Possibly (ok, probably) related: She has since done her absolute best to avoid anything that would put her in the public's eye.

It's also hard to rank Borneo because if you watched it live your feelings about it are wrapped up in the nostalgia of having seen it live. It was such an experience, as others here have mentioned- since such a huge portion of the country was watching, there were constant discussions about it amongst friends, family…

They also got sunglasses and ponchos, which they no longer receive. They are more generous with food now, though.

Why does Richard, the largest contestant, not simply eat the other three?

People were pissed when the alliance voted off Colleen, because she'd already become America's sweetheart at that point.

As the challenges grew in scale and commercials took up more air time, there is less and less time for the show to spend in the camps showing us daily life and social interactions.

You're right about stepping down from final immunity being Richard's best move, although he probably never even gets to that point without the alliance.

She had a pretty low bar for redemption, though. She was pretty disastrous last episode. But if they were going for a full redemption thing with her, I don't know that they show that it took her 5 hours to make fire.

I don't know if they expected many people in the audience to know about that. It could just be that they're setting that up as a reason she ends up getting sick later. But if it was a knowing wink to those of us that know about Debbie's past, that would be amazing.

Maybe this was an experiment by Survivor's production staff- lower expectations before the season starts to make people appreciate it more.

Last season was fantastic. The two seasons before it was mediocre, though.

I don't know if that was an Alecia redemption arc so much as Alecia stepping aside and letting a disaster happen. But it was certainly an improvement over her performance in the premiere.

That's an extremely high bar in Survivor terms. And JT's plan is at least defensible, even though the results were hilariously tragic for him.

She joins JT as Survivors not even on this season that got more airtime than Wiglesworth.

It's one of my favorites too. The way that Tyson humors and eggs on Coach is just fantastic. "I guess I'm like his assistant coach?"

Agreed. I legitimately enjoyed Coach in Tocantins, when his delusions were just entertaining and not grating.

(Except Shirin.)

Savage wanted to target Stephen! How is that not making a move?!

I'm not saying that Fishbach argued to not put votes on Ciera. I'm saying that he didn't argue for a vote split because he didn't want to risk her going home if an idol was played. They probably also figured that if Kelley had an idol she would've played it last week.

Really high bar, that one.