Back in the early days of Survivor, the show revolved almost entirely on the personalities the contestants on the season. It’s more common now that we will see storylines about the strategy of the game and how players are posturing themselves for the end-game. While there has always been talks about the game itself, it was never the main focus of throwback Survivor. Since the show billed itself as the ultimate social experiment, it only made sense that it focused on those social parts.

When the show was at its cultural peak, plenty of big names came out of the woodworks. Players like Colleen Haskell, Elisabeth Filarski, Kathy Vavrick-O’Brien, and Rupert Boneham. They were all contestants that were almost as big as their season itself. It’s crazy to think nowadays that a Survivor contestant could become a household name but in 2003, there are few North American households that didn’t at least know of Rupert.

After Survivor: All-Stars, the show was looking like it would drop-off with its audience. All-Stars felt like a natural final season up to that point. People had no idea how many seasons CBS was looking to broadcast, they had already done eight in four years and the market felt oversaturated. A lot of people felt done with Survivor. Thankfully for production, for Survivor: Vanuatu, they had cast one of the best personalities the show would ever have on, Ami Cusack.

There have been notable female players before Ami, like those mentioned above and Jerri Manthey, her spiritual predecessor, and there were many after Ami as well, Parvati Shallow, Amanda Kimmel and Cirie Fields spring immediately to my mind. Aside from possibly Cirie, who has had two more seasons to develop her arc and Jerri, I don’t think any female player has been as complex and interesting as Ami.

On the second season to be split among gender lines, Ami was the woman that most rallied around the idea of an all-female alliance that could dominate the game. She quickly established power within her tribe by being a dominant challenge performer, acting as a shoulder to lean on for everybody around her and by making real bonds with both the younger and older women that had split off into two groups. While the early days of the women’s tribe in Vanuatu was filled with drama, neither side ever considered going after Ami.

There have been debates over who truly was controlling the primary women’s alliance that would go on to wipeout the men until there was only Chris Daugherty left. The show definitely tells us that Ami is the one calling the shots with everybody falling back behind her and following the lead. The cast, and especially Chris, has gone record in post-show interviews that Leann Slaby was the true leader of the alliance but it was never shown. Either way, no one could argue that Ami was not an important part of the women’s alliance. This is especially true in the broadcast where she is the figurehead and the one producers go to for any sort of confessional relating to the state of the game.

Going through Ami as much as possible makes sense for a season like Vanuatu. It has often been said that producers love when contestants embrace the theme of a season. Ami embraced the idea of men vs women more than anybody on her cast and really drove the point home whenever the opportunity presented itself. She was portrayed, and is also in real life, as a strong woman who can be looked at as an inspiration for young girls. Compare Vanuatu to Survivor: the Amazon where the men vs women dynamic mostly fell flat when the cast was more interested in flirting with each other. Ami is one of the key forces in ensuring Vanuatu would not go down that way.

We first see the wrath of Ami Cusack when she cuts Bubba Sampson. This is the first vote after the tribe swap that mixed together the men and women. At the immunity challenge, Bubba tries to send some not so subtle signs to Chris about throwing the challenge and Ami catches him. While it seems like the women would initially target Rory Freeman before Bubba, his act pisses off Ami so much that she convinces her tribe to vote him out first.