Where ‘Survivor: Worlds Apart,’ Mike Holloway stand among top seasons, winners
After every season of “Survivor,” we like to go back and update our retrospective looking back at all of the past winners and seasons in order to figure out some sort of perspective for what just happened. So now that it has been some time since “Survivor: Worlds Apart” concluded and Mike Holloway was declared the winner, we decided that now was the right chance to go back and do just that.
Where do we rank this season, and one of the most physically-dominant players in the history of the show? This was no easy task, and in a way, we do dislike the fact that we have updated our retrospective (read here) with Mike ranked as the #15 winner ever, and the season overall at #16. Why such boring, straight-down-the-middle numbers? The simple answer is that we ultimately feel good about both Mike and the season, but we don’t necessarily feel great.
When it comes first to Mike, we feel like he needed to be rewarded in some way in the rankings for winning so many challenges and basically ensuring his safety from final nine on. However, he also made some mistakes, such as the destruction of his social game at the auction. He is a player who overcame great odds, and that makes him an exciting winner and one of the best underdogs. (He may be in our top five favorite people to win.) To get into our top ten list on this article, though, you need to be someone who is strategically and socially dominant, and at times someone who people don’t want to get rid of even when it is obvious that they should. Richard Hatch and Tom are two very good examples of that.
The season itself had some great TV moments, a few awesome tribal councils (Dan going home), and excellent characters. This may just be one of those cases where we really need around a year or two’s worth of perspective before being able to analyze it fairly. Many of the season’s players are right in assessing that both the Dan and Will controversy and the “Survivor: Second Chance” voting overshadowed the season. It’s still hardly to mentally separate much of this.
Maybe that will change over time, and we’ll be able to suss out this season beyond just being a very solid entry with a very solid winner. For now, you can at least read the rest of our “Survivor” coverage at this link, or you can sign up now to get some other TV updates on all we cover via our CarterMatt Newsletter. (Photo: CBS.)