Over the course of Survivor history, some seasons eventually get labelled as bad for whatever reason. Some are edited in weird ways, some have unlikable casts. To me, every season of Survivor has at least some reason for tuning in. Of course not every year will be as good as the next but that doesn’t mean we should discount entire seasons altogether. No truer is this the case with the first season I would like to throw into the spotlight in a regular feature we are going to call “Why you should watch”. Without further ado, let’s kick it off with a personal favorite of mine, Survivor: Gabon.
To understand why Gabon is usually so looked over, it’s important to put it in historical context. Gabon took place at an interesting time in Survivor lore because it was coming off the back of two hugely acclaimed seasons in China and Micronesia, two seasons that traditionally make it very high on most fans’ best ever lists. The latter is especially lauded as the season that started to shape what is now seen as the modern era of strategy. With the way Survivor handles its filming and airing schedules, Gabon players would not have had the chance to see Micronesia before going out and playing their season. Because of that, going from one immediately to the other might feel like taking a step back in terms of the strategy of the game. Gabon is also not helped by being immediately followed by Survivor: Tocantins, another season which would be included in many a fan’s top five. Despite its placement in the Survivor timeline, that does not mean that Gabon is bad, in fact it is one of the most entertaining seasons in the show’s history.
The location and editing
Immediately something that stands out in comparison to the current era is the area itself. You might not believe me but Survivor wasn’t always filmed solely in Fiji or Samoa. Producers used to love to scour new spots to host seasons and keep things fresh. The show had not gone back to Africa since its 3rd season which had featured some of the most fascinating wildlife and some of the most dangerous conditions. While Gabon did not throw the players in for as much of a loop as Kenya did, playing the game in Africa surely looked and felt different than the beach side locations we are used to now.
One of the most notable things about playing in Gabon is how dirty everyone got. With no oceans and only a lagoon for the players to use, which was full of leeches, they were not able to wash themselves or their clothing. Barely a week into the game, everyone’s shirts and pants all looked the same shade of brown from the mud and dirt that got caked in. It got so bad that producers had to finagle fresh clothes as a reward for multiple challenges simply to add some color to the show.
In terms of the nature, Gabon has some of the most beautiful shots in any Survivor seasons. The players got up close and personal with elephants, gorillas and gators. There was a sea turtle that was killed and eaten, giving PETA folks a heart attack almost instantly. Shots of will buffalos running around the barren lands were thrown into the episodes. The landscape itself was breathtaking, especially the grassy knolls in which many of the challenges took place.
Because modern seasons don’t really stand out in terms of the aesthetic appeal, going back to a season like Gabon can be very shocking to the eye. In my opinion, the diversity of the environment adds to one’s enjoyment of the season and helps create better memories of what happens simply because you can remember the distinct locale.
As well, around the time of Gabon is when the editors started to get a little bit fancy with their editing. You can notice that confessionals are starting to be inserted in different places in an almost Big Brother like style. Some will be during competitions, others will be right after the challenges and they have a new segment before the final tribal council that has a few of the jurors giving confessionals about their thoughts.
This is also the second season in which Ponderosa videos would become available for the jury members. Micronesia’s were something new and felt as such. They weren’t quite sure how they wanted to go about editing it into an online video piece and you can tell. With Gabon, I feel as though there is already a marked improvement in the editing of these videos and it greatly enhances their enjoyment. It might also just be that a lot of the jurors were ridiculous people in real life.
The pre-merge cast
Pound for pound, I would put the majority of Gabon’s cast up with any first-time player season. For whatever reason, the Survivor producers don’t seem to agree because the season has only produced three returning players when the number could be so much higher. There are very few players you could look at and put them below what the Survivor Historians call the “Ashby Line”, which evaluates a player based of whether they are more memorable than Ashlee Ashby of Survivor: Palau. In order to demonstrate, here is a list of the cast members that I believe fall below the Ashby Line before I tackle those that surpass it: Michelle Chase, Paloma Soto-Castillo, Jacquie Berg and Kelly Czarnecki.
Even those four players are not as boring as other generic early boots. Michelle has the most awkward and cringey flirt scenes this side of Parvati laughing at random comments made by men. She also eats a termite and gives one of the more awkward reunion show answers in Survivor history. Paloma shows some feistiness before ultimately being voted out for being useless in challenges. Jacquie is part of a majority alliance that has its claws into the early game and Kelly is good fodder come the first tribe swap.
Any season is bound to be entertaining when 50% of its pre-merge contestants are at least some form of memorable and that is the case with Gabon. When getting into the characters that are memorable, there is a wealth of personalities that mesh together in a brilliant way that in my opinion, has been rarely replicated on Survivor.
This is a season in which 60 year old Gillian Larson somehow manages to avoid being a first boot. Picked to be the team captain for Fang, she is the original cause for how terrible that tribe ends up being. Let’s remember that this is a tribe that ends up with Gillian, Crystal “Blazing Speed” Cox and Susie Smith as their first three members in a school yard pick. Those three people would be picked before Matty Whitmore, Marcus Lehman and Dan Kay. This could only ever happen in Gabon. Gillian is immediately useless to her tribe, unable to climb up steep hills and failing to help Randy when he cuts his head on Fang’s hut despite being a nurse. The one moment where Gillian might have been able to provide some use and she can’t even make a difference. This woman tried to eat elephant shit and paraded it around in front of her tribe and she still wasn’t booted first. I dare you to tell me a season where that happens if not in Gabon.
Of course, Gillian is not the only representation of Fang, to draw inspiration from Courtney Yates, sucking at life. After their first tribal council where they voted off Michelle “I am somehow worse for my tribe than Gillian” Chase, they elect a leader, well sort of. GC is offered up to take the leadership role despite being showcasing none of the skills for the position. In his glorious tenure as the leader of Fang, he boils rice in clean drinkable water instead of using lagoon water and annoys Randy Bailey. GC then promptly quits his position about 24 hours after being appointed after an argument with Gillian over him talking at night. I swear this all happened on a season of Survivor. GC is also memorable for nearly becoming the first player to miss a challenge by simply disappearing moments before the tribe was due to leave for the competition.
Once the first tribe swap happens, Fang gets some new blood and changes up the dynamic but they still suck. Ace Gordon comes over from Kota and decides that he is going to run things at his new tribe despite being down in numbers and having swapped with Kelly who already hated him at the Kota tribe. Ace is an interesting player in his own right. He is born in Mississippi and yet talks in a British accent. That accent is highly inconsistent and likely fake. Ace presents himself as a high class human being who has traveled the world. He claims to be a photographer but I would be willing to bet the pictures he takes are mostly of naked people. Ace’s storyline revolves around his relationship with Sugar Kipper, his “model”. Sugar of course gets an egregious amount of airtime in Gabon and her early stuff is all about her finding the immunity idol and helping Ace with it. His downfall is somewhat satisfying because it comes at the hands of Sugar who has been swayed by Crystal and Kenny to flip on him and deny him the use of her idol.
On the other side of the swap, one of Kota’s new members is another interesting fellow, Dan Kay. Unfortunately, Dan tragically passed away near the end of 2016 at the age of 40. Post-show, every one of his cast members has said how great of a guy he was and on the show we get a lot of interesting material from him before he goes out as the last member of the pre-jury phase. Dan is the first player on his season to be sent to Exile Island which is really just an isolated grassy area. The twist for this season’s exile is that players can choose between the comfort of a furnished hut filled with fruit or a clue to the idol hidden on the “island”. Of course being the first one sent, Dan chooses the clue and proceeds to over analyze its simple instructions. This gives us a great montage of Dan looking everywhere but the right spot for the idol and he leaves completed befuddled as to where it might be.
The other thing about Dan is that despite his appearance as a muscly, fit alpha type, Dan is more introspective. Constantly throughout the season he searches for approval with his tribe mates, worries about being targeted and generally just wants to be accepted as part of the group. He is like a new kid in school trying to make friends and coming off so desperate that it actually turns people off. One would think that an attorney of his physical profile would be comfortable within himself but Dan tells us right off the bat that he is doing Survivor as a way to find himself. He comes off very genuine with his message and come his vote off, it is sad to see him go without ever really fitting in with either of his tribes.
While Fang is a terrible tribe, Kota is honestly not much better. At Kota a majority alliance is formed between Marcus, Charlie, Corinne and Jacquie. When Jacquie becomes the first casualty of the nu-Fang swap, she is replaced by Randy who has come in from Fang and hates his original tribe. On the outs of that alliance is Bob Crowley who is seen as the 5th. This alliance is formed essentially because Charlie has the hots for Marcus and cannot stay away from him. Despite a tenuous reason for forming, it dominates early Kota and has all the makings of something that could hold through to the end. After Dan is voted off, the players expect to merge but instead are surprised by another swap. That isn’t before Marcus, Charlie and Randy arrogantly toss an idol into the ocean so that members of Fang don’t have access to it. Needless to say by the end of that very same episode, it seems pretty costly.
The jury
The new swap features two tribes of five with each tribe having a 3–2 advantage for Kota. The Fang tribe is now Matty, Sugar, Corinne, Charlie and Randy while the Kota tribe is Marcus, Kenny, Crystal, Bob and Susie. When Kota loses the next immunity thanks to Matty simply willing his tribe to a win, it seems like a foregone conclusion that Kenny or Crystal will be going but nothing about Gabon makes total sense. Kota’s alliance management outside of its core group is poor at best and Susie knows she is on the outs. She flips on Marcus with Ken and Crystal and suddenly the frontrunner to win it all becomes the first jury member. His boot also gives us Survivor’s most famous GIF which has been posted on every internet forum since the dawn of time.
It becomes clear in the post merge that most of Gabon is fueled not by strategy but by emotion. No player is more emblematic of that than Sugar. As soon as the merge hits, Sugar does not appear to be tied to any real alliance other than her heart. She is easily swayed by whoever talks to her and appeals to her emotions. She targets Randy instead of Bob, the more obvious threat, because Randy is mean and rude. She flips on Crystal to save Matty when he should have been dead to rights because Crystal yelled at him. At the final four, she saves Bob because he is like a father figure to her and she has recently lost her dad.
No other season has a player so emotionally driven dominated the moves that take place in the game. For much of Gabon, whatever Sugar wants to happen is what happens. A large part of that is because she holds the hidden immunity idol from very early on and people are leery to target her. They figure it best to have the idol holder with them rather than against them. Sugar also accidentally finds herself becoming the swing vote between solid alliances on multiple occasions. That is a by-product of her wanting to be friends with everybody and trying to avoid making enemies. Ironically that kind of playing leads to her making the most enemies. She is also sent to Exile Island about a million different times including five times in a row.
Another important personality trait given to Sugar: she cries constantly. There may not be a single episode in which Sugar doesn’t shed at least a few tears. This annoys everybody to no end and there is no shortage of confessionals or footage of various players hating on her. Despite all this, she is able to go all the way to the final three without ever receiving a vote against her. Again, some of that is the idol but to a certain point, you have to marvel at how she keeps skating by unscathed.
While it’s clear that Sugar’s edit dominates the post-merge and becomes annoying for people who want to watch others, she isn’t the only one who gets attention. Matty, the star of the famous GIF, really shines after the merge. During the pre-merge, Matty is the only one who can never get out of Fang and becomes its de facto narrator, something he excels at. If Aras was the glue that held Casaya together in Panama, Matty serves the same purpose for the rag-tag alliance between Crystal, Kenny, Sugar and himself. We get a lot of confessionals from Matty about the beauty of Gabon’s wildlife and how being there has changed him into someone who wants to take control of his life. All of it is very believable and humanizing.
Once he hits the merge, Matty finds himself in a dominant position. His alliance with Sugar becomes unstoppable and they are able to work their way into the final four by flipping between alliances, cutting off the people who were going to target Matty before they got the chance and aligning with the right people. Matty also has a much less advertised bond with Susie who is willing to go with him to the finals. At the loved ones visits, one of the better ones in Surivor history, Matty proposes to his girlfriend Jamie on the spot. It is one of the more heart felt love confessions the show has ever seen.
Going into the final four, Matty is the favourite to win it all. All he needs to do is make sure Bob doesn’t win the last challenge since everyone else is ok with sending him home. Susie manages to win the challenge in an upset and it looks like Matty has the game locked up. Unfortunately for him, Sugar’s heart strings, that have helped him up to now in the game, once again start acting up and she gets sad at the fact that she has to send Bob home. At tribal council, she likens it to choosing between a father and a brother. Upon hearing this, Matty is crestfallen because he knows she is about to flip on him. No matter what the father always win.
Still, Matt has one last chance to save himself with the fire making tie breaker. He gives it his best but it just isn’t meant to be and like so many other r.obbed goddesses, he becomes the final member of the jury. It allows for Bob to slip into the finals with one of the weirder edits a winner would get in Survivor.
Unlike most winners, Bob does not get much shine. He is first depicted as the old, dependable dude on Kota who knows how to do basically everything. He wears a bowtie and is generally likable. He is never in the driver’s seat strategically as he is on the outskirts of the dominant Kota alliance and then falls into a higher spot within that alliance at the second tribe swap. At the merge, he just sort of blends out of the drama and actively avoids having to make any strategic moves.
At the merge is also where Bob goes on a challenge tear, at one point winning five in a row which includes three immunities. The others start to realize that he hasn’t angered anybody and keeps showing his physical worth so they need to get rid of him. The only problem is that he refuses to allow them the chance by continuously being immune. This is a 57 year old man beasting through challenges like he was Ozzy in Cook Islands, once again this could only ever happen in Gabon. Also like Ozzy, Bob never has any agency over his own game. The only difference is that Bob still manages to win his season.
Most winners get a winner quote or a moment where it becomes clear that they are the front runner. We don’t get that with Bob. They show us his Exile Island excursion where he takes the time to go on a safari and tell us about how wonderful his journey has been. We get to see him interact with his wife when he wins the loved ones reward. Others tells the audience that Bob is a jury threat for being likable. That’s about the extent of his winning chances the viewers get going into the final three.
As for the rest of the jury, they all have their moments. Corinne is a bitter woman who hates her tribe in confessionals but acts nice to them on the island. She is also useless at challenges but likes to think she contributes more to the season than she did. Randy is similar in personality to Corinne but pulls it off much more convincingly. He is sour, angry and mean. His confessionals are usually about how he hates his tribe and he becomes sort of the mouthpiece for the audience reacting to zaniness that is the Gabon cast. He is also one of the worst winners the show has ever seen, making sure to taunt the other tribe anytime he wins any sort of challenge. Randy’s downfall is one of the harshest of the season when Sugar asks Bob to give Randy his fake immunity idol. This gives Randy so much false hope and he goes into his death with guns blazing only to be neutered and laughed at by the one person he hates the most. It is one of the season’s cringier moments but certainly does not come short in delivering fireworks.
The tight twosome of Crystal and Kenny is also interesting and unlikely. Crystal is the gold medalist winning Olympian and Kenny is the professional video gamer. What is funniest about their relationship is that by far, Kenny proves to be the much better competitor throughout the season. From the first challenge, Crystal is inept. She is unable to climb steep hills, fails at holding up posts with the back of her hands, can’t swim and doesn’t even run faster than the majority of her cast. It’s safe to say that by the time she was cast for the show, whatever steroids she had taken during her Olympic training had stopped having an effect on her body. She also has a story line that involves Randy and her hating each other to an impossible degree. This reaches a head when she gives her voting confessional in his boot episode and screams as loudly as she can “you have made my life a living hell. Forget you!”
When it comes to Kenny, we are supposed to see him as this season’s mastermind villain which makes Gabon even funnier. Look, Survivor has had its share of nerdy schemers but none of them have ever really been portrayed as outwardly villainous like Kenny was. In fact, Kenny isn’t much of a player. He took down Marcus. Great job dude, you took out the obvious social and physical threat who was gunning after your alliance. Then he takes out Charlie for revenge because Charlie is the one who caused the idol to be thrown into the water. Great strategic reasoning behind your moves grand schemer. Finally, when he tries to pull a fast one on Matty with Bob and Corinne’s fake immunity idol, he gets outplayed by Sugar of all people. Corinne is forced to expose that her idol is fake, Kenny trying to flush the idol tells Crystal to vote for Corinne while he stupidly votes for Matty and they unknowingly become the swing vote to save Matty while exposing their double cross.
Then Kenny becomes obsessed with Bob’s promise that he will give Kenny his immunity necklace if he wins the next challenge. Of course, Kenny wants the necklace so that he can in turn vote out Bob. It’s funny that this cast had not seen season 16 while out on location but Kenny is trying to “Erik” Bob out of the game. The one problem with his plan is that Erik was mostly outdone by Cirie Fields and Kenny is like the Cassandra Franklin version of Cirie. Once again he is outsmarted by Sugar who sniffs out his plan and warns Bob. By this point, Kenny is dead to rights but is allowed to survive until the final five because Crystal is annoying. To emphasize, Kenny is outplayed by Sugar who votes out the one person she might be able to beat in a finals situation because Crystal is annoying. Kenny Hoang, your Survivor Gabon “mastermind” everybody!
Final Tribal Council
Gabon’s final three may be the least strategically inclined finalists Survivor has ever seen. Bob got there on the back of his competition wins, Sugar made pretty much every single decision from an emotional point of view and Susie was just along for the ride. It stands to reason that for such a final three, the final tribal council would be entertaining simply for them trying to explain why they should win the game… and it is.
Each finalist seems to have a different approach to this final tribal council. Susie argues that she is a hard worker and a role model. Also during FTC, she suddenly claims she has students despite being billed as a hairdresser all season long so that is confusing. The jury mostly does not really care about her and any questions she gets revolves why she is even still there. This is why it becomes even more surprising when the vote is revealed.
In Bob’s case, he stands by his stature as the guy who won a lot of competitions, was agreeable in a sea of unlikable people and allied himself the right way. When he is asked what he did that Sugar didn’t call the shots on, he says that he didn’t do anything Sugar didn’t do. He agrees that he rode coattails and even goes so far as to say that he never had control of the game. This is this season’s winner saying these things.
Easily the person who takes the most heat is Sugar. A lot of different people feel burnt by her flipping willy-nilly as her heart desires. If the jury is going to dish it out, Sugar is going to give it right back because it is obvious from the beginning that Sugar isn’t even playing to win at this point. She tells Charlie not to vote for him if he doesn’t want to. She tells Crystal that she voted her off because she doesn’t like her. She calls Randy a jackass and a jerk. When it comes to Matty for the last question, he asks her if she has any regrets over her decisions. This is clearly asking her to say that she feels bad for voting out Matty because it is apparent that he is still shaken about it. Sugar does not pick up on this and tells him she feels bad for hurting Kenny’s feelings. Matty is dumbfounded at her answer and just kind of gives up on his line of questioning. She also flips off Corinne but that one is totally warranted.
The worst part of Sugar’s flameout during final tribal council is that you can tell the jury wants to vote for her. They just need to feel good about giving her the win when she was out there doing whatever the hell she pleased for 39 days. Kenny alludes to it in a confessional before FTC begins. Sugar’s absolute refusal to kiss ass or even be somewhat cordial to the people she hates for a couple of hours costs her a million dollars and puts the jury in a real bind. They are forced to choose between the nice guy who won competitions but had zero impact on the actual game or the lady who tagged along, flipped on her alliance but probably had the strongest argument in front of the jury.
As Probst read the votes for the winner, he had to be petrified. One has to imagine that Susie winning a season of Survivor is nightmare fuel to him. I don’t necessarily prescribe to the “Jeff only likes alpha males” theory but it is very clear that there is a certain type of player he doesn’t like and Susie falls in it. Thankfully for him, he is able to avoid that scenario with a 4–3 Bob win in one of the oddest seasons the show has ever produced. The reunion is of course no different and has its share of interesting moments. Chiefly, Crystal bringing her gold medal as proof of her Olympian status, the same gold medal that would later be stripped from her for getting caught using steroids. Also Randy brought along super fans as his guests to the reunion instead of friends and family because that is totally a Randy thing to do but also because he might not have any friends or family.
***
While this is only an overview of what went down in Gabon and why it is worth watching, I can’t even do it justice. Seriously, take 16 or so hours of your life and sit down to watch, or re-watch, this gem of a season. Is it a strategic season that offers ground breaking gameplay? Absolutely not. Consider this, Kota had a strong majority, managed to lose it to the clusterfuck that is the Fang tribe. Then with Fang in the driver’s seat, they still managed to fumble the ball and let an original Kota member win the game. That is like the opposite of a good strategic season. Still, strategic play shouldn’t be all we limit a good Survivor season to. Gabon is at its core a very pure version of show’s original purpose which was to put a bunch of strangers from different walks of life on an island and see what happens. In this case, so much weird stuff happened that it feels surreal. Bob is a weird winner, possibly the weirdest the show has ever had. It only feels fitting that he would come away winning possibly the weirdest season the show has ever had.
Do yourself a favor the next time you want to watch a season of Survivor, pop in Gabon and get ready to experience one of the strangest but enjoyable rides in reality television history.
