Review: Survivor, "The Blood Moon" | Season 50, Episode 6

In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the Blood Moon is a reset button. In this massive open world video game, the player faces various roaming threats across Hyrule, and you might think that you could defeat them to permanently clear your path as you travel from dungeon to dungeon. But then you start to see the red sparks emerging, and the cutscene kicks in, and all of a sudden the Blood Moon has resurrected every monster. Link must fight his way across the map anew.

Although Probst argues that they came to this via the game’s focus on nature, I’m choosing to presume this was the naming inspiration for this season’s historic Survivor merge (I typed this before Tiffany brought it up at Tribal), as 17 players come together in a profoundly uncertain way. They all know this is early, but they were also primed for twists and turns befitting a historic season, and many of them react as though they had speculated this was a possibility. And while it isn’t a reset to the same degree as Breath of the Wild, Survivor’s Blood Moon certainly has the same effect of raising the stakes for the remaining players.

“The Blood Moon” isn’t as dramatic as Probst imagines it to be, only because it’s just an increase of degree. We’re used to post-merge challenges which divide the tribes randomly in order to process double eliminations, and this just does the same with three instead. You can’t even argue this was a huge surprise: there’s 24 players in a 26-day game, and you can’t count on evacuations to make the difference.