Review: Survivor, "Reverse the Curse" | Season 50, Episode 13

Hey free subscribers—it's not often that a show celebrates its fiftieth season, so here's a preview of our coverage of the Survivor 50 finale. Become a paid subscriber to have your say on the show's legacy.

In the first act of tonight’s live finale for Survivor's fiftieth season, we cut from the early jostling for position ahead of the final five immunity challenge back to the Paramount lot. Jeff Probst is onstage, and takes this opportunity to bring forward Cirie, the player who was eliminated in last week’s episode. As she basks in the adulation of the crowd, Jeff takes an opportunity to repeat the superlatives from her elimination from the game, honoring her with a special “Spirit of Survivor” award “for inspiring others to discover the fire that burns within.” It’s a continuation of a narrative that has followed Cirie throughout her time in the game, particularly here and in Game Changers.

And look, obviously I love Cirie and appreciate the acknowledgment of her contributions to the game (especially the anecdote that the producers were just as mesmerized as the players she was manipulating). But it was jarring to cut from a finale that still has five active players to shift to memorializing the ones who were already eliminated, and who pretty much everyone agrees they would have rather seen at this point than…maybe all of them? I thought it was an aberration, but then it happened again before the next commercial break, as we cut back to memorialize Christian and Rick’s alliance and witness the passing of the MrBeast coin to the man who had the nerve to flip it.

It was then that I recalled comments from Probst that came across my social feeds over the past couple of days where he talked about his dislike for the live reunion. I didn’t read too closely, because reading Probst interviews will raise my blood pressure in ways I don’t need, but the gist was that he didn’t like how “defensive” they would become if people were confronted about their game after it’s aired. It makes sense, then, that he would prefer the immediacy of the Fiji-set reunions, which basically just end up being a celebration of the game’s surface. And it also helps explain why he decided to use the cuts back to the studio during the finale to effectively deliver what a full-cast reunion would usually do, celebrating the parts of the game that he wants to enshrine as the core narrative.