Seventeen years ago today, I was a 10 year old who was allowed to stay past his bedtime to watch the conclusion to his new favorite show. Before then, I had watched every Survivor: Borneo episode after I did my homework on Thursdays thanks to the complex voodoo magic required to make VCRs function. That my parents allowed me to stay up for the finale was a special occasion but it was by no means unique. I was joined by nearly 52 million people who all watched Richard Hatch lay claim to the first ever title of sole Survivor.

Plenty of finales have come and by since and some may have been arguably better but none of them have held more room in my heart and I doubt any future finales could replace it. This was the conclusion to the most exciting season of television my young eyes had ever seen. It helped cement my love of reality television and send me down a course that would have me writing about it an astounding 17 years later.
Of course the big factor coming out of the finale was its winner, Rich. Throughout the season, he acted as the voice of strategy on a cast that was almost afraid to play the game. Many contestants realized that alliances and strategizing would be the key to victory but were too afraid to meddle in it. Nobody knew how people would react to players ganging up together to vote out specific people instead of voting out who was perceived as “least deserving”. The potential blowback in forming an alliance had scared a lot of people away from even trying it.
Not Rich though, he didn’t really worry about how he would be perceived. He figured he could take a stranglehold on the game and he did. While the Tagi alliance and Rich may not have been popular after Borneo, he eventually got his due as the founding father of Survivor strategy. Had he not created an alliance, someone would have eventually but the facts are that Rich engineered Survivor’s first successful alliance and made it the primary emerging strategy for all future players.
The finale had so much more than just Richard though because it was packed with some of the season’s most memorable moments. We got to see the first “Fallen Comrades” immunity challenge in play. Sue Hawk put up a surprisingly good fight but Kelly Wiglesworth’s immunity run kept going as she stayed alive one more round in the game. The Fallen Comrades challenge was fun but what was even better was the vote immediately following it.
A first in Survivor history, the final four in Borneo produced the show’s first tie vote. Rich and Rudy held through to their alliance and voted for Sue, Sue and Kelly aimed their target at Rich. In the first ever re-vote, Kelly flipped her vote to Sue in what seems like an incredibly bad move in retrospect. One that may have cost her the game. If she was going vote out Sue, she should have done it on the first vote. I suspect that the unknown of what may come had they tied again may have scared her into flipping.
As she is voted out, Sue seems to take it surprisingly well given her penchant for telling like it is. Even her final words are calm, measured and she seems to be in a good head space. I remember being shocked that she did not let Kelly have it then and there. Well, we can hold that thought for a few minutes.
After Sue’s vote comes the Rites of Passage. Now, unlike many Survivor purists, I have never been a big fan of the Rites of Passage. My opinion is that the good quotes we sometimes get from the ceremony are outnumbered by the larger amount of useless airtime. I understand that for the players, they get to realize the extent of their emotional journey but it has never done much for me on the screen.
Having said that, Borneo’s Rites of Passage is awesome and pretty emotional. They have the tribesmen chanting as the players pass by them. They walk on hot coals to reach their final immunity challenge. The former castaways don’t actually say anything, instead we see the torch with their name and a quick flashback to them on the island. It’s not time consuming, it still hits the mark emotionally and we get to remember those that left a long time ago. Though what was up with Sonja’s torch having her name misspelled? Being the first ever boot wasn’t enough humiliation?

The final immunity challenge is “hold this idol for a long ass time”. One of my favorite challenges because it’s purely mental will. How much do you want a chance at a million dollars? Here’s your chance to prove it. It’s also when Rich makes one of the gutsiest calls the franchise has ever seen by dropping out of the challenge early and basically forcing Kelly to vote out Rudy. Rich knew that he could never beat Rudy in a final two but couldn’t afford to lose his vote on jury by voting him out. He also figured there was no way Rudy was going to outlast Kelly and took a chance she would realize there was no way she was also beating Rudy in the final two.
Obviously, Kelly sees the logic and bites the bullet. A simple slip of Rudy’s hand as they switching positions on the idol costs Rudy a million dollars and he feels pretty unfortunate about it. Rudy is one of my absolute favorite characters and to honor him, I have listed my top five favorite Rudy moments from Borneo’s finale.

Rudy Boesch Highlights
5. When voting for Sue at final four, Rudy’s voting confessional is a hitman like “her number was up”. At the re-vote, Rudy once again votes for Sue and deadpans, “same reason”. That is classic Rudy being funny without even trying.
4. When asked if Rudy’s wife would walk on coals like Rudy just did, Rudy’s response is “she would if I told her to”.
3. During the Fallen Comrades challenge, one question is to identify whose shirt is being presented. In an attempt to remember the answer, Rudy gets a big old sniff of the shirt.
2. Theorizing on what the Fallen Comrades challenge might be, Rudy thinks that they are going to ask about the former players like “how old there were. What they did for a living. I don’t know. And I don’t care”.
- Rudy’s final tribal “question” which is really just a quick statement, “I don’t have nothin’ to say to these two. I’d just like to let everybody here know how dumb I feel after the mistake I made yesterday”. Vintage Rudy Boesch.
Back to the action. The first ever final tribal council where the jury will get to grill both of them. Well, most of the jury since Greg’s question is just to pick a number between 1 and 10. That is just Greg being Greg.
Honestly, most of the jury members are very civil and devoid of bitterness (until their voting confessionals, anyway). Of course I say mostly because there is one person who might be slightly angry. Remember when Sue was so accepting and understanding of her vote off? Well she had some time to think about how she really felt about it and she’s not exactly as jovial as she was back then…
The rats and snakes speech. It almost immediately became an iconic moment in reality television. It was filled with such vitriol and anger. When we say reality TV, that speech felt as real as anything the show had ever produced. This was Sue just taking her shotgun and unloading her chamber all over both finalists. Some people loved, some people hated but either way, everybody was talking about it. To this day people who have stopped watching Survivor a long time ago can still remember hearing the rats and snakes speech. That is some lasting power. If Rich’s win was a factor in helping the show’s longevity, I would argue that Sue’s speech had just as much of an impact.
That chime at the end of Sue’s speech… it gets me every time. The chills hit my body and it’s just something that provides a visceral reaction to what I’m watching. There aren’t many other TV moments I can cite that do that to me. It’s also funny that we get annoyed at jury members for grandstanding like it’s a more recent phenomenon when it happened literally in the show’s first season.
What a lot of people don’t remember is Gervase Peterson’s response to the speech. This is the show’s way of making sure both sides of the coin are represented since Kelly does a poor job of defending herself. As he votes for Kelly to win, Gervase lets loose on Sue and it’s honestly just as good as the original speech:
Just on Sue’s comments, that’s what in my town we call a sore loser. Because when Sue is doing the backstabbing, the lying, and throwing the knives everywhere, she was happy. If she was sitting in Kelly’s spot right now, she wouldn’t be thinking nothing but this million dollars and that’s it. So that just goes to show you how thrife she is. I mean it disgusts me what she just did. It was so foul. You know Sue put knives in my back. Sue just talked about a rat and a snake, well Sue formed an alliance so that’s her little snake part and then she did the rat part when she lied to Colleen in her face when Colleen asked her if she was voting for her. So I mean, that just goes to show you how people play this game when it comes down to it. If it’s saving their butt, they’ll do anything to save their butt. When they’re out of the game, they cry about it. They bellyache about it the whole stinking time and it makes me sick. So Kelly, I hope you win it and after you win it, you can stuff it in Sue’s face.
And he ends it with a double chest tap. That is why Gervase is a money character and an absolute bad-ass. Third time’s the charm Gerv. Oh also it’s really shocking to hear “fat, naked fag” come out of Sean mouth even if it was coined by Rich. Imagine the kind of bedlam that would occur if that was aired on TV today.
In the end, we all know how it went. Rich won, people around the world talked about it and Survivor finished its inaugural season as an absolute ratings machine. Since then, some of its popularity has died down but for its diehard fans, it keeps churning out seasons of high quality. 17 years later, I am so happy to have gotten to watch that finale live and it’s something I will never forget.

Survivor, here’s to at least 17 more years’ worth of winners.

