It’s been back-to-back-to-back (to-back-to-back-to-back) episodes of chaos on Survivor 50 and while it’s truly a breath of fresh air after a new era that hasn’t quite provided the strategic gameplay fans originally fell in love with, I think it’s safe to say this week may have finally taken things too far.
Episode 9 finally gave us our third celebrity shout-out of the season—first Billie Eilish and her boomerang idol, then Zac Brown and his spearfish dinner concert reward—when Jimmy Fallon was given credit for not one, but three new twists in the game. And while The Tonight Show host’s first twist in the game might actually be the best of the season so far, the other two fairly quickly counteracted everyone’s excitement.
When host Jeff Probst welcomed players to the challenge arena and stated they were going to do rice negotiations a little differently this season, I don’t think anyone could predict the TV gold that unfolded over the following five minutes. Jeff would be running the challenge alongside all of our castaways with the intention of outlasting at least one of a selected few. If he fell before all of the players who bet they could last longer than him—Joe Hunter, Ozzy Lusth, Tiffany Ervin, and Jonathan Young—the tribe would earn their rice.
And as soon as that challenge started, Jeff was immediately regretting his decision. During the longest 7.5 minutes of his Survivor career, Rizo Velovic, Emily Flippen, and Rick Devens fell out of the challenge, but everyone started trash talking him the way he’s been doing to players for the last 25 years. This led to a montage of his best one-liners and then the moment we got the episode’s title, when Jeff admits, “I Deserve All of This.”
For fans of the show, it was truly funny television that gave us a chance to see the long-time host step into the players’ shoes for a minute. And he shared that it came about because of a poll taken during an appearance of his on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.
But that wasn’t the last time we’d hear Jimmy’s name during the episode. In fact, Christian Hubicki would go on to say it quite a few times after he arrived for a journey where both the reward and the risk were credited to Fallon.
Should he complete a classic Survivor 3D logo puzzle in a specific amount of time, he’d earn the chance to pre-vote for one of his fellow castaways right there on the journey. Should he not finish in time, he had to take an envelope with an unknown message and read it out loud at camp in front of everyone.
Immediately, the red flags are flying. Even Christian clocks that the reward isn’t necessarily good. To place a vote before speaking to anyone at camp, not knowing where the majority of the numbers are sitting, is hardly as powerful as an extra vote. In fact, that “advantage” in and of itself could easily turn into a disadvantage. Knowing how impactful it is socially to have your name read out at Tribal Council, if you put a name in that ultimately gets no other votes, that person is gonna start asking around for who wrote their name down—ultimately putting a target on the back of the voter.
But we didn’t have to see if that advantage would change Christian’s game because in the end, he couldn’t finish the puzzle and was forced to take the envelope back to camp, where he read off to the tribe that he was being forced to write his own name down at Tribal Council that night.
This was…genuinely more than a bit ludicrous.
Survivor journeys are all about the balance of risk vs. reward. And at the end of the day, the reward has to be worth risking the disadvantage you could walk away with. If any player in Survivor history arrived at that barge for the journey and was given the chance to risk their vote for a chance to play for “One in the Urn,” every single one of them would walk away. Because the advantage really isn’t worth much—especially not a whole vote.
Yet, after losing his shot at that partial advantage, Christian was given a triple whammy disadvantage that fully outweighed the reward he lost out on. Not only did he lose his vote, but he received the penalty of getting “One in the Urn” against him. And then he couldn’t even strategize a way around the two disadvantages because he was forced to tell his entire tribe about both of those things. That’s too big of a risk—obviously unknown at the time—for too little of a reward potential, and it was clear that anyone who went on that journey would have been voted out. It was an easy shot.
So though it’s been days since the episode—and Christian has even appeared on The Tonight Show and received an apology from Fallon—fans aren’t happy with how things went down, feeling production and a celebrity cameo may have stepped too far into the game for this twist rather than simply shaking things up as has been done previously.
But we still have one more celebrity appearance when Mr. Beast pops in with a suitcase on episode 10, “A Side Dish of Chaos.” Will we finally get a celebrity moment that actually has fans cheering instead of wondering what’s happening? We’ll see soon enough when Survivor 50 continues on April 29 at 8/7c on CBS and Paramount+.
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