For a Survivor season themed "In the Hands of the Fans," fans were pretty unenthused to discover that about half of last night's episode was focused on someone not even involved in the game.
When our three tribes showed up to the challenge area only 15 minutes into the episode, the first assumption is that something big is going to happen later in the episode. Double Tribal Council? A medevac? Camp-based drama? But episode three reserved the time for country music singer Zac Brown who, as a fan of Survivor, asked to be involved in a reward this season.
The winning tribe would get a chance to go to the sanctuary and enjoy a meal Zac planned, including fish he caught himself. Kalo won and arrived at the sanctuary to the sounds of "Chicken Fried" playing on the radio with cold drinks waiting for them, including Zac's personal brand of wine, prominently featured in the ice bucket.
Colby Donaldson reads out a note from Zac that says he'll be back soon with lunch, and we cut to a sequence of him spearfishing in the deeper waters around Fiji. During this sequence, Zac gets his own confessional time to share what he loves about Survivor and spearfishing and how the two are kind of similar.
Watching the episode live, this sequence went on...for a very long time. And Kalo's time at the sanctuary seemed to go on even longer...
A dedicated Survivor fan on Reddit—@nintendolost—tracks every player's confessional times after each episode. While they're tallying up episode 4, I wanted to compare Zac's featured time to all our other players so far this season.
Rewatching that reward with a stopwatch in hand, Zac had a total confessional talking time of around 2:14. If you count the entire spearfishing sequence as a confessional (including the b-roll of him, not talking) then he had a total time of about 2:46. In one episode! In one scene, in one episode! That's a lot of dedicated time for one person.
Comparatively, let's see which remaining players he's outranked on the confessional leaderboard in the first three episodes combined:
- Rizo Velovic - 2:23
- Aubry Bracco - 2:11
- Jonathan Young - 2:04
- Stephenie LaGrossa Kendrick - 1:58
- Colby Donaldson - 1:54
- Charlie Davis - 1:54
- Chrissy Hofbeck - 1:41
- Dee Valladares - 1:23
- Angelina Keeley - 1:22
- Kamilla Karthigesu - 0:53
- Tiffany Ervin - 0:27
A reminder: these are the players' confessional totals from the first three episodes including a 3-hour premiere.
Now, I'm not discounting that this was definitely an incredible reward and Kalo got some great food and got a personal concert with an award-winning musician. That's really cool! But the first three episodes have been filled with so much exciting gameplay that it felt like a random slam on the breaks as an audience member to step out of the game for so long.
Now, I'm not discounting that this was definitely an incredible reward and Kalo got some great food and got a personal concert with an award-winning musician. That's really cool! But the first three episodes have been filled with so much exciting gameplay and
I'm so happy Kalo got to experience such an exciting afternoon, but we'd just gotten a declaration of war on Rizo from Charlie over at Cila. Surely that could have gotten some more screentime this episode? And all of Vatu's voting talk back-and-forth was incredible! We could have really gone into that, too. There were so many players that could have gotten more confessional time this episode that I would have loved to see.
Hopefully episode 5 will pick up where we left off!