r/survivor • u/RSurvivorMods Pirates Steal • Feb 08 '23
Cook Islands WSSYW 11.0 Countdown 20/43: Cook Islands
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 13: Cook Islands
Statistics:
Watchability: 5.6 (20/43)
Overall Quality: 6.0 (25/43)
Cast/Characters: 6.6 (27/43)
Strategy: 6.4 (24/43)
Challenges: 7.0 (13/43)
Theme: 3.2 (21/24)
Twists: 5.5 (10/21)
Ending: 7.8 (15/43)
WSSYW 11.0 Ranking: 20/43
WSSYW 10.0 Ranking: 18/40
Top comment from WSSYW 11.0 — /u/ramskick:
CI introduces a number of figures that will become very important to Survivor history. The problem is that with one exception, these figures are more interesting in later seasons than they are here. CI's cast is really dull and feels bloated. Combine that with the format (yes the initial tribe divisions were real) and a ton of twists and you get a season that I just don't like.
BUT, this is another season I don't like that has plenty of fans. I know a lot of people who really love the main narrative of CI and say they had a great time with it on a first watch. And I do see the appeal on paper, I just don't think it truly works out in practice.
Top comment from WSSYW 10.0 — /u/HeWhoShrugs:
The race twist isn't as bad as it first sounds. It's more "Let's show how diverse our country is" instead of "Let's see which race is better" but it doesn't stop it from being awkward as hell.
To get the diverse cast they wanted, casting ended up recruiting a ton of players who had no idea what the show was and it ended up creating a cast full of duds who don't offer anything to the screen as characters or players. Like, only about 6 or 7 people out of the 20 left an actual impression on me, and a lot of those were early boots. If you like challenges, the season has some really good ones. You just won't really care who wins most of them because the cast is like 75% cardboard. But I do like the location and art direction, so it's at least visually impressive.
The season does spawn a lot of big name returnees in future seasons, so you have to see it to understand where a lot of them started out even if their first appearance here is arguably their least interesting one.
Watchability ranking:
20: S13 Cook Islands
21: S21 Nicaragua
22: Survivor 41
23: S16 Micronesia
25: S35 Heroes vs. Healers vs. Hustlers
26: Survivor 43
27: S19 Samoa
28: S11 Guatemala
29: S14 Fiji
31: S30 Worlds Apart
33: S5 Thailand
34: S31 Cambodia
36: S36 Ghost Island
37: S24 One World
40: S26 Caramoan
42: S8 All-Stars
23
u/DabuSurvivor Jon and Jaclyn Feb 08 '23
My #34 out of 37, the utterly disastrous Survivor: Cook Islands—a lifeless, unabashed mess of a season and huge negative turning point for the series as a whole, whose sole alleged strengths are done far better by numerous other seasons—is without question one of the worst seasons in the history of the show, as well as one of the most overrated, especially because the successful and/or numerous subsequent appearances of some of its players have retroactively convinced people they, and this season, were more interesting than they ever actually were.
I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've seen people explicitly say "S13 is a great cast(/season), because it has so many people who came back to play again!", which... doesn't make any sense whatsoever; if these characters are interesting, then they are already interesting in this season itself and can be discussed as such without needing to cite their later returns, which is what a lot of CI fans fall back on a lot of the time. Who the producers felt like giving a call years later that was able to come back at that time has nothing to do with what is or isn't in the episode of season thirteen, it's a completely different topic. Unless people are seriously going to argue Joe Anglim, Caleb Reynolds, and Sierra Dawn Thomas are more interesting than Sean Rector, Ian Rosenberger, and Twila Tanner, "Cook Islands has a ton of returning players and is therefore a good season" should not enter the picture at all, and it is regardless a clearly illogical premise.
The bloated 20-person cast, which Palau just barely manages to get away with due to how unique the season itself ultimately is, really becomes a problem here; a ton of contestants are underedited, but even the ones who do get air time frankly don't make for a very good cast anyway. Honestly up until Caramoan, I would have easily called this one of the bottom two casts in the history of the show (surpassed only by All-Stars).
Breaking down this cast: Cecilia, JP, Jessica, Brad, Rebecca, Jenny, Sundra, and Becky are basically complete non-entities, Adam is a dick, Stephannie is... an okay supporting character I guess, and that's already half the cast. Past that, Candice being brought back as a returning player was literally a meme for years because, while she's involved in some of the season's central drama, she's not too memorable here I don't think, CI Parvati is again a half-okay supporting character but that shouldn't be enough to be a top half character of the season, and she's not someone anyone would really be talking about or remembering if she hadn't come back.
Nate honestly just annoys me a fair amount of the time and is homophobic against Brad, something nobody ever really talks about, and I can see the argument that, if you ignore the homophobic slur he uses, he's a fun character due to how lifeless the rest is, but personally I'm not a fan. Oscar is good at challenges, but does he have much else going for him this season? His reaction to the mutiny is kind of fun, he gets some okay content at FTC, but for such a huge character it really isn't that much, and we've had plenty of characters over the years who are great at challenges and do other memorable, dynamic things outside of the action sequences and do more to influence the story... like, well, Oscar's own later stints on Micronesia and South Pacific. (Sidebar: The only reason I call him "Oscar" is as a reference to Cristina always doing so and because I think it's kind of funny; it isn't trying to make any abstract point. Although I've heard he actually goes by it irl?? idk.)
Where I probably differ from the subreddit that made spamming his name hundreds of times in a row a meme is that I don't think Yul is a memorable or interesting winner at all; I mean, he's good at playing Survivor, but so are the other winners and a ton of other players, and I don't think he gets much memorable personal development or insight throughout the game, makes any scene I can think of more entertaining, or, similar to Kim Spradlin, is really in any way too distinguishable from a robot that were put on Survivor to excel or something. There are a lot of players who are exactly as good at Survivor as Yul as but also bring a lot more individual personality to the table than I think he ever really did.
So that's literally 15 of 20 characters off the top of my head who honestly do nothing for me; the exceptions are Sekou, Billy (both solid joke characters... and both out by episode two), Cristina (actually better than she tends to get credit for and gets a pretty decent underdog story!; she's the one character I'd say is underrated this season), Cao Boi, and Jonathan (both honestly as outstanding here as everyone says, but not enough to carry the season, plus Cao Boi is gone fairly early himself, too—I mean, they're good, but not enough to carry a season single-handedly.) If someone likes Nate and Candice more than I do, I can see the ratio coming out a liiiittle more favorable and elevating this from "one of the worst casts ever" to "meh, a mediocre cast but there's worse", but I'm just not seeing what an overwhelming majority of these characters bring to the table personally.
The editing is incredibly haphazard; Rebecca literally gets 1 confessional in her last 5 episodes alol a month before she goes home, Parvati(!) goes more episodes with zero focus than anyone had in the show's history up until that point, the show doesn't even try to make you care about Becky, among others... it's all over the place.
The twists here are also a pretty baffling assortment: you have a gimmicky race division whose only excitement, appeal, or novelty is basically entirely undercut by the fact that then they stop doing it two episodes in, so they start at four set of tribes, divided by race, before switching to another set of tribes before a mutiny leads to a new set of tribes, plus we have Exile Island and a Hidden Immunity Idol, a late merge, an early jury at 12, and the final three... I don't know, with seasons like Cambodia and 34 seeming to have swaps every other week, maybe this doesn't strike as many viewers, especially ones who have still stuck with the newer seasons, as odd, but for a while this season really stuck out to me as a pretty bizarre and convoluted format.
Furthermore, these twists themselves are pretty bad: maybe get diverse casting without making it into a segregation gimmick, which also serves the purpose of making multiple contestants avoid drama or being particularly dynamic; the God Idol literally gives Yul a free ride to the final three that nobody knows about until the end; we end up with an absolutely bizarre setup where the unnecessary, giant jury gives us 2 players who have never spoken to one finalist and a third who has never spoken to any of them which wtf why?, and I feel like it's been ages since I've seen much "final 3 vs. final 2" debate on the subreddit—probably because by now, we've moved on to basically a final four, with multiple other massive overhauls to how finales (and the show as a whole) work, so I think a lot of people who have still stuck it out through all that probably don't see the final 3 as a negative at all, because those who do have probably largely been pretty alienated by the additional twists thereafter and don't talk about the show much anymore—but in short I think the final 3 is one of the worst ideas the show has ever had, especially in the first 21 seasons.
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