http://parade.com/415787/joshwigler/jeff-probst-tells-you-everything-you-need-to-know-about-survivor-second-chance/6/ Jeff Probst Tells You Everything You Need To Know About
Survivor: Second Chance August 25, 2015 – 10:00 AM – 0 Comments
Inside The Marooning[/b]Fifteen years after
Survivor premiered,
Survivor: Second Chance begins. The first day of filming for the new season is the 15-year anniversary of the show’s very first episode, a fact that Probst makes sure to tell the surrounding crew out on the water with only a few minutes to go until the game truly begins. There’s a sense of ancient history in the air — and an even stronger notion that history is in the making.
Kelly Wiglesworth is the lone representative of the original
Survivor season on
Second Chance, but she’s far from the only old school player in the mix. Jeff Varner and Kimmi Kappenberg, returning from 2001’s
The Australian Outback, lived together on Kucha, one of the most beloved
Survivor tribes of all time. Andrew Savage hails from 2003’s
Pearl Islands, the show’s seventh season, which is still considered by many fans to be one of the very best. Shane may have missed the cast, but the vote worked out in favor of his fellow
Exile Island cast mate Terry Deitz, a fighter pilot from Connecticut and one of the most distinguished challenge performers
Survivor has ever seen.
These are names that few die-hard
Survivor fans ever expected to hear again in a current events context. And yet, here they are, rowing up to an impressive cargo boat in the middle of the sea, about to be marooned all over again. Amazing.
Hours later, Probst and I sit down to talk about the new season, and the first item on the agenda is the cast — especially the aforementioned veterans who have waited a decade or more for their second chance.
“This is probably the most motivated group of players we’ve ever had,” he says. “I think after 12 years or 10 or 15 years, you get over the idea of, ‘I’ll do anything to get back there,’ and you get to a place of, ‘
If I ever get back there, here’s what I’m going to do.’ That’s where they’re at, and they’re ready to play. You feel it.”
He’s right; you can almost feel steam coming off of the players on opening day — though that might have less to do with their anticipation, and more do to with the fact that they are practically cooking in the sun. Remember what I said about sweat? Yeah. Cambodia is hot.
The Survivors are already divided into two tribes — Ta Keo in green and Bayon in purple — and the tribes are separated into two long boats each, four boats total. They are stationed in front of a much larger vessel that contains everything they will need in the days ahead. Probst, standing high above them like a divine lord before his kingdom, like Bobby Jon Drinkard and Stephenie LaGrossa looking down upon Yaxhá and Nakúm, explains that the Survivors will soon have as much time as they need to raid the vessel’s supplies — but they have incentive to work quickly. Further out, there’s a second, smaller boat containing a bag of rice. The first team there gets the bonus rations.
Without spoiling what happens after Probst’s signature “Survivors, ready? Go!” war cry, it’s safe to say that the host’s assessment of this cast is spot on: “They are ready to play.”
“It’s hard to know until you play,” he says, “but it seems like there’s an abundance of riches. I look at all these cards, and I personally would want to play with 75% of the people here. That’s pretty unusual.”
The words “pretty unusual” do not even begin to describe the sensation of watching 20
Survivor legends working with and against each other in a mad dash to get everything they need to kickstart their game on the right foot. It’s absolutely stunning and surreal, seeing the old and new schoolers alike competing at their fullest capacity. For some, that capacity is not so big; for others, it’s bigger than ever. For all, it’s clear how much these people want to be here.
I’ve been very touched by how good natured they’ve been about this process,” says Probst. “They’ve already played once. Sometimes when we have returning players back, they kind of whine and moan and go, ‘I know the routine.’ These guys have been gracious.”
I wonder how gracious they would be if they knew what lies ahead.
ON THE NEXT PAGE: The Past Comes Back To Haunt Second ChanceOn
Survivor, when Jeff Probst snuffs your torch, you’re out of the game for good — except when you’re not.
Four previous seasons of the show have included the “resurrection” of fallen players. For instance, Andrew Savage famously fell victim to the Outcast twist on
Survivor: Pearl Islands, where the first six people voted out returned for a shot to re-enter the game, blindsiding contestants and viewers alike. Two Outcasts returned, and within days, one of them — scowling scout leader Lillian Morris — helped send Savage packing.
Even more recently,
Survivor dabbled with a format change called Redemption Island; instead of getting voted out for good, contestants were voted onto an island where they would compete for a shot to return to the game. Redemption Island was last seen during
Survivor: Blood vs Water, the home season for
Second Chance contestants Ciera Eastin and Vytas Baskauskas.
For those of you seeing red right now, relax: I’m trolling you.
When I ask Probst if Redemption Island is in play for Second Chance, he responds with one of my favorite words: “Nope!”Despite the
Second Chance theme, there are no do-overs when voted out of Season 31. In fact, for the most part, Probst and his team are steering clear of too many twists from the past. “We will never see the Medallion of Power again,” he says, for instance. Sorry,
Nicaragua fans.
But that does not mean the past won’t come back to haunt the Second Chancers. The driving concept behind the season’s challenges revolves around revisiting what’s come before. Probst explains: “One of the big things we want to accomplish is to bring back as many old challenges that the people on the show participated in.”
The idea of resurrecting old challenges presents itself in the season premiere’s immunity challenge, Quest For Fire — a physical competition tasking Survivors with lighting up torches and carrying a heavy raft all along the way.
“It’s the challenge we did 15 years ago in episode one, season one,” says Probst. He explains that it was always the plan to begin
Second Chance with the show’s first-ever immunity challenge, but “what we
didn’t know is if Kelly Wiglesworth would make the cast. She did! So now it’s great, because Kelly did that challenge and lost, so here’s a perfect first second chance. We couldn’t script that, but everything worked out.”
Unlike the Quest For Fire challenge from
Survivor: Borneo, however, the
Second Chance version features a new ending: Jailbreak — another classic
Survivor challenge where players must tie sticks together to create a pole long enough to grab a key and use it to open a gate — has been tagged on as one final obstacle standing between the tribes and safety from the vote.
“Andrew Savage participated in Jailbreak in
Pearl Islands and lost, and it was [part of] the Outcast twist that got him voted out,” Probst says. “So we have two Second Chance stories right out of the gate.”
In other words, challenges are designed to haunt the competitors. Will Joe Anglim have to balance a block on his head? Will Kimmi Kappenberg be confronted with a gross food eating challenge? Will Stephen Fishbach have to win immunity by giving a compelling and relatable speech? Who knows! If it’s in their past, it’s fair game. Of course, by Probst’s own admission, “a lot of things have to line up for the trend to continue — people have to stay on the show long enough to get the challenges for them,” but it’s certainly the idea.
There’s one more thing you need to know about the immunity challenges. But first, let’s talk about immunity idols.
ON THE NEXT PAGE: The Hidden Immunity Idol Gets A MakeoverGary Hogeboom found
Survivor‘s very first hidden immunity idol in a Guatemalan jungle in 2005. It was affixed to the back of a tree, despite New York City door man Judd Sergeant telling Gary that the idol is “definitely on the ground, man.”
In the seasons since Gary’s triumphant discovery, the hidden immunity idol has undergone some revisions. When Gary found it, the idol was envisioned as a preemptive strike, played before the votes were cast. One season later, Second Chancer Terry Deitz found a version of the idol so powerful that it could nullify all votes cast against him after the ballots were cast
and read aloud. Those powers lasted for one more season (and then once more many seasons later, but we don’t need to go there) before we arrived at the current rules: The idol can only be played after votes are cast, and before they are read.
This has been the state of the hidden immunity idol for 17 seasons of
Survivor, and while those rules aren’t changing, there are some very important changes on the way for Season 31’s idols.
First and foremost are the differences between the idols themselves. Because the
Survivor gods are cruel and unusual, the hidden immunity idols on
Second Chance will look different from one another.
“We’re making every idol unique, which means there will never be two idols that look alike,” says Probst. “That’s already going to screw people up. They’re going to say, ‘But the idol doesn’t look like this. This has to be a fake!'”
The danger does not end there, as Probst adds, “On top of it, one idol might look beautiful, and the next idol might look like a kid made it in a craft room — but both are equally powerful.”
Remember the stick that
Micronesia prince Jason Siska found in the jungle and thought was an immunity idol? Yeah, it wasn’t. But in
Second Chance, it could be.
“If you extrapolate all the ways you can now play this,” Jeff says, “you can have a real idol, play it to somebody as a fake that you made, sucker them into thinking it’s not real and then sabotage them when they find out that it is —
or you can make a fake idol and say it
is real. ‘Didn’t you see the other one? This is just as bad as that one!’ So you don’t know which way it’s going to go.”
Instantly, every stick and stone in Cambodia is under extreme scrutiny, or ought to be. The revamped idol presents huge potential for disaster, and also huge potential for a glorious comeback. In either event, it’s a wrinkle that Probst feels the
Second Chance cast is prepared to handle.“For years, I wanted to play with the idea that an idol doesn’t look like an idol,” he says. “We’ve talked about doing some crazy ideas that never really made it. What we’re doing this year, under the guise that Second Chancers really want to play, is giving them the
room to play.”
But there’s only room to play if the contestants
find the idols — and that’s another challenge entirely, literally.
ON THE NEXT PAGE: The New Challenge Of Getting An IdolSix of the twenty Second Chancers have never won an individual immunity challenge. The remaining 14 have won a combined total of 30. In other words, the competitors in Cambodia mean business — but there’s some brand new business to attend to this season, as far as the challenges are concerned.
In the past, immunity idols have been hidden in all kinds of spots in and around the Survivors’ camp. The idol has been the lid on a box of rice. It was once concealed inside the tree mail’s skirt. (Don’t ask.) For
Second Chance, the idols will pop up somewhere they’ve never appeared before — at the immunity challenges.
Probst says that each camp contains a clue to the whereabouts of the hidden immunity idol, but “you won’t actually find the idol at camp.” Instead, “the clue will tell you that the idol is waiting for you at the next challenge. So you have to grab the idol while participating in an immunity challenge, under the eyes of all your tribe mates, and hope you don’t get caught.”
So, not only do the idols look different from each other this season, they’re
also hidden in a way they’ve never been hidden before. In fact, Probst doesn’t even think of the idols as hidden; the clues will contain drawings of the challenges, and the exact location of the idol.
“So it’s not that the idol will be hard to find,” he says. “What’s going to be hard is, you will have nine tribe mates with you as you try to pull that idol out and put it in your pocket.”
In a sense, then, the show’s decision to put the idol at immunity challenges heightens the drama built into some of the other early season choices we’ve seen on
Survivor — such as
Tocantins, Cagayan and
Worlds Apart presenting players with a day one decision to look for an idol or help their tribe. In the case of
Second Chance, the idol’s new “hiding spot” will put the Survivors to the test under an even more intense lens. Are you willing to slack on challenge performance in order to get your hands on an idol? Are you too afraid, or too focused on winning, to seize the opportunity? Are you savvy enough to find one of these things without alerting the surrounding players — all of whom have played
Survivor before, many of them with excellence?
No pressure!
The question Probst wants the idol to ask this season is this: “Do you have the guts to try to get it? And what if you get caught? What if somebody sees you? Now everyone knows you have the idol, and your big powerful thing is rendered useless!”
When I ask Probst if this is how the idols will be hidden all season long, he says it’ll hold “at least for the first round of idols.” Beyond that? “Every idol will have to be found a different way,” he teases. “There will be a twist to finding the idols.”
If you thought the presence of a hidden immunity idol amps up the pressure for the first immunity challenge, just wait — it gets deadlier.
Few Survivors are ever happy about losing immunity challenges, unless it’s day 15 and you’re on the Boran tribe and your name isn’t Silas Gaither. The Survivors who lose the first
Second Chance immunity challenge will feel the sting of defeat more than most.
Just like the original Quest For Fire in Borneo, the
Second Chance version of the challenge will run at dusk. “We’ll have this beautiful light,” Probst tells me, thinking ahead two days into the future. He’s right; when the day arrives, it’s beautiful. But for ten of the Second Chancers, beauty is a beast.
“There’s no time to go back to camp,” says Probst, “so the losing tribe will leave directly from the challenge and go right to Tribal.”
It’s bad news for anyone on the losing tribe, especially anyone without solid partners or plans in place ahead of running the immunity challenge. “Normally, they have hours to go back and start talking to their alliance,” Probst says. “Now, you’re going to have to hope that you talked earlier — because if not, you’re screwed.”
This is not the first time
Survivor has served immunity challenge losers with a straight-to-Tribal card (I salute you, Michelle Yi!), but it’s perhaps the earliest instance of the twist in the show’s 31 seasons. Probst says that beyond believing the Second Chancers can handle the pressure, he wants to make a big statement with the first immunity challenge of the season.
“The big goal is to set in motion the idea that this season will be unique and that you better be on your toes, because anything can happen,” he says. “I think that’s what they’ll do. I think the losing tribe will go back to camp after Tribal and say, ‘Oh my god. We can’t rely on anything.'”
Probst is forecasting, of course. He has no idea how the losing tribe will react — the challenge is still two days away. Then again, Jeff Probst knows a thing or two about time travel.
