Review: Survivor, “A Fever Dream” | Season 49, Episode 13

Hey free subscribers—I know this was a pretty historically weak season of Survivor, but wanted to flag our coverage for any newer subscribers who might want to join in the discussion for Survivor 50 in the Spring.

In Jeff Probst’s standard recap at the opening of the Season 49 finale, he uses a tattoo metaphor to describe the trajectory of the game. During the first half, he says, tribe lines were permanent and visible—but then the merge made those tattoos vanish, and old loyalties were forgotten. “Every alliance has, at best, been a temporary tattoo,” he summarizes, as everyone experienced a kind of “collective Survivor amnesia.” It led to one of the most unpredictable post-merge games we’ve ever seen.

Now, I know it’s Jeff’s job to gas up the show, and I’m typically accustomed to tuning out this kind of obligatory exaggeration and self-promotion. But it feels especially egregious to use such hyperbolic language to describe a season like this where very little actually happened. Jeff and I clearly have different ideas about what makes good Survivor, and that’s fine, but this is almost something different. It’s like he’s lying about what we just saw, or maybe forgot what the first 40 seasons of this show looked like. I wish Season 49 was the season he’s describing!

Watching a bad season of Survivor often feels like being gaslit. The structure of the show is consistent, even when the ingredients aren’t coming together right, so it’s up to the producers and editors to at least create the appearance of drama. With the help of Jeff’s generous words and the usual finale bombast, the gameplay of Season 49 sounds far more cutthroat, personal, and crafty in retrospect than it actually was. It’s rewriting history, and it makes the lack of actual substance all the more grating.

The thing is, “A Fever Dream” isn’t even one of my least favorite episodes of this season, though I was bored at times. The person I expected to win did win, but the exact path to that point was a little different than I predicted. I’m not mad at all at this final three, really; Sage’s presence there is a fun surprise, along with the absence of any easy zero-vote finalist (which would’ve been Kristina). It’s also nice to get an all-female final three for the first time since the San Juan del Sur finale, 11 years ago to the day.