Above all else, my favorite thing about Survivor is its ability to make you feel things about the people they showcase on the show. While they are obviously real life people, Survivor is able to transform them into characters with tangible storylines like it was a scripted drama. The producers are so good at this that some people still claim that Survivor is secretly scripted and everything is determined ahead of time.

One of the examples I will always point to in order to do away with the “it’s faked” argument is Russell Swan in Survivor: Samoa. You know, that one time when he nearly died on the beach during a challenge? Stuck between Mike Skupin falling into a fire in Australian Outback and three people going down in the same challenge, with Caleb Reynolds nearly dying, in Kaoh Rong is Russell’s collapse. It is truly one of the most terrifying moments in Survivor history and an interesting middle point for one of the saddest arcs a contestant has ever had.

In Samoa, Russell was the driving force behind his Galu tribe from the get-go. Though reluctant to accept the leadership role, Russell stepped into it and excels. He makes sure the camp is tended to its fullest extent and has his tribe ready to go for every challenge. Despite being borderline dysfunctional individually, under Russell’s guidance, they win 8 out of 10 challenges and absolutely crush the Foa Foa tribe at almost every turn. Unfortunately, Russell also works himself to the bone at camp even after massive downpours start coming down their camp and it would come back to haunt him in a terrifying way.

During a reward challenge for pizza at the upcoming double tribal council, Russell blacked out onto a puzzle table after exerting himself in the physical part of the challenge. What made everything worse was that Russell and the majority of both tribes were still blindfolded because of how the challenge worked. All we saw at home was Russell suddenly go limp and unresponsive, unknown to what was happening behind his buff.

With his heart rate plummeting dangerously quickly and having become extremely dehydrated, Russell had to be pulled out of the game. His begging and pleading to stay in the game as he clearly can’t keep going is depressing. Everything is made worse from the fact that once Russell left the game, Foa Foa launched into an unbelievable comeback spearheaded by the other Russell, the soon to be infamous Russell Hantz.

So that was how Russell’s Survivor career initially ended. In one fell swoop he went from a top dog to out of the game because his body failed him. For someone who doesn’t accept losing, that had to be a tough pill to swallow. When a few years later, Survivor decided to put together a season with three returning medevacs, Russell was an obvious choice for one of those spots. After a few years of waiting to get a chance to prove he could last all the way, Russell finally got his wish in Survivor: Philippines.

This was his chance to shine, Russell was coming back with a great story and loads of experience. He knew that he could provide for the tribe but didn’t have to step in and do absolutely everything. Having learned from his mistakes and knowing he could compete with anybody in challenges, Russell figured to be a strong pre-season pick to make it all the way… and that’s when he was assigned to the Matsing tribe.

They are still smiling at this point because they have yet to take part in a challenge.

Make no mistake, the winner would ultimately emerge from the Matsing crew but it would take some hard work to get there because at first, things got dicey. Russell almost immediately went against his own words of not wanting to be the leader by doing leader like things in front of the tribe and asking his tribemates to do things for him. It was like Russell in confessionals was Dr Jekyll, fully cognisant of what he needed to avoid this time around, and Russell at camp was Mr Hyde, the monster who could not stop himself from still doing all the things he knew not to do.

As it turns out, Matsing was one of the worst all-around tribes in Survivor history. Every single time they went out to compete, they got their asses handed to them by the far superior Tandang and Kalabaw tribes. On paper, it shouldn’t have been such a disaster. Russell had a proven track records in challenges. Malcolm Freberg and Denise Stapley both quickly showed their challenge abilities. The other three tribe members, Zane Knight, Roxy Morris and Angie Layton, while not physical standouts, did not appear to be complete nothings either. Sadly for Matsing, they were.

See? The smiles are all gone now.

Quickly the tribe was decimated, losing the first three players of Survivor: Philippines back-to-back-to-back. By day nine, they were left with only Russell, Malcolm and Denise. Losing took its toll on each of them but especially on Russell. On more than one occasion, he completely lost his mind following a loss, often asking God why he was doing this to him, sending him back out on Survivor only to have him fail miserably. To be completely fair, Russell was a big factor in his tribes’ losses. Time and time again he came up short in challenges when in Samoa he was one of his tribe’s most reliable competitors.

To make matters worse, as if to taunt him a little more, Survivor: Philippines had to be one of the rainiest seasons of the show on record. The downpours, which had contributed greatly to his dehydration in Samoa came back in the Philippines as if to serve as a reminder that Russell was not destined to succeed on this show.

The pre-merge story in Philippines is essentially Matsing’s failure and Russell is the emotional anchor of the tribe. Never before has he experienced failure in Survivor. He’s never really lost on this level and he never had the chance to be voted out by his tribe. He has never felt like he didn’t belong. In Philippines, that is all Russell feels. He is suddenly not the efficient leader he thought he was and he physically is no longer able to do it in the challenges. He isn’t even able to find the hidden immunity idol, which was tucked into the tribe’s rice, despite looking for it obsessively and it being right under his nose. The pre-merge in Philippines is all about Russell coming to terms with his own weaknesses.

That is never easy to deal with and Russell really struggles to come to terms with those inadequacies. Even though he keeps losing, Russell never accepts that his tribe is destined to lose continuously. As a great speaker, before every challenge Russell steps up to rouse his tribe to victory. He delivers emotional and motivating speeches that would leave even the most cynical people to believe in their team. Like Palau’s oracle, James Miller, no matter how much Russell believes in his own words they never come to fruition.

At that point, losing so many challenges in a row and nearing his own boot, Survivor broke him. It forced Russell to really reflect back on himself and how he had approached life up until that moment. Before his boot, he opens up to Denise about his past and how he spent his entire life fighting back against bullies who pushed him down. How he never accepted failure and learned to avoid it. Up until then, he mostly had. In real life, Russell is successful, intelligent and charming. He worked for what he earned. On the island, Russell became manic, unhinged and unhappy.

Coming out of Philippines was difficult for Russell. He tried to push it out his mind, like he did with past failures, and move on with his life but it became unavoidable when the season started to air on television. At that point, Russell had to watch himself fail all over again and it sent him into a depression. He told People about his post-show journey in an interview during the time of the show’s airing:

When I came back from the Philippines, I went into denial. I couldn’t sleep; I was irritable. I thought, “I’ll pretend like it never happened.” I hid everything that had to do with the experience. And it was working, until the show started airing. When they announced that I had returned, I thought, “Oh, crap. It really did happen. I want this to go away; I need this to go away.” But every week the show would play, and it’s like I relived it again: the failures, the discouragement. My sense of self-worth and capability: physical, intellectual, emotional, all of it has been thrown into question. Basically, to find out that you suck at every aspect of the game, it’s really tough. I wasn’t playing a character; I was just being me. So all the things that people say to me on Twitter, they can hurt. The things Jeff [Probst] has said about me, the way we interacted, that has been tough, too.

Few people can say they have experienced such high highs and low lows on the show like Russell can. For a guy who has never even made it out of the tribe portion of the game, Russell has run the gamut of emotions on Survivor. He is also an embodiment of the show’s past. In recent memory, Survivor has taken to airing a lot of strategic content while straying away from the character driven narratives that carried the earlier season.

With Russell playing a huge part in two seasons, they had to approach things differently. He was never a strategic mastermind but he was always a great character with a compelling storyline. In Samoa, they had to focus on the person to make viewers feel for him when he went down in the challenge. In Philippines, his emotional collapse as his tribe kept losing was the key narrative for the first four episodes of the season. It had little to do with strategic play and a lot to do with the emotional state of a real person.

There’s a reason that for a lot of fans, myself included, Survivor: Philippines is considered as a renaissance in the show’s history. It really went back to telling a story as opposed to focusing on the numbers and strategy of the game. A lot of that is because of the story that Russell infused into the show by simply being himself and wanting to win so badly. While not everybody will be invested in watching Kim Spradlin run roughshod through her competition in One World, I challenge you to find anybody who can say Russell Swan’s four episode run in the Philippines isn’t one of the rawest two hours ever aired on television.

So while Russell may never have won Survivor, he will always be a memorable contestant. To me, he will always be near the top of my list simply for having made me feel real emotions as I watched his journey. I can never understand what he went through over two seasons on Survivor but I can certainly get a portion of it simply because his amazing ability to talk about it. That kind of skill is what makes good television and what Survivor producers should be looking to cast above all else.