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22. Survivor: Redemption Island (Season 22)

How fitting that season 22 is also the 22nd best season of the show.  I want to start this by saying that I didn't go into the season with negative expectations.  Yes, I was fully aware that Rob & Russell would be coming back, and admittedly that was the one thing I wasn't looking forward to, because I know how the editing turned out in Micronesia, and how Russell tends to hog up screentime in any season he's a part of.  But the other stuff, I didn't mind.  The cast had 10 people from California, fine.  I was more pleased that casting found a decent array of ages and personalities than anything else.  Redemption Island?  The Outcast twist worked out well, so why not give Redemption Island a shot, since pre-merge boots tend to be more interesting than some end-gamers anyway.  So yeah, going into Redemption Island, I thought the season had a ton of potential and could give us a bunch of interesting characters.  I was sadly mistaken.  The following is a list of flaws that completely ruined Redemption Island for me.

A. Rob & Russell coming back.  Pitting returning players against newbies is never a fair thing to do.  It worked KINDA in Guatemala, but that was because Stephenie is a shitty strategist and Bobby Jon may as well have been a newbie.  And even there, you could see the inherent flaw in this sort of twist, because of just how much blind devotion people had towards Steph, which resulted in her being able to dominate her idiotic minions, thus causing her to eat up screentime.  But still, Guatemala was balanced compared to more recent seasons.  Micronesia pitted a team of returning players against a team of newbies, and that was clearly bullshit because of course the editing is going to focus more on the favorites, because there's TEN of them.  Not to mention the fact that, again, plenty of players on the fans tribe were content to sit back and let the favorites walk all over them.  So naturally, there was a lot of failure potential in a season with returning players, and that potential was realized.

Ometepe was divided into two camps: the "let's get rid of Rob on day one just because he's a returning player" camp, and the "let's let Rob make all our decisions because thinking is so hard" camp.  Note that neither camp had thoughts beyond how they wanted to play in regards to Rob.  And as a result, the most interesting players (the non-followers) were picked off, with a brief break to vote Matt out, again, because Rob said so.  This continued for the rest of the game as Ometepe wound up dominating going into the merge, and it actually killed ANY suspense in the season because of just how far up Rob's ass the other players were.  The final 8/7 episode could've easily had some suspense (not real suspense, obviously, but the editors could've TRIED) if they just ended on Ashley and Natalie considering Steve's proposal.  But no, they were such blind followers that they had to clarify to the camera "We're not going to think for ourselves.  PSYCHE!"  It was just so awful and boring, and even when it got down to the point where they would have to turn on each other, the ONLY switch-ups occurred via immunity wins.

Meanwhile, Zapatera had Russell.  And Russell doesn't learn from his mistakes, so he went about making the same exact alliance as always and hoping he could get an idol to better his position in the game.  Meanwhile, the six-person majority of his tribe had tunnel vision with regards to him, leading to them throwing a challenge to boot him.  This sucked for two reasons.  One, them throwing the challenge (maybe they would've won it, maybe not) led to them being down 6-5 instead of UP 6-5 at the merge.  And two, the worse reason, is that the editors constantly drilled it into out heads for the next five or six episodes after Russell was finally eliminated that Zapatera were idiots for throwing the challenge.  And you know what?  I bet if they hadn't thrown the challenge and voted Russell out normally, the editors would've told us "They didn't accept Russell's expertise in the game and voted him out".  No other player would be able to hover over a tribe's storyline like that, and it sucked.  And worst of all, he got to act all smug at the reunion because Zapatera lost.

B. The cast.  My initial hopes for this cast were shot right to hell when everyone either went with or against the returning players and focused all their energy on that.  And not surprisingly, the players in the minority on both tribes were the actually interesting ones.  But it's more than that.  Honestly, the make-up of the tribes was just awful.  Ometepe had three young girls that were relatively interchangable (with Andrea being the good girl) as well as a young college student, a young, ex-NFL athlete, two lawyers, and a crazy guy.  There were a lot of ways things could've gone on that tribe.  Compare that to Zapatera.  Iraq War veteran (hero), firefighter (hero), older ex-NFL athlete (hero), nice chicken farmer or whatever Ralph does (positive edit), a hippy (positive edit) and then a single lawyer and two young girls that are just a massive age gap away from the rest of their tribe.  Zapatera is just an awful tribe based solely on the fact that they're composed of personality types that are generally honest and hard-working and put those people in the majority of the tribe along with two people (Stephanie/Krista) that are going to have a VERY uphill battle to not be booted first (because they have next to no one in their age range to work with except MAYBE David, but he's a lawyer and would be more likely to associate with the older crowd).  But yeah, Zapatera's tribe make-up sucked, and in the end, I think the biggest problem I noticed with the cast was the lack of age diversity.  Yeah, you had five young girls, a couple older women, and a couple in-betweens, but looking at the male casting and there's a different story.  You have an entire male cast of 30+ players, with the exception of Matt and Grant, and even Grant was an NFL player, so there's a big difference.  The lack of young guys in the cast really hurt the season because older players are either batshit insane, or extremely rational, both male or female.  Young girls are highly likely to be followers.  Young guys can be wild cards, even if they're boring personality-wise, and Matt being the only young guy in the cast (and being on an already young tribe, rather than Zapatera) didn't work.

C. Redemption Island.  I didn't mind the season pre-merge, because I feel like it does give us a chance to better get to know the players who get voted out early.  And it's a nice little distraction since honestly, pre-merge reward challenges are kinda lame.  Yeah, this season sucks because it was blatantly obvious that Matt was going to dominate until the merge, but still, it's a good concept.  No, the reason why this season was exceptionally bad was because Redemption Island didn't go away at the merge.  The post-merge is where we generally start to see things switch around and get awesome, but instead, we saw people get blindsided and not really be out of the game because they got to compete on Redemption Island again.  And they weren't even competing in duels anymore, but rather trials or quarrels which didn't even result in everyone who lost getting sent home.  That sucked and it ate up 15 minutes of every episode.  And the culmination?  Andrea made it back into the game at the final five...just to get voted right back out again because the players would have to be stupid to keep the RI winner around.  Why would they be stupid?  Well, the RI winner would get to spend quality alone time with future jurors, enduring similar conditions and sharing bitterness at the people still in the game.  Also, it's pretty bullshit that Grant made the final 5, yet got 8th place over the merge and second merge boots respectively.

D. Everything else.  There were plenty of twists that just worked terribly and the whole season came across as a way for production to guarantee a win from Rob or Russell.  Seriously, the immunity idols which Kristina/Ralph found (and Ralph wasn't even looking for it) were fine, but once Kristina played hers, the fact that Ometepe had a new idol rehidden was bullshit.  That essentially meant Ometepe got two idols compared to Zapatera's one just because Ometepe decided to flush theirs out.  Had that not happened, Rob wouldn't have been able to play his second idol at the final five (which is another fucked up thing, because Rob was able to guarantee himself a spot in the final 4 when in recent seasons the idol is done at the final six).  Plus the massive number of physical/puzzle challenges, which caters to Rob's strengths (no final endurance challenge?  Really?)  And the extremely biased edit which gave NO hint that Rob was EVER in danger and in fact led to the most anticlimactic final tribal council of all time.  This season was just a massive failure, and I'm still extremely pissed that production had the nerve to tell us to our faces, at the reunion for the worst season ever, that they were going to run the same exact twists a second time.  God DAMMIT.