Have I got some explaining to do.

“Welcome to the closest I will get to a Survivor New Zealand article!”

“I will admit, despite having zero plans or desire to watch this season”

“Even though I have no plans to cover New Zealand”

The explanation was that I had gotten so much wrong, especially re: Franky, that I knew I had to watch rather than try and WikiSurf. After that, the explanation for why I wanted to keep watching was that this season was not bad and also I am a retroactive hypocrite that makes declarations she wishes she hadn’t on the reg.

I was supposed to write a GI article this week- if by “supposed to”, you mean “pressured herself into it” because I cover GI and I really don’t wanna skip out on it. At the same time, I realized I didn’t have anything to say about it. It was… cool. I don’t hate it as much as I am passive on it. It still has time to be season ruining but at the same time I get the sense that it will be a perfectly fine season whether or not I had anything to say about it from Episode 6 on.

Still, what could I even stretch to make a conversation out of when it was… so low stakes, so level, so middling? Even bad seasons I can trash with more energy than I rarely shown- the HHH Finale and Talking About Zeke articles came out less than twenty-four hours after the episodes. I do my best, most impassioned writing when I’m really feeling something, and I don’t really feel anything about Ghost Island.

That’s my biggest problem with the season.

My problem with Ghost Island is that we just had an idol play cancel seven votes for the underdog of the season, and the fanbase- or the parts that didn’t have their lips superglued to Michael’s ass- just kind of went “eh” about it. The fanbase never does that. I don’t think really anything has changed or developed in a few episodes. Not that I think storylines were dropped. Dom versus Chris was still there. Wendell was still cool and a good winner. Malolo still had the underdogs. The characters stayed as we knew them. However, it’s safe to say the season has flatlined and rested on its laurels (not the Johnson kind), with the same layer of modern US season gloss that seems to be the norm.

It’s hard to really compare it to Episode One of a season when it’s aired nine episodes, but the feeling is still there. This is even from someone who loved the first swap period of the season and considers Episode Five excellent. However, the blessing and curse of US Survivor is that it doesn’t let up. While it once used to be somber enough to really ponder the moments, the modern seasons are like blockbuster movies- rich production, loud noises, and life or death decisions. It prides itself on not letting many moments go to waste. This attitude works well when moments are big and impactful, but for the moments that aren’t big deals, it feels tonally dissonant. It’s trying to make us care about moments I don’t really care about.

That’s the big difference with Survivor New Zealand: Thailand. I wouldn’t pretend anything big or important came out of it, but it was far, far more comfortable.

I am not going to tell you that anything particularly deep came out of the premiere. In fact, contrasting Jacob is another big premiere character that didn’t make the end. In fact, the tribe that lost replicated the Jolanda vote and voted out Josefina, the challenge beast turned leader who picked the tribe in a schoolyard pick 6-3. That’s illuminati shit right there.

Yet, the show didn’t make a big deal about it- they just showed she talked a lot and others thought she didn’t really earn her position. In some ways, it could have- and should have- been played up as a bigger deal. Yet, it was refreshing that it wasn’t. It just fell a certain way, and more or less I was okay with it, because it fit the rest of the episode.

Survivor, as much as it acts super cutting edge and different from the norm, is very basic in its form. Generally, who goes home first on each tribe? The older woman, the woman who flunked the challenge, the woman who’s annoying. Sometimes a man who does these things. Katrina, Simone, Ciera, Lucy, Darnell. Occasionally it branches out to men who play too hard or can be threats later. Jacob, Tony, Vytas, Jeffrey.

Only later, in the expected time, do people play selfishly, and as this season has shown- and reflected in other recent seasons- a few detours aside it’s a numbers game with a (very) occasional big move. However, CBS is so hyper, so dedicated to pounding in your head that there’s big moves and gameplay everywhere, that when the expected happens again your attention isn’t hold and you get upset that it’s so boring and stagnant and no one is #playingthegame.

This latest Tribal Council was full of those platitudes. Probst threw the big moves ball, and the contestants caught it. If you aren’t thinking ahead you aren’t playing the game. You have to make big moves to get ahead. You can’t be bitter as a juror and the new format takes away bitter juries. Then after that, we got a 7-4-1 vote where eleven votes went to the minority. The show is so focused on trying to use platitudes to please viewers that when it doesn’t, the viewers get mad, because they’re treated more importantly than the show thinks they actually are.

Meanwhile, so far on Survivor: New Zealand, the first vote out is subversive to those standards, because a big play did start off the season, but it was treated as ordinary. She was peppy, she tried to keep spirits up, but she worked to inherit a role she only got by happenstance and, according to the others, didn’t fit it as well as she thought. It was largely hinted at, but mostly as the way humans do it, not as a game move. That’s what drew me into Survivor- to see how humans acted in a scenario with no rules and everything to gain. I’m sad to see that authenticity go away.

Let’s backtrack a moment, because that’s an important point. Tess, on the other tribe, said to confessional that she hadn’t really known about Survivor. People looked slightly for idols but decided not to stay at it lest they tip off others. People outright said that in the early game they didn’t need idols that much. In Ghost Island, everyone’s a superfan, Jacob poured rice into his sock to find a clue, and everyone acts like getting an advantage on Ghost Island is necessary for their game even if they’re so far on top of the world that the others can’t see them to glare at.

The biggest difference in that is that on Ghost Island, those attitudes are venerated and editorialized. In New Zealand, they aren’t mocked or praised, that’s just how people think. The lack of agenda is offputting, but only in the way that I didn’t expect it.

Considering the show’s effort to not be like Season One, I find Thailand to be a start for Survivor New Zealand. Sure, there’s expectations to play the game, which actually feel a little necessary due to the show’s last season really not liking gameplay, but it’s not overwhelming and editorialized. It’s got this season to really establish the tone for Survivor in New Zealand, whereas Survivor in America has leaned into that hard in modern times, especially after Michele won while a subtle, quiet woman.

The best way to put it is, SNZ doesn’t have a metagame, whereas the metagame and agenda for its US counterpart is everywhere and twisted in unholy, unnatural ways to be exactly what Jeff Probst and the producers want.

This is shown in this week’s FrankyWatch, which thankfully fits nicely into the context of the article. Franky lagged in her part of the challenge in a brief table maze against the other tribe’s star athlete. In modern Survivor, it’s very common for those who don’t do well in challenges to be scapegoated. It even happened to Joan in SAU2, the closest contemporary for the Kiwi viewers. However, it didn’t factor in at all- she successfully gave Jose an alternate target and voted her out with an alliance she was included in early on. First off, get it get it get it yeah! Second off, that’s really refreshing not to conform to US Survivor meta and stick it out on your own. In that way, it has a real Borneo feeling- the characters are making the metagame.

To me, the metagame is the biggest difference. Survivor New Zealand doesn’t tell you what to feel, what to think, what is correct and what isn’t. That’s the biggest problem with US Survivor- even while there’s no progression or stakes, they think they can fool us with their agenda that something is, or at least should be, or else. To me, there’s far more interest in seeing what people do without the pressure and conditioning of what US Survivor is now.

I don’t know if I’m gonna cover Survivor: New Zealand. Probably not regularly, but if the urge comes to me I will probably write about an episode- or at least contribute a FrankyWatch because I kind of signed myself up for it, even if the show is far more interesting. If it keeps up this construction of meta, I may have a lot to write about it. If Ghost Island continues this streak of nothing really mattering, I may have a lot less to write about it.

-Cam

P.S. If you’re into that sort of thing, I’m doing a Survivor story called Wild River Water! I used to write fiction in massive quantity before I wrote for here, and due to some tumory things that kinda dried up. I’m getting back in the saddle, though! This is less a typical fanfic that plays like episodes of the show (which I am working on one of for deep, deep into the future) and a narrative focused on the thoughts of one fictional contestant in a fictional season. I wanted to take a new approach on the genre, and I hope you like it!