Survivor 50 Sacrificed Surprise for a Good Story

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for the Survivor 50 finale.]

Last week, Survivor crowned a new winner: Aubry Bracco, who beat Jonathan Young and Joe Hunter in an 8–3–0 final vote. Based on general reactions online, her win has been polarizing, partly because of the expectations going into this historic 50th season. People wanted a legend to win this time — and for a while, it seemed like one would. Cirie Fields, one of the most popular players of all time and widely considered the best to never win, somehow managed to make it to the Final 6 before getting voted out in the penultimate episode of the season, having been recognized by the remaining contestants as a shoo-in to win against any of them at the finals. In retrospect, it was foolish to ever get our hopes up. But it was impossible to resist the fantasy, especially when Cirie got so close. It would've been arguably the most deserved win in Survivor history, and in one of its most important seasons.

But alas. Instead we have Aubry, a modestly satisfying winner who successfully played the middle. I've always had a soft spot for Aubry, especially in her first appearance in Kaôh Rōng; watching her become the major strategic force of the season after a panic attack on day two was inspiring. Like many fans, I initially rooted for her to win against Michele Fitzgerald in the finals, preferring Aubry's deeply strategic gameplay to Michele's strong social game. Her subsequent appearances on the show are, admittedly, less memorable: She made it to fifth place on Game Changers by playing a more under-the-radar game, but the edit didn't serve her well, and she got voted out fifth on Edge of Extinction.

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Compared to a Cirie or an Ozzy Lusth, Aubry isn't a beloved superstar. But she certainly makes for a more satisfying winner than her other competitors in the Final 3 of Season 50. That's what she was banking on when she made sure she landed there with Jonathan and Joe instead of Cirie, Ozzy, or Tiffany Ervin, who was perceived as a lovable underdog by the jury. It's worth noting the inevitable effect casting has on determining the order of eliminations: Because of the nature of the game, contestants on Survivor are generally incentivized to go to the end with the biggest flops. (This flaw in game design is even more significant in The Traitors, which encourages the least strategic and often least interesting players to stick around far longer than the gamers.) It's not entirely out of the ordinary to get an unremarkable Final 5 heading into a finale; the best and most loved players are gone, and now the second-stringers are duking it out for the million.

I've seen countless complaints about the boot order for Season 50, and it's easy to understand why. Four of this Final 5 are players from the New Era, itself a disappointing lack of variety; Aubry goes furthest back, and Kaôh Rōng was only Season 32. In fact, before Season 50 even aired, I named Jonathan and Joe, along with Rick Devens, as a potential nightmare Final 3 scenario, and two of them actually got there!

Everyone can design their own ideal boot order for a given season. But sometimes I prefer to look at the narrative in front of me and determine whether it works on its own terms, setting aside any expectations for how this season played out. In that aforementioned piece, I argued that whether Season 50 succeeded as a season would come down to the presentation of the story itself, not necessarily the specifics of how everything went down last year in Fiji. The edit counts for a lot.

So how do you edit a winner like Aubry, someone who was on the bottom for a decent portion of the game and played mostly under the radar? Those trained to spot a winner edit from 49 seasons of Survivor were able to spot signs throughout this season — like the fact that the narrative always checked in with Aubry for her perspective, even when she didn't have any direct relevance to a given vote. She got "credit" for taking out big threats like Ozzy, Cirie, and Tiffany near the end; if Rizo Velovic had made it to the finals and won, it's easy to see how he could've gotten credit for some of the same moves. Another sign Aubry was going to win: We heard her name-check Kaôh Rōng multiple times in confessional, walking us through her complex feelings about her performance in that game and the lessons she took away from losing to Michele. These final episodes have framed Aubry's game as a redemption story — not because she should've won Season 32, but because she realized why she didn't win and honed her game accordingly over the years.

That's a solid story, even if it pales in comparison to the ideal scenario we all wanted (Cirie winning). If there's an issue with this conclusion, it's just that it began to feel a little inevitable. The edit never allowed for the strong possibility that Jonathan or Joe could win; Jonathan played a pretty strong game, all things considered, but his personal content had nothing on Aubry's slow-burn arc, an echo of her first game. Yet showing less of Aubry would've made this win feel even more anticlimactic, even if it meant her win didn't seem so assured. There's sometimes a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't quality when it comes to allotting screen time for an unflashy winner.

I like to find silver linings in an unideal boot order. Yes, it sucks that second-time players like Q Burdette and Angelina Keeley and Charlie Davis didn't get to make it to merge — I'd much rather see them in this Final 5 than Jonathan or Rizo or Joe. But Jonathan and Rizo and Joe did have good showings on this season, in different ways. Jonathan made for an effective villain whose loss was enjoyable to watch (and his bratty post-game press has made that loss even more delicious). And the Rizo we saw bouncing off bigger Survivor legends was a more interesting character than the gratingly confident guy who seemed to spend most of Season 49 flexing his easy control of the game. Ditto Joe, whose noble persona on Season 48 made him achingly dull to watch. He probably shouldn't have been cast on Season 50, but the edit started playing his deer-in-the-headlights quality for laughs pretty early on this time, and that made him much more entertaining.

Season 50 felt refreshingly comfortable leaning into comedy and conflict, two factors sorely missing from the show these days. Tiffany was an important contributor to both — and if her casting was the biggest initial surprise, she managed to prove that she deserved her place here with the level of grit and raw emotion she brought to the season. Meanwhile, Emily Flippen didn't at all improve on her meek game from Season 45, but she did cause a lot more mess by spreading everyone's secrets, which makes her TV performance a level-up.

There were still major gaps in storytelling this season, even when it came to this Final 5. Aubry and Tiffany's early bond could've used more screen time to lend some real emotional oomph to their eventual split (and to the final leg of Aubry's winner story). Really, few people ever discussed the specifics of their alliances or their Final 3 deals in confessional or in dialogue. In retrospect, Jonathan and Joe were goats to be taken to the end, easy players for Aubry (or Rizo or Cirie or Tiffany or Devens or Ozzy) to beat. But the edit never acknowledged that, eschewing narrative clarity to obfuscate an increasingly obvious endgame. That's an increasingly common tactic for Survivor lately: deliberately leaving out critical information in the hopes of creating more mystery around a vote or shift in alliances.

That lack of transparency also extendsto the show's confusing treatment of Rizo as a character. We occasionally heard someone like Aubry mention that he wouldn't get votes at the end, yet from our perspective, he seemed to be playing a careful, methodical game. He made big decisions alongside his core alliance of Cirie and Ozzy, then shed his allies and repositioned himself with Jonathan and Joe (the latter of whom was apparently his ride-or-die, something we never saw) when it made most sense. Was some daintiness at camp and obliviousness at the auction really enough to kill the jury's respect for him?

Season 50 was a mess in many ways, and I haven't even touched on the overabundant twists and convoluted tribe swaps this time. But there are also lessons here for the next era of Survivor — lessons in seeing what fans responded to throughout this season, both positively and negatively. I'm not sure what the so-called Open Era will look like, but this series is still capable of telling poignant stories about people when it wants to. Perhaps Aubry seems like an unremarkable winner for Season 50 now, but sometimes a legend is made through her win, and through a story viewed in retrospect. Aubry had a story that meant something, and that's not nothing.

Survivor 50 is available to stream on Paramount+.