannah has become a more traditional monster (while inadvertently continuing the "horror movie" theme by reminding herself in confessional not to be a "psycho"), and is this season's villain?

It's a neat bit of storytelling magic* that Jawan has thus far followed the path he predicted from the very opening seconds of the season - taking it day by day in the pre-merge, just surviving, running from the monster (as he bubbled along on the bottom of the numbers through three tribe configurations) - and is still here to bring his early prediction to fruition. But truthfully, the key question of the season, as bodies allegedly will begin piling up less predictably, is: Who is the real monster? (Hopefully we actually get an answer to that, now that I've posed it.)

*I know, I know, Jawan probably recorded the overdub long after the season finished filming, and may well have adapted the wording from something he said pre-game. But it was still fun as foreshadowing, right?

Anyway, with that out of the way, time to do what new era merges do best: Wasting time, purely to fill an expanded episode.

Adventures in time wasting: The challenge advantage scramble

This version was at least (I guess?) more thought-out than the lazy, over-before-it-started "race" into the jungle to grab the advantage in plain sight in Survivor 48, where Sai swooped in at the last second and grabbed it before Charity did. But it was also a completely random grab for items that required production to both: (1) distract the contestants with a boat and reading a note, while (2) sending an unknown number of crew members to tie keys to branches in the trees around camp. (They probably started in the immediate post-merge arrival scene, when everyone was hugging and talking about the previous Tribal in a big group.) It's basically an Easter egg hunt for adults, but instead of collecting keys in a basket, you have to test each one you find individually, drop it in the communal basket, then go back to find another. Yay, maximal time consumption!

The problem is, this is all to distribute a "challenge advantage," which in the past three seasons no longer has any bearing on anyone winning the individual challenge to which it applies (Genevieve in 47, Sai in 48, and now Sage). So as an actual "advantage" in the game, it's (almost) a complete waste of time. It *does* provide guaranteed access to the "merge meal" [*grinding my teeth typing that*] so I guess in that sense it's useful. And it does provide an extra 4.5 minutes of The Contestants Doing The Things They Were Told. Sage described her win as "This is my moment! This is what I've been waiting for! To finally have some control in this game."

I have some bad news for Sage.

In the past (say, Jaison in S19: Samoa's Ep11 IC), having a challenge advantage gave you some kind of headstart or failsafe in an individual challenge, usually an IC. You therefore stood a much better chance of actually winning that challenge (unless you were Malcolm "Shaky Hands" Freberg). Even as recently as Jake in the F5 IC in Survivor 45, that was the deal, even if the advantage scramble at the start of the finale was also mostly an exercise in structured time-wasting. Here, as in the past two seasons, Sage just got to skip a team RC that someone would have had to sit out of anyway, and she had no actual advantage in the IC. Whoo! Congrats for putting in all that hard work! Finally some control!

This whole sequence pretty much encapsulates what's wrong with the new era. Production says, "Oh god, we have 90 minutes to fill. Let's add in a labor-intensive task that forces the contestants to run around frantically." The contestants, given only the vaguest of information, do that, only to ultimately learn it was all a waste of time. The audience, knowing in advance it's all a waste of time, then has to sit through it. All of it.

There was a lot that was edited out this episode. Perhaps most upsettingly (from Nate's exit interviews), Nate tried to build on his journey-alumni bond with MC. Which made sense! As Tribal approached, he correctly informed her that she didn't need to play her idol. He then (understandably, if not wisely) lied about whom the Uli alliance was targeting, and told her Kristina; as we saw, they were actually voting for Steven. This was a problem, because Jawan and Sage had already told the Hinas that Steven was the real target.

Australian Survivor is not flawless, but one thing they do really well is show the many overlapping plans that are discussed before Tribal, which disguises the boot, because the audience can't be sure which plan will really go forward. US Survivor, especially in the new era, has tried to streamline things, and has instead focused its energies on time-wasting segments like the advantage scramble, then laments, "Oh, there's just no room!" when anyone complains. But Nate trying to work with MC and fumbling that attempt is what Survivor is actually about! This is (in part) why Nate was voted out! Instead, we got nearly five minutes of adult day care, and "We're voting for Nate, it's the safest. Wait, maybe Rizo. No, maybe Savannah."

The ultimate time-filler: The "Earn the merge meal" challenge

There's another staple of the new era that I really hope meets a swift death as the 40s close: The back-to-back challenge where it's a pairs/team challenge in the first stage(s), followed by an individual immunity challenge where only (a subset of) the stage winners get to compete. We first saw it as a multi-stage challenge (run in pairs, then individual) when Gabler won the Ep7 RC/IC in Survivor 43. This format was repeated in S44 and S47-S48. It's also been done in threes, then individual (in S45-S46). Here we had it with teams of five at the merge, where it felt exceptionally dumb.

Why? Here's Jeff Probst's pre-challenge script: "You are 11 people entering the next phase of the game, the individual phase ... and that means you're merged." Wild celebration by the contestants! They all get merge buffs! Hooray! ... So of course the very next item on the agenda is to divide everyone up into two teams for a challenge.

Whether it's two, three or five people to start with, this format never feels fair, simply because individual immunity should *always* be available to every player. Winning an individual challenge is actually "earning it"! So far we haven't seen anyone intentionally throw the reward/early stage part of the multi-challenge sequence in order to block a target from winning immunity, but it's the logical endpoint for all of this. In this specific spot, it really felt like a step backwards, because we finally got rid of "earn the merge" only for it to morph into "earn the merge meal." Ugh. And of course, five people were not allowed to compete for the first individual immunity.

Conceptually, though, the "reward" part was just - again! - an exercise in filling screen time. There's no reason the entire merge tribe couldn't have competed for individual immunity. It would have added a trivial amount of cost to build five more ramps and five more poles. But then ... how else would we fill almost nine minutes of screen time? (Don't answer: You could just have a separate RC. Maybe even make it individual, I don't care. Or have a merge feast for everyone, and just spend those extra minutes focusing on the contestants playing the game.) But "that's how you do it on Survivor!" - for no reason other than to satisfy the host/showrunner's various whims.

Side note: The team RC actually featured a schoolyard pick (Sophie and Kristina were the captains). The actual pick was, of course, edited out. These picks tell the audience a *ton* about who likes whom, who is seen as a challenge asset/beast, as does whoever is picked last, for whatever combination of reasons. Every time someone asks Jeff Probst about rock draws vs. schoolyard picks, he always moans about how there's just not room in the episode for them. (We see *every* rock draw. And as stated repeatedly here, there is so much superfluous fluff that's exclusively here to fill time, but there's never room for this. Please excuse me while I repeatedly pound my head into a brick wall.)

The land of tepid takes

Just do it: Despite Probst practically begging everyone at the merge to make big moves and create their "legacy" or whatever and get themselves cast on Survivor 50, the Hinas (+ Bottoms Up) went with what everyone described as "the safest option" at Tribal, voting for Nate simply because (1) Rizo had an idol, and (2) Savannah was the person for whom he was next most likely to play it. That left Nate as the only Uli left to target. But Jawan had been pushing in camp for just voting Rizo, because *Rizo told him* and Sophi that he wasn't going to play his idol. Then when Rizo pulled out his idol and announced at Tribal, "I'm gonna be truthfully honest with my approach ... tonight I do plan on playing it [his idol]," that should have been the signal to everyone in the game that there was a 0% chance that Rizo was playing his idol. Russell Hantz did this. Malcolm Freberg has done this. Showing everyone your idol and announcing you're playing it that night (before the vote) almost never is followed by actually playing the idol that night. (Ben Driebergen was one of the few exceptions in S35: HvHvH, but plowed on through and played an idol before the vote, removing any doubt.) But really, the double-positive "truthfully honest" bit should have been the tip-off.

Still in merge-atory after all: While we did get some minor speed-ups (almost entirely due to Jake's medevac) like everyone receiving their buffs at the IC rather than after Tribal, there were still signs that production just can't give enough of a shit to roll out merge-related activities in a timely fashion. For example: The merge flag did not arrive in camp until after the IC. Why not? They had a delivery boat the day before, plus untold number of crew in camp, tying keys to trees. What was the holdup? It's hard to come up with any answer beyond they just don't care enough to make it an event any more. This show desperately needs a reboot.

The mid 20s to mid 30s era: The "Why X Lost" podcast (David Bloomberg & Jessica Lewis with guest Jeremy Faust) on RHAP had a great discussion this week of the lack of age diversity (and walk of life diversity) in the recent seasons. It's a topic I want to write more on in the future (updating my "How old is too old to win Survivor?" piece from pre-S35), but it's one of the most glaring differences between the early days and now. Nate was playing a great game, but because of always-small tribes and only 2-to-3 players allowed to be over 40 in the current casts, he was always a fish out of water in terms of having something in common with anyone else. As he said in his exit interviews, he never had a #1. Everyone left in the game now ranges in age all the way from 25 to 36. Everyone outside that range (except Nate) was gone by the end of Ep4. Usually a token post-40 player slips through to (near) the finale, but in an all-newbie season, you almost never get more than one. Add to that almost every man over 40 has to be a retired pro athlete or a Hollywood power broker, and ... go ahead and apply random superfan dads! You will not playing on our show, but more power to you!