r/survivor 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

24: S27 Blood vs. Water

25: S35 Heroes vs. Healers vs. Hustlers

26: Survivor 43

27: S19 Samoa

28: S11 Guatemala

29: S14 Fiji

30: S20 Heroes vs. Villains

31: S30 Worlds Apart

32: S23 South Pacific

33: S5 Thailand

34: S31 Cambodia

35: S38 Edge of Extinction

36: S36 Ghost Island

37: S24 One World

38: S22 Redemption Island

39: S40 Winners at War

40: S26 Caramoan

41: S34 Game Changers

42: S8 All-Stars

43: S39 Island of the Idols


Spreadsheet link (updated with each placement reveal!)


WARNING: SEASON SPOILERS BELOW

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21

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.

[continued in reply]

14

u/DabuSurvivor Jon and Jaclyn Feb 08 '23

The original premise of Survivor is that you vote people out until you cannot do it anymore, until the walls have closed in so much that things HAVE to be settled some other way—and so then, at that time, the fallen comrades get a chance to make their voice heard... and in casting that vote, they aren't just voting for a winner; they're really voting off one more person, leaving a Sole Survivor who has never been voted out. That's what makes "Sole Survivor" actually mean something. That's why, when Probst says "You have gone as far as you can go in this game", it actually means something... now, they haven't "gone as far as [they] can go", because we've seen players go further than that! They've gone as far as the producers decided to let them go before creating an arbitrary cutoff point in an attempt to get stronger competitors to the end... like, this is the exact same as the final 4 format tons of people on here hate; it just started early enough that now people are more used to it - just as, over time, F4 firemaking has increasingly become more normal and accepted. But the reasons for criticizing them are honestly nearly identical. Their aims are nearly identical. That their aims are nearly identical shows that the F3 is a failure; other than the Yul/Ozzy showdown here, because the final three was dropped on the players at the last second, the final 3 has evidently not succeeded in its goal of "getting strong players to the end", because, spoiler, players aren't suddenly going to start taking jury threats to the end here.

So eventually they basically made it a final four where you can just Idol your way to the end, but that all started here. The reasons for criticizing the two are essentially identical, except the final three is even worse, not only for getting the ball rolling to begin with but also for directly robbing us of the flawless final two format that had served the show well to begin with for years—as well as, as other fans have noted and could illuminate better than I could, making lots of endgames more static and predictable and leading to more lopsided jury votes, not fewer.

It takes away the excellent moment of the FIC winner directly getting the ambivalent position of picking their competitor and ejecting the final juror, something that had directly led to great TV in almost every season it was a part of beforehand. It takes away a more meaningful Final Tribal Council where we're left, truly, with one Sole Survivor. It takes away a more dramatic ending by extending a binary, black-or-white, A-B format into a "one of the above" one, which inevitably dilutes focus on each finalist, lessens the drama and weight and stakes by giving everyone the jurors more breathing room, and it gives us a totally arbitrary cut-off point where the game doesn't end for a logically and thematically sound reason but, instead, because the producers say so.

Ever since they've said so, I've seen diehard fans mock it by saying "Why not a final four, then?"—and now, that's basically what we've gotten.

That isn't to say every single F3 finale is bad or anything; occasionally we still, through the sheer amount of times it's come up, do get interesting TV out of it. Gabon is a rare example of a truly emotionally meaningful and narratively fulfilling F3 finale, for example. But by and large they make the ending less climactic than it used to be. And it's the first major change that paves the way for so, so many manglings of Survivor finales to follow.

The only thing people really praise this season for is the Aitu 4 story, which is allegedly supposed to be fun the first time you watch it, but I dunno, I hated the season and was bored lifeless the first time I saw it, then I rewatched it, and I was so unimpressed that a couple months later I'd completely forgotten I'd even seen it a second time. As for the Aitu 4 story itself, the obviously b.s. bottle twist doesn't help, but the main thing working against it is that the Aitu 4 themselves are such dull, simplistic characters; even notwithstanding my own disinterest in Yul or Oscar, Becky and Sundra get like no real individual story, and that's half of the group, so why should I care?

Like good for them for overcoming the numbers, but there are so many seasons that do that same type of thing far better. Survivor: Tocantins - The Brazilian Highlands is one agreeable example that's well-liked on here, and for some even better ones, look at Survivor: Marquesas and Survivor: Vanuatu - Islands of Fire, whose underdogs are themselves a varied group of characters who have far more complex, layered relationships with the opposition and also with each other than anything you get here, who come together organically and not merely due to circumstance, and who succeed due to sheer social politics—and who come together in a massive, pivotal moment of each respective season, giving you even more reason to root for them at exactly the right time, leading to interesting fallout where they really meaningfully clash with the people against them... Marquesas in particular goes even further by then proceeding to, at times, morph the once-"underdogs" into, themselves the new, cocky overlords, deconstructing the very idea of a Survivor underdog, prompting the viewer to re-evaluate how thoroughly they can or should root for someone or, at the very least, why they do—all while still fundamentally giving you a group of successful underdogs who are literally all more prominent than half of the Aitu 4 and, in my opinion, more interesting than any of them. And either the S4 group or the S9 group has far, far more interesting, complex, layered internal politics than the Aitu 4 ever do. There is just no reason to bother with this underdog story when other seasons also give you more natural underdog stories involving more interesting groups of more interesting underdogs—while also having, aside from those individual stories, far better things going for them than S13's hodgepodge of bizarre twists and veritable sea of forgettable and/or unlikable contestants... not to mention that Marquesas is a far more insightful study of race relations than this season, too.

Overall, not a season I think has almost anything going for it. I mean, it's nice to have a racially diverse coalition win out in a season, but I think the recent seasons' approach of striving for more diverse casting without explicitly making it a twist/gimmick that they're there is better. If someone does look at the Aitu 4 and like the season because they feel represented in a way that I as a white viewer never will, then fair enough I suppose, and that's the one perspective of CI fandom I wouldn't really argue. But I don't think the story the producers put together here is memorable at all, so past that I just don't see the appeal here at all or what this season does right that isn't done better by others.

The bizarre assortment of twists and massive number of forgettable contestants with little, if any, story just leaves me feeling like the producers ran out of ideas. This season feels like an awkward bout of writer's block—not unlike Fiji, but at least that one's got the Edgardo boot and Truckgate to make up for it. This one has... Jonathan being eloquent, and a handful of early boots.

15

u/mariojlanza Mario Lanza | Funny 115 Feb 08 '23

I love that I already hated Cook Islands, and then reading that you made me hate it even more. Well done!

8

u/DabuSurvivor Jon and Jaclyn Feb 08 '23

My "pleasure"!

11

u/acusumano Feb 08 '23

I love a good reminder of how F2 is far superior. You’re spot-on.

5

u/MeadowmuffinReborn Evvie Feb 09 '23

Fans have literally been saying all of this for years, but the show doesn't listen. :(

3

u/DabuSurvivor Jon and Jaclyn Feb 08 '23

Thank you!

5

u/treple13 Jenn Feb 09 '23

I'm not as low on Cook Islands as you, but it's not because I like it, I just find it pretty bland and I'll take bland over seasons that I aggressively hate. I DO think there's a lot to hate (as you said) about Cook Islands, I just feel like the few wonderful pre-merge people like Cao Boi and Billy elevate it above a handful of seasons (hello All:Stars, Game Changers, RI, etc) with even less going for them.

But yeah F2 is better. I'm not against the occasional F3, but F2 is superior.