A Former 'Survivor' Player Is Questioning the Series’ Legitimacy

The casual Survivor viewer probably does not care much about this, but Sage Ahrens-Nichols, a Survivor contestant from the most recent season of the series, has been spilling tea all over the place. She has outed some of her fellow players as cheaters, caused a fair amount of chaos, and generally upset the Survivor apple cart ahead of its 50th season.

For those unfamiliar, ahead of season 49, Survivor booted two players and replaced them with alternates right before filming began. The two were removed for breaking the rules around “pre-gaming,” or talking and strategizing with others before the game officially started. According to multiple lengthy social media posts from Sage Ahrens-Nichols over the last week, those two players were not the only ones guilty of pre-gaming. They were simply the most egregious cases, but because there were only two alternates available, others could not be replaced, at least according to Sage. Those two players also allegedly decided who they were going to eliminate first before the game even began. That target was a player named Kristina, who, according to Sage, is also the person who ultimately informed production about the pre-gaming.

While Sage acknowledged that pre-gaming was widespread, after a week of teasing the issue she finally named the two worst offenders as Sophie Balerdi (otherwise known as Blue Sophie) and Jake Latimer. Sophie B. finished second on the season, while Jake was forced to leave the game early after being bitten by a sea snake.

Naturally, Sage’s revelations have inspired conspiracy theories, primarily surrounding Jake Latimer and the possibility that he was not actually bitten by a snake, but that production manufactured the entire incident as a pretext to remove him from the game. I do not believe that for a second, although some of the other behind the scenes disclosures have been interesting. Most notably, Sage claims there are fewer production assistants monitoring players, not only to prevent pre-gaming, but also to stop them from talking strategy when cameras are not rolling. For instance, she says players are sometimes left alone together on a boat for up to an hour at a time.

The long and short of it is that, for some hardcore viewers, Sage’s disclosures have called into question the legitimacy of season 49 and, for a few, the integrity of the series itself. I am personally not terribly bothered by the revelations, mostly because I never believed that the gameplay of a massively popular reality competition series was ever entirely pure to begin with. In fact, I’m a little annoyed with how much Sage has demystified the series for what appears to be mostly a ploy for attention.