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Venatrix Avia wrote:

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I just rewatched Thailand, and I still really didn't like it. Since you asked, here are my personal reasons, which of course I realize are totally subjective.

I found Grindgate, and the way that the entire issue was framed and presented by the editing, extremely disturbing. It was uncomfortable and upsetting to me, and it happened early enough in the game to color my experience of the entire season. This was exacerbated by the fact that Ted remained in the game to the very end, which meant that my negative feelings about the incident were reawakened for me every episode, as I was inevitably reminded of it whenever he appeared on screen.

On a related note, while sexism and misogyny are present in nearly every season of Survivor, for some reason it seemed more intrusive to me in Thailand than in many others. This, too, made the season feel distasteful to me on a visceral level.

I disliked all but one of the characters. A likeable cast is not an absolute prerequisite to my enjoyment of a season (I liked Amazon a great deal, in spite of disliking most of the characters), but it certainly does help. I found that with Thailand, it got hard for me to care what happened all that much, since I found so many of the characters so unsympathetic. Basically, I just didn't care much what happened to them.

Furthermore, many of the players I found not merely unsympathetic, but actively creepy...and not in a good or funny way. Brian struck me as sociopathic. Clay made my skin crawl. Jan came across to me as borderline mentally deficient. Shii Ann was an embarrassing mess of social insecurity, and Robb was simply a pain in the ass. And I don't know what Stephanie's deal was, but she wasn't fun. Eccentric or neurotic players are generally a good thing in my book, but these people's particular eccentricities didn't entertain me. Instead, they just made me feel uncomfortable.

The Sook Jai characters seemed really underdeveloped to me. Of the lot of them, the only two I felt I got to know at all were Robb and Shii Ann. The rest were ciphers to me, and I felt as if their attributes were told to us, rather than shown. We knew that Penny was manipulative because other people claimed that she was, but we never really got to see it for ourselves, which I consider poor storytelling. And as for Erin, Ken, Jed and Stephanie...who the hell were they? Seriously, I just watched the season last week, and I have no idea who those people were.

I found the game play boring and predictable. Again, this isn't always the kiss of death for a season for me -- there are some really strategically dull seasons that I like a lot -- but interesting strategic shake-ups can help to maintain my interest in a season when other points of interest are lacking, and Thailand didn't have that going for it.

And finally, the season as a whole didn't seem to me to have a terribly coherent story. What was Thailand about? Survivor seasons are admittedly not often all that thematically complex -- I mean, they're hardly great literature -- but they usually do convey some kind of story. I didn't feel that Thailand's story ever cohered.

So that's why Thailand ranks very low on my own personal list. I can't speak for others' reasoning, of course. I can say, though, that for me, Sook Jai getting picked off was actually more a point in the season's favor than the reverse. I tend to favor older players, and I certainly did in Thailand (although this may have been in part because the younger folks on Sook Jai were so underdeveloped that I never really felt I got to know many of them).

The other thing I liked about Thailand was Chuay Gahn's camp and all of the nature- and survival-oriented stuff associated with it. Magilla totally stole the show, the water-fetching missions were just plain cool, and I thought the cave was pretty nifty. Also, nice sunrises.

I love Thailand, a season in my top 4....and i still agree with many of your points, except your view on Thailand's story-telling theme...which was plainly obvious - wise Older people won through brains instead of the younger immature tribe full of physically fit people. This was the first season that focused more on puzzle challenges than strength and opened up the door for weak physical players to still have a chance at a right to win.