Did You Watch the Survivor Finale?

400px-survivor-borneo-logoI know that no one reads this blog for Survivor updates, but I allow myself one entry per season because I continue to really love the show. This is that entry.

Also, spoilers for the finale. Don’t read this if you watch Survivor but haven’t seen the finale. If you don’t watch Survivor, you might still find this interesting, especially the second note.

First, one of the contestants made one of the most brilliant moves in the history of the show. For many years now, a staple of Survivor has been hidden immunity idols. They’re typically necklaces hidden in and around camp that players can find and reveal at the right time to stay in the game.

Maybe around 8 years ago, a contestant had a clever idea: They made a fake hidden immunity idol and used it to make people think they were protected from being voted out. Since then, several people have done this, using the idol in a variety of ways.

Well, in this season’s finale, one of the players, David, made a fake idol. Instead of keeping it, he “hid” it in an obvious place where someone else could find it. Which someone did. And that someone proudly revealed it at tribal, confident they had avoided the vote…only for the show’s host to tell him it was fake. It was amazing.

Second, the mother of one of the final contestants had been struggling with lung cancer for a little over a year when the contestant was offered a spot on this season. She urged her son, Adam, to compete on the show, but it definitely weighed on him throughout the season. At any point, his mother could have died while he was gone.

So, as was revealed at the finale (which is live–the island part of the show was wrapped months ago), when Adam finished filming the season, he rushed home from Fiji to be with his mother.

An hour later, she died.

Stories like this leave me in awe of the human condition. I’m sure most of us have encountered a time when we got through an important task only to get really sick afterwards, as if our body was holding the illness at bay until the right time.

But to hold off death? That’s just incredible. It makes me very grateful for the miraculous connection between mind, body, and spirit, most of which I think we barely understand.

Did you watch the Survivor finale? What did you think? Have you ever encountered something like what happened with Adam’s mom?

2 thoughts on “Did You Watch the Survivor Finale?”

  1. An incredible finish, to an excellent season of one of my favourite shows. During the final tribal council, Zeke described Survivor as “the world’s greatest game”, which, I mean, for a board game and video game enthusiast, those are BIG WORDS.

    … but, the more I thought about it, the more right I think he is. I mean, without getting cynical about the gameifications of, say, politics, is there another game that plays with as many facets of human existence, socially, physically, mentally, as Survivor does? I’m not sure.

    And yeah, I totally blubbed during Adam’s denouement. Oof. What a show.

    Reply

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