Review: Survivor, "Not Here to Get a Pedicure" | Season 51, Episode 5

In the aftermath of last week’s vote, the new Savu tribe is in a reflective place. They’re happy to have voted out Jenna, and feel united as a result of their vote—calling it a blind side is dumb, they had a full majority—but Alexis talking heads that the vote also has her thinking about why she’s playing Survivor. 

This transition was weird to me, and felt like the producers forcing a transition to a segment focused on the players’ personal stories. In a late night conversation, the players go through their “Reasons to Survivor.” Ori is playing to retire his mother; Devin is playing in honor of his late brothers. Alexis gets the spotlight, going over her past drug problems and her inspiration to become a criminal defense attorney.

What struck me as the conversation started was that I really don’t care why someone is playing Survivor. I also realized that the show seems to have veered away a bit from the personal stories that defined the New Era; we’re getting a glimpse of her life, but it seems more like a conversation between them as opposed to individual spotlights from producers. Last season, the All-Stars focus meant that we already had their stories, and this time around the focus on the “unpredictable” open era has seemed a bit consciously impersonal.

This isn’t to say that the players don’t have personalities, but the New Era was defined by a contradiction: at the same time as the game became more conspicuous and advantage-heavy, the shift to 90-minute episodes simultaneously pushed the editing toward those personal stories. The Open Era has seemed like a better balance, insofar as the players came into focus in relation to the game as opposed to in opposition to it. The simplest explanation is the two-tribe focus, which put players in closer relation to each other, and created dynamic gameplay as opposed to seeing people picked off one by one.