Survivor Fans Aren’t Happy About Season 48’s Most Fascinating Player Not Making The Jury, And I Have Some Thoughts About It Too

The following article contains spoilers for Survivor's most recent episode. If you haven't gotten a chance to watch it yet, sit out this challenge and come back next time.

After more than twenty years of watching Survivor, I’m confident in saying the most fascinating player of the season rarely wins. By hook or by crook, the loudest, most chaotic and often the most endearing players usually get their torches snuffed prior to the finale. Sometimes it’s because they’re just too messy to move forward with. Sometimes it’s because people don’t want to give the jury a chance to vote for them. As a Survivor fan, I’ve made peace with that. Part of winning is figuring out how not to get voted out, and if you can’t do that, ultimately it’s on you. That being said, when one of those all-time fascinating players doesn’t even make the jury, that’s something I get a little frustrated about, and if social media is any indication, there are plenty of others right there with me.

At least that’s the case with Sai. Season 48’s most fascinating player has been at the center of a really high percentage of the memorable moments this season. She received at least one vote in all six tribal councils she went to but was somehow able to avoid the hangman’s axe the first five times. She feuded with, strategized alongside and competed against basically every person on the island at some point, and gave some of the wildest and best confessionals all season.

At one point she literally chased Mary around the island to make sure she wouldn’t find an idol. She also disguised her handwriting in order to vote for Cedrek, even though she knew he wasn’t going to go home, purely as a revenge middle finger, and then blamed it on the contestant that went home.

Most Survivor players would be lucky to be involved in that much action over the course of their entire season. Sai did it in only seven episodes, but yet, thanks to how the New Era is structured, she made the merge but not the jury. I’m not happy about it, and neither are a lot of fans who voiced their displeasure very loudly…

That was far from the only sad tweet about her early exit. Another compared her elimination to a “stab to the butt cheeks.” Another talked about how we were all deprived of the looks she would have been giving from the jury box. Another called her early exit a “travesty.”

Unfortunately for Sai, she was the victim of starting on a terrible tribe and playing alongside a half dozen or so castaways that are obsessed with keeping the strong around. That, of course, doesn’t mean that Sai was physically the least strong of all the remaining players. It just means many of them (David, Joe, Eva, etc) are obsessed with this idea of keeping the players more likely to win in the game.

That may have been Survivor logic during the early seasons in which people were focused on keeping their friends around and saving those with strong work ethics at camp, but that hasn’t been the case for awhile. Instead, most players, especially in the New Era, have intentionally tried to keep messy players like Sai in the game because they consider them unlikely to get votes from the jury. They think, by keeping them in the game, their personal odds of winning go up. That’s objectively true, but not everyone sees the game in the same way, and there are some who would rather vote out the obvious person in order to guarantee there are no blindsides and they survive to another day.

I don’t think Sai made quite enough of an impact to be under serious consideration for Season 50, given the OG legends they cut, but among all the players we’ve seen so far this season, she’s definitely the one I’d most likely to see play again. She’s the type of player I’d put on the DVD box art. Fingers crossed she gets another chance and makes the jury next time.