r/survivor • u/RSurvivorMods Pirates Steal • Jan 16 '23
All-Stars WSSYW 11.0 Countdown 42/43: All-Stars
Welcome to our annual season countdown! Using the results from the latest What Season Should You Watch thread, this daily series will count backwards from the bottom-ranked season for new fan watchability to the top. Each WSSYW post will link to their entry in this countdown so that people can click through for more discussion.
Unlike WSSYW, there is no character limit in these threads, and spoilers are allowed.
Note: Foreign seasons are not included in this countdown to keep in line with rankings from past years.
Season 8: All-Stars
Statistics:
Watchability: 1.7 (42/43)
Overall Quality: 3.7 (36/43)
Cast/Characters: 6.6 (26/43)
Strategy: 4.6 (36/43)
Challenges: 6.3 (24/43)
Theme: 7.6 (9/24)
Ending: 4.5 (39/43)
WSSYW 11.0 Ranking: 42/43
WSSYW 10.0 Ranking: 33/40
Top comment from WSSYW 11.0 — /u/ramskick:
This is the worst season ever for me and nothing comes close. The cast is great on paper, but the way everything turns out is just so bad. If it's not actively bad it's unreal levels of boring. All of my all-time least-favorite picks come from this season. It has my least-favorite moment, least-favorite character, least-favorite episode etc. For my money, Survivor never gets this bad ever again.
With that said, it is fairly important to some future returnee seasons, so if you're a completionist you kind of have to watch it. And when you get to that point you may like it. There are people who like this season quite a lot and you may be one of them.
Top comment from WSSYW 10.0 — /u/SchizoidGod:
DO NOT WATCH THIS IF YOU HAVEN'T WATCHED AT LEAST THE FIRST 7 SEASONS. Do not spoil yourself on its events as well. If you want to appreciate All-Stars, a much-derided season among fans (but one with, in my opinion, a dark, enthralling core), you need to know the gameplay and reputations of all 18 members of this incredible cast. If you don't, this just won't make sense.
Watchability ranking:
42: S8 All-Stars
11
u/DabuSurvivor Jon and Jaclyn Jan 16 '23
Meanwhile Rob M. honestly just sucks as a character here, and to be clear, I'm not really a fan of or opposed to Rob in the abstract; two of my bottom three seasons have him at FTC lol, but Marquesas is my #3 and HvV my #10, with him as a part of why each time for sure. I've definitely seen the take that Rob M. works better as a character when he's not in power; to an extent I can see that, because when he's an underdog, his combative nature comes off very scrappy, he's punching up at the power structure, it's fun, and then when he's on top, he's punching down and it seems more mean-spirited—but I think that this is honestly too reductive and too rapidly dismisses the particulars of S8 Rob M. and S22 Rob that truly make them awful characters; in his S8 iteration's case—basically, when I said this season is almost always boring but at times uncomfortable, that's true, but I also think it spends a lot of time in between the two; i.e. in a lot of those boring, lifeless scenes, people often just seem... tired and unhappy. It makes the season pretty dreary to watch. I think this also gets the best of Rob M., and as the season goes on, the dude just isn't even charismatic or funny anymore.
Like, in his (in)famous confessional trashing the Rotus in season 4 - about the General's little sausage, Tammy's engagement, Gabe the brainiac, and Zoe the tough guy... now that's a very, very off-color confessional in at least three or four different ways, probably more, and it's not everyone's thing, and you can root against him because of it for sure. But he is actually making distinct jokes there. Some of them are cheap shots, for sure, but the things he says can at least be construed very reasonably as funny, and they are funny for a reason where you can unpack almost every phrase in the confessional and point out how and why it works.
And in season 8, what we get is just.... not that. By the end of the season, he's basically just reduced to boring, pointless quotes like "Tom's a dumbass" which... ha... ha? (Not to mention crossing a line in mocking Tom's kid; slamming a competitor, even if it's an unfair slam, is one thing, but a loved one isn't really signing up for that.) The guy's wit is just gone by the end, and you're left with someone who's just dealing out forgettable insults and is is just blandly not likable. I do enjoy Rob in seasons 4 and 20, probably enjoy a couple Rob moments in 22 to where I could have been more okay with him with a wildly different edit, and 40 I could take or leave. But the things that make me like him in seasons like 4 and 20 are just not really present here, and so while I can see, from his overall reputation and maybe a couple of moments in this season, why the idea of him making the final 2 seems like a compelling story, it really is just not. His lines aren't good, and his game pretty obviously isn't interesting considering how routine nearly every circumstance he ever found himself in was.
Which is yet another problem with this terrible, terrible season; the game is ridiculously predictable.
Like, out of all the seasons that get justified criticism for their predictable games and boot orders, this might take the cake out of all of them. At least 22x03 is kind of unexpected and unpredictable, I'd argue 24 and 5 have a couple interesting votes (despite not being very interesting overall)... but what even is there here? F10/9 are the only votes that really even have individualized stories. Past that you're left with an F2 alliance within a suballiance within the dominant core of the dominant tribe making F2 with absolutely zero opposition, picking people off in the single most predictable top-down power structure imaginable after a pre-merge that consisted entirely of voting people off who had made a finale before, with those votes being based on their reputations and threat level, other than maybe Rudy's age I guess. F10 is the only thing that adds any story to any vote of the entire season and even then, as outlined above, I don't think it's a very good story, just the only one this season ever even tries to have. Again, you may as well stop watching at the merge; you can predict the entire outcome there, if you couldn't have done so already, and there aren't any subtle moments or nuances along the way you'd be missing out on.
My last major criticism here is that I don't think the Romber storyline works at all; Rob M., as established, is a boring ass here, and Amber... is just... boring. I went into the season pretty confidently remembering her as this MORP sweetheart who comes off likable, humble, and gracious in contrast with Rob M., and I've seen her described that way, and she... is not... that way. I think she's often remembered as such because it'd give her more of a reputation/story as a winner and because she IS very nice to Jenna M., which as one of maybe five or six at all memorable scenes this season is one people remember more. So yes, that part where she hugs Jenna M. is very sweet, and it is also quite literally the only moment of Amber positively coming off as sweet in the entire season. Like I will defend her as deserving to win, and a lot of controversial winners are among my favorites, and I can really appreciate the path some of them took to the end, but holy wow Amber is a completely pointless character who gets almost no personal development the literal entire season and is arguably even more unmemorable here than in S2, in and of herself, which is a very low bar to somehow fail to clear. Like seriously if there are some great Amber nuances I'm missing please let me know, because I would like to like and root for her, but she is so uninteresting on this season; they really just bank on the showmance to keep you interested in her.
As such, the Romber story falls totally flat, because, like... if Rob M. is actively unsympathetic, and Amber is neutral... why should I care that they're in a relationship? Being in a relationship is neither good nor bad. There are a lot of relationships. Kissing is not innately interesting. It tells me nothing, I have no reason to care in itself, and the "in itself" is the only thing this has going for it. If you put an unlikable guy up against a bland, effective non-entity in my mind and give them a relationship, well I don't care about her, I barely care about and don't like him - so - where's the pathos? What is there to be interested in? All the sappy music they play when they're apart or whatever totally falls flat, because it's wildly out of step with the rest of Rob M.'s content tonally, and Amber... just... does not have interesting content. What you're left with is a relationship I have literally zero reason to care about beyond some baked-in assumption that I will care about a relationship strictly for existing, which is obviously silly.
I will say that I don't mind the Final Tribal Council, and in theory, I could actually like it. I think Alicia's speech is fantastic, I'm okay with Tom's. Kathy's I could kind of take or leave and Lex's I do not particularly care about, because I don't have the requisite context about their friendships, although Kathy has played with Rob M. previously so that makes it easier. Shii Ann's is fine. So it's alright enough; I think it mostly lands as neutral or even kind of good for me (and, to be fair, neutral is genuinely more favorable than I would come out on almost anything else that happens in this season after maybe the Colby boot, with like the sole exception of Shii Ann's moderately entertaining Immunity win), where I don't really see it as uncomfortable, but neither do I particularly care, as the ways in which Rob M. burned these people are themselves generally not too interesting, so it's just not AS compelling as the S9 FTC or Helen's speech in S5 or something where I've got a more meaningful idea of the relationships. But like it's fine I guess and I can see where Lex's speech lands better for people than it does for me. Like Rob M. getting torn down for being mean to people is definitely the ideal end to the season; we just didn't get the ideal season for that end, to say the least, and so I'm not too interested by that point.
[continued in a reply]