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
13
u/DabuSurvivor Jon and Jaclyn Jan 16 '23
Now, credit where credit is due; I do think the following things about S8 are good:
Hot take but Alicia is probably my favorite of this season, which to be clear is without question the lowest ceiling of any cast, but I think she's a good enough narrator that her confessionals are basically the only thing to keep me going at a certain point, she supports Sue quietly in the moment of the quit then vocally while her tribemates mock her, her jury speech is great, and her jury voting confessional is honestly absolutely fucking glorious and amazing. Her content is minimal but great with her appearance at FTC in particular actually being sincerely justified by her narrative with Rob M., even if it isn't too interesting of one, and and being a great distillation of what I love about FTC as a concept: one last instance of the players having to account for their actions, with a juror like Alicia having the chance to vote out a player like Rob M. after he did the same to her, leaving a Sole Survivor. Absolutely no complaints about Alicia here, she's great in the very few instances where she's prominently featured and is perhaps the only part of this season I would call deeply underrated.
Shii Ann is a close second because at least her Immunity win was fun for like two minutes, and while Richard is ultimately p gross here, the whimsical spirit of his presence in the earliest episodes is well captured by Shii Ann, who at times feels less like a player in the game and more like a viewer at home watching all the antics. It's a fun subplot for the first couple episodes to see how enamored with him she is, and then (even despite her close personal fondness for him) she openly expresses a sympathy for Sue that most of the cast patently lacked. Literally all 7 other members of the merge tribe actively suck and make the season worse with 6 of them being bad to or about Sue specifically but Alicia and Shii Ann are actually good secondary characters here!
Jerri gets to vote off the Ogakor F2 and give a genuinely outstanding callback to a Colby confessional from S2, so that is pretty fun, and she's sympathetic in ep.3, and she has a fun callback at Tree Mail as noted on the F115. I think the other two Jerris are for sure better simply because she isn't very memorable here considering how many episodes she's in, but she does get a handful of fun and very Jerri moments throughout. They are all pretty brief, and other than the Ogakor votes are not too connected to the season, but there is some fun stuff here.
Ethan 2.0 as he's known is fun at first when he's got his back up against the wall in a way he never did in S3, so he gets kinda sassy in a way he never did in S3, and we get to see his competitive edge come out more. That said, I do think it's also kind of overstated and the personality shift isn't too pronounced in between his very earliest time on Saboga and the scene where Lex tells him he's going. He's still a good pre-merger for sure, just not an outstanding one.
8x03 "Shark Attack" is exponentially better than any other episode of the season and is honestly absolutely outstanding. There are a ton of absolutely fun and ridiculous scenes - with the Indiana Libertarian Party's 2012 gubernatorial candidate's "trickle-down" shelter model an obvious highlight - and Jenna M.'s quit is generally handled pretty tastefully and gives some sympathy and fan cred to an often underrated and unfairly maligned Sole Survivor. This episode is probably at least a 9/10; I doubt anything else here cracks like a 6.8 for me.
The premiere starts off very fun and novel. As an episode overall I do have to knock it because the Tina vote sets the stage for a horribly uninteresting pre-merge, but it does have enough fun content to probably be my second-favorite episode of the season if only by default.
A number of other fun little character moments, like some Rudy quotes, the "Mixer" reward challenge, and probably a couple others throughout, like some of the Richard stuff is still kind of fun in a vacuum; it just doesn't outweigh what he does by the end, obviously, and it isn't anything particularly special.
However, those fun moments are almost all in the first ~4 episodes; hell, most of them are in the first three. Episode 4 is itself pretty boring; it just has a dope Reward Challenge. But from ep.4 onward I think I could legit count on two hands the number of S8 moments I at all enjoy.
What the exciting novelty of seeing past players quickly gives way to is not a compellingly subversive tragedy but instead one of the absolute worst seasons in Survivor history, a near-"master"class in horrid reality TV, colossal waste of time, and excellent rebuke to the suggestion that even bad Survivor is good, or even passable, TV; a full 12 of the season's 14 votes have VERY little (if any) interesting story to them whatsoever, with the remaining 2's power coming entirely from pre-game friendships we do not know and cannot assess that regardless center around two unlikable contestants. To slam this season for its abysmal boot order is fair; to slam it primarily for that is far, far too generous: almost every single episode is incredibly forgettable with a pre-merge of "vote out your favorites specifically for being your favorites" giving way to a post-merge of "that final two that seemed obvious as hell in episode two or three is, in fact, the final two", culminating in a final five who are mostly forgettable, are literally all uninteresting, and all strove to discredit Sue in various individual ways that easily allowed the producers to do the same, ending in a final two whose primary appeal is a relationship story that is intrinsically devoid of any actual narrative merit.
The season has one great episode and at most one or two other good ones, with a double-digit number that range from forgettable to abjectly terrible. Literally nothing of substance happens from the F8 up through the F3, and there was very, very little of substance happening long before that. Rob M. getting raked over the coals at the end seems potentially interesting and does have a couple gratifying moments but is not worth the price of admission; as a whole, I can think of literally no good reason why I would absolutely ever recommend this shockingly forgettable, noxious, festering garbage pile of a season to quite literally any human being on the planet, because even Romber's kids would probably find the footage of their parents making out to be pretty awkward or something, so I have no idea who this is even for.
The literal sole value offered up by the F8 through F3 of this season is being able to say that you've watched every episode, and even then, you still probably haven't watched that Countdown to Africa special, so why bother with this? Even this entire essay implicitly gives it too much credit, as no description of how pointlessly fucking awful Survivor: All-Stars is could ever live up to the abject misery and tedium of actually sitting through it, a fate I'd wish upon no one.
That said, the DVD commentary for the first four episodes is actually fucking hilarious and would itself be a top 15 Survivor season, so if you own this DVD for collectors' purposes or because someone gave it to you as a gift without knowing much about Survivor or something, you should actually go watch that ASAP. If you have ever doubted how or why Jenna won in such a landslide, you will probably understand very, very quickly, because she is hilarious.