Over the last 26 years, there’s been more than 700 episodes of Survivor—and we’ve watched all of them, definitely more than once. But while fans have chosen their favorites, they’ve also made it clear which ones trail at the bottom of the list.
For reference, the highest-rated episode in Survivor’s history is episode 12 of Survivor 47, “Operation: Italy.” The episode earned a 9.3 rating from fans and was an immediate classic, earning the high rating right after airing.
Keep scrolling to see which episodes have the lowest audience rating on IMDB and let us know if you agree with their ranking.
5. Survivor 50 episode 6, “The Blood Moon”
With an average fan rating of 5/10, the Blood Moon twist apparently did not resonate with fans the way the show was hoping it would. While it was definitely an insane twist that shook up the game, fans didn’t appreciate that they merged to tribe only to immediately divide players into three random groups of five and then forced them to vote out one of the four non-immune players. It basically put players in a position so nothing they’d previously done in the game mattered and the last vote before the jury came into play ended up being more attuned to the very first elimination of the season—where people vote based on vibes, not on gameplay.
4. Survivor Island of the Idols episode 8, “We Made It to the Merge!”
The most controversial season in Survivor history, episode 8 received an average rating of 4.9/10 by fans and it’s likely because of how Kellee Kim was treated after voicing her concern over Dan Spilo. Production stepped in and talked to the players, so Kellee opted to continue to play the game strategically rather than voting against Dan because of her personal feelings on the matter. However, when that got out, everyone started accusing Kellee of lying about how Dan was being inappropriate with her and ultimately voted her out of the game. Fans were not happy with how Kellee was treated after speaking up considering the season happened right after the peak of the “Me Too” movement.
4. Survivor 41 episode 13, “One Thing Left to Do... Win”
The finale of the first new era season tied with the above episode with a fan rating of 4.9/10. And while the episode itself did nothing wrong, considering it was the first finale of the new era, fans were disappointed in the straightforward ending and the lackluster “reunion” show. A lot of that simply had to do with unfortunate timing with the many production changes happening to the show that fans were not fans of.
2. Survivor 41 episode 1, “A New Era”
Similar to above, the premiere episode of the new era of Survivor also tanked with a fan rating of 4.8/10. Again, this was simply because Survivor: Winners at War had just given us peak Survivor and then suddenly, everything changed in consideration of the state of the world. Fans wanted the old Survivor back and it actually had the lowest premiere tune-in rate at the time with only 6.25 million viewers watching at home. Ironically, that’s now the highest tune-in rate in the entire new era.
1. Survivor 50 episode 3, “Knife to the Heart”
I don’t think I even have to tell you what happens in this episode of Survivor 50. All I have to say is “Zac Brown” and you know exactly why fans gave this episode an average score of 3.8/10, making it the worst episode in Survivor history according to fans. That’s very telling considering that’s an entire point lower than the above episode’s score. It’s also not lost on us that over 1.4k fans logged into IMDB to rank this episode and every other episode this season had an average of less than 450 fan ratings. That’s triple the average amount of fans who went out of their way to share their dislike of this episode.
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