Review: Survivor, "A Side Dish of Chaos" | Season 50, Episode 10
As long as you think of the grinning idiot as a garnish to be tossed aside, not a bad meal
“I literally don’t have any idea what’s going on.”
Look, let’s address this up front: including a fawning tribute to MrBeast in the 50th season of Survivor is dumb. I can see Probst’s point about MrBeast’s whole shtick as a spiritual connection to this game, but why is this a thing that’s happening?
It's just not necessary. If you just put an “Ultimate Beware Advantage” into place, this episode becomes much less dumb. Dumbness is far from the worst crime, but it’s painful to hear all of the players having to talk about the destabilizing force of MrBeast. We’ve already established that Survivor 50 is a game rife with twists, and their existence would naturally shape every player’s actions.
So why are we giving MrBeast credit for this? During tonight’s tribal council, Probst tries to make the argument that all of the chaos of an especially back-and-forth strategy day is all about his presence, but there’s no Carfax to be found here. In fact, there’s a moment during the jockeying for position where Tiff notes that they need to operate as though there is no twist to speak of: they need to have a plan even if they know the results of whatever the Super Beware Advantage entails. To suggest causality in this case is baseless, a reminder that the problem with the celebrity cameos is less their existence and more their endless reification within the Probstian narrative of events.
I know it’s hard for us to erase MrBeast from this, but from a gameplay perspective he is irrelevant. If that briefcase didn’t have a stupid logo, and if both sides of that coin were related to Survivor, this twist works exactly the same way. It’s a high stakes flip of the coin for a doubling of the prize money, with the player in question at risk of immediate elimination from the game. The idea that this twist required “Jimmy” and his distinct vision suggests that Survivor hasn’t had this capacity the whole time. It’s true that nothing quite this high stakes has come up before, and whereas I had no belief that Billie Eilish or Jimmy Fallon were directly involved with gameplay, I at least believe it’s possible that MrBeast had a say in this one given how much it fits his brand. But it feels weird to be celebrating this interloper in a moment when Survivor is meant to be celebrating itself, even if the fact that Devens volunteers so quickly robs this of some of its intended disruption.
