Earlier this season following a particularly upsetting elimination, I wrote an article about how Survivor needs to give us a themed season featuring a cast of the best pre-merge players in the history of the game. At the time, I was particularly upset about Pantsless Patt getting blindsided at the third Tribal Council. I felt like she had so much more to give, but little did I know, that same feeling was going to hit me over and over again. In fact, it hit me so hard after last night’s episode that I’m now ready to make a wild claim.
I think Survivor 51 features the strongest group of castaways eliminated during a pre-merge in the entire history of the show, at least if we’re not counting all-star seasons. Seriously. We’ve lost a total of eight players. Three of them popped so hard in the edit that many fans were convinced they were potential finalists. Another was eliminated in one of the most WTF Tribal Councils in the history of the show. Another, despite ending up on a tribe with three locked in alliance members, had them all crying when they had to vote her out. All five of them felt like they had huge potential.
If you watch enough seasons of Survivor, you start to notice patterns, and perhaps the most inescapable pattern on Survivor is that there are a lot of people who are terrible at the game. Whether it’s because they’re paranoid, unable to form social bonds or play too hard too quickly, a lot of castaways who go home during the pre-merge come across like they were always destined to go home during the pre-merge. On the average season, one, maybe two castaways who go out early feel like they left with a lot in the tank. And yet, this season, it’s person after person.
Let’s run down the heaviest hitters in more specific detail. Pantsless Patt, one of my favorite pre-merge characters ever, really popped during the first episode when she, of course, lost her pants. Her social game, however, was fantastic, as she was the only person Jelly trusted enough to tell about her idol. She was also extremely close to Mike and seemed to be the person with the highest number of bonds on the Toka 5, which is precisely why Thien An pushed for her to be sniped out of the game way earlier than players typically try to eliminate established threats. In the weeks since, fans have been screaming about how she’s got Kelley Wentworth levels of potential if she’s brought back.
And then there’s Jenna, who spent the first few days emotionally walled off because of a recent divorce. When she realized she was on the outs with her tribe and possibly going home, she manipulated Brady to turn on Aaliyah and swung the numbers in her favor. Her performance was so impressive that many podcasters and Edgic experts who meticulously track the edit had her ranked as the single most likely winner. That theory was looking even better when she positioned herself on the right side of the Toka fracture in the Patt vote, but then she drew the wrong buff and ended up on a tribe with Devin, the one person in the game who she could not make any inroads with, and she went home way too early.
That potential was there with Linnea too. She looked like she was quietly in control of her Savu 4 alliance. She seemed to have everyone’s ear and looked positioned to make a really deep run in the game. Then Maggie acquired two extra votes and gave them away to Kilby and Lewis with explicit instructions to use them to vote out Linnea, specifically because she felt like the biggest threat in her tribe. Let that sync in. Someone on another tribe gave two people on Linnea’s tribe extra votes, specifically to target her during the premerge. We don’t normally see that level of gameplay until way closer to the end.
Poor Alexis felt like she had so much more to give too. She got swap screwed when they went from two tribes to three and ended up with a trio of castaways secretly in the helicopter alliance. But then she went to work. First, she was able to convince everyone to vote off Jenna before her. Then, when it was only her and the three members of the helicopter alliance, she bonded with them so hard that she had everyone crying at Tribal Council and had viewers wondering if they were going to flip on each other to keep her. Had she ended up with almost any other group of three in the game, she almost certainly would have survived.
And that brings us to Ori. The loveable big man had alliances all over the beach and seemed well-connected enough to make a deep run, despite the obvious physical threat he posed. I thought he was in no danger whatsoever until after the merge, but he ended up in the latest Survivor disaster tribe, which got whittled from five people to four people to three people and now to two people. Unfortunately, despite making fantastic logical pitches to both other people, he just couldn’t overcome a day once alliance with two locked in players who cried when they voted him out.
This doesn’t happen on a normal season. Sometimes we get a premerge that includes a lot of fun characters like in Cagayan where we got J’Tia, Garrett, Brice and Cliff or like in Cook Islands where we got all-time memorable castaways Billy Garcia and Cao Boi, as well as other standouts like Flica and JP. Edge Of Extinction had a fantastic premerge too, though I’m not sure I would count that since some of those people returned to the game. Regardless, I’m not saying there aren't other candidates, but there is a legitimate case to be made that this group on 51 is pound-for-pound the best pre-merge group in the show’s history.
Even Aaliyah and Ana, who probably won’t go down as all-time what-ifs, showed a head for the game and weren’t awful disasters that did a ton of things wrong. They seemed like capable players who could have made the merge on another season. Only New England Rob has the pre-merge stink about him, but from a pure entertainment standpoint, he’ll be fondly remembered too. You could make a case that he gave us the funniest quit ever. He’s still dropping comments about how if he hadn’t have run into medical issues, he would have been a huge threat. I dislike him but in a fun way that makes me talk about his antics.
Survivor changed its casting philosophy heading into 51, and this murderer’s row of fantastic castaways we’ve already lost is great evidence of how well they did. So many eliminated players felt really vibrant and in focus in a way that a lot of pre-mergers historically do not. I need to see a bunch of them play again.
