u/MercurialForce

Okay, yeah, this one kicks ass. It was one of the ones I remembered most clearly, and for good reason. A far better intro to Martin as a character than Mossflower, when he was more of the stoic warrior archetype. This has gotta be the best one, right?

Another Tale of Redwall

Wanted to start quickly with the frame narrative, which has us returning to the Mariel crew after a few brief mentions in Salamandastron. Given that The Bellmaker is next, I really like how Jacques lays the seeds for that, with Saxtus as Abbot and mention of Dandin and Mariel having been off adventuring. It’s nice to see the Abbey again, free of conflict or fever, existing only as a place for friends to gather. I love how Jacques connects these early novels together. It makes the world feel more alive, the Abbey more real. I suspect this will be a piece that I’ll really miss down the road.

Back to Before

Through story, we flashback to the earliest time yet in the chronology of the series, some seasons before Martin ended up in Mossflower during the waning days of Verdauga’s reign. It’s in an entirely new land to us — northern environs between two seas. Martin’s come from the Western Sea, while a former corsair stoat named Badrang the Tyrant has enslaved goodbeasts to build a fortress called Marshank on the Eastern Sea and claim dominion over its shores.

Already, this is compelling stuff. Shades of Mossflower here for sure, but this differs in that Badrang is a very different villain than Tsarmina, and you get none of the sense of woodlanders living in the shadow of the fortress. Here, Badrang’s already won. There is no resistance. It’s up to our heroes to figure it out.

Early on, we’re introduced to our core group — Martin, Felldoh, Brome, Grumm, and Rose — before they break out of Marshank and are split from one another. This gets us our quest and siege plot threads that we’ve seen so often before. Despite their familiarity, I think Jacques succeeds with both to varying degrees (the Marshank plot is stronger), both for the strength of the characters and the way he tightly threads the stories together.

Of Swords and Sycamores

Let’s take the quest plot first. Like all of the previous ones we’ve seen, the quest is largely a picaresque journey across the countryside where our heroes alternate between encounters with friend or foe. On its face, there’s not a lot new here. This one feels especially tightly packed — there’s the business with the pygmy shrews (my favourite bit), Polleekin, the Mirdop rabbits, the Warden and the reptiles, the Gawtrybe, Boldred, Aggril, and then Noonvale itself. This is a lot of plot, and looking at it, it’s clear why Jacques kept his focus more narrow with just the two plots here after the jam-packed Salamandastron. While this section of the book is not without padding — the Mirdops and Aggril don’t really offer us much as readers — the reason this quest plot succeeds where so many have stumbled before is because Jacques uses the plot to drive his characters (well, Martin and Rose anyway — sorry Pallum, you’re not breaking the hedgehog curse), to deepen their bond and heighten the tragedy at the core of Martin’s story.

Because let’s be clear: this is perhaps the only Redwall novel that is, at its core, a tragedy. This is the story of how Martin went wandering and why he eventually hung up his sword. Re-reading it with knowledge of the ending in mind, I was genuinely impressed by how Jacques lays the groundwork for tragedy, especially in the character of Polleekin, one of the most unique characters we’ve seen so far in this series. I love the idea of the kindly grandmotherly mole who gets glimpses of one’s future but is not able to prevent it. I love the bits in Noonvale where Martin pledges to protect Rose’s life. I love the sequence with the sycamore tree and how it produces probably the best line of the entire series when Martin retrieves his sword from Badrang. So while this quest narrative has some of the typical fluff, it’s very successful at building the foundation for this eventual tragedy.

Fur and Freedom

This is not to say that everything is perfect near the walls of Marshank! Once Brome and Felldoh wash ashore, they run into the Rambling Rosehip Players, a travelling troupe of performers who offer them protection and subsequently plot to help free remaining slaves.

I think ultimately this is the stronger half of the novel, as much as I like the Martin and Rose plots. This is all killer, no filler. The players feel like more than their archetypes — I especially like Ballaw as the ringleader of sorts, but even Celandine as the flirty squirrelmaid is a fantastic foil for Felldoh too. In general, the characters on this side of the novel are really spectacular. Brome’s journey from wannabe hero to healer is some especially good character work, and even with bit players like Druwp and Geum and Barkjon you get some new ideas.

Yet even with all of that going on, there’s two characters on this side of the story who rank among Jacques’s very best.

The first of these is on the villains’ side. Truthfully, I wish I liked Badrang more given how significant a figure he is in Martin’s life. This is our first stoat villain of the series, and while he thankfully breaks the habit (to some degree anyway) of casually killing his own guys, I was frustrated by how little interaction he actually had with Martin. I think this lessens his character to some degree, as instead of being a true foil to our hero, he’s just a figure to be removed. This isn’t all that different from what happened with Tsarmina, but we got much more of Tsarmina’s interior world in that book, which ultimately made her more compelling.

Instead the stoat I want to call out is Cap’n Tramun Clogg, who to me is one of the most fun and unique characters we’ve seen so far in the series. He talks a big game, but doesn’t ultimately do a lot of directly villainous stuff himself, which allows him to play off both our heroes and our villain, enriching everyone around him. The way Jacques draws him is incredibly vivid, and by the time he’s hiding under wheelbarrows and turning over bodies in the ruins of Marshank, he’s become one of the best characters in the entire series.

But then there’s Felldoh. The shattered slave who becomes a javelin-tossing figure of vengeance against the hordes of Marshank. His name was a throwaway line in Mossflower as ‘Felldoh the Wrestler,’ and while nobody calls him by that epithet here, this brawny squirrel more than lives up to the legend. Jacques paints him as someone deeply scarred from his imprisonment, contrasting him both to the naive Brome and to the valiant Martin. Martin wants justice, while Felldoh wants revenge. If I have any critique of this character (and the book as a whole), it’s that Martin doesn’t actually spend that much time interacting with folks that it seems he should know better. But everything else about Felldoh works for me. I love that he doesn’t really seem all that interested in playing his part in the ruse to free the slaves, yet he doesn’t hesitate when he has a chance to snipe Druwp. I love how resolved he is to toss javelins over Marshank’s at night and harry the forces within. His relationship with Ballaw and Rowanoak — two beasts who help him even as the reader gets a faint sense they fear him slightly — is wonderful. His last stand is both excellent and frustrating in that it gives him the relationship with Badrang that Martin should have had, but it’s ultimately so satisfying that it almost doesn’t matter.

I think the best part of Felldoh as a character is that Jacques doesn’t seem to want us to root for him entirely. He’s presented as broken and dies because he cannot step away from the fight. He’s contrasted with Brome in his own journey, and it’s Brome who ultimately is able to settle and live following the war. As much as we’ve talked about how bloodthirsty the goodbeasts are in these books, Jacques has a line, and I think it says a lot that his most merciful character is the one who leaves this book with the fewest scars.

Closing Thoughts and Rankings

There’s a lot to say on Martin the Warrior! This is the first of these where I feel I’ve spent more time talking character than I did specific events, which is a sign that Jacques really did something special here. The Bellmaker is next, and while I’m excited to return to the characters of Mariel and discover a new land, I feel fairly confident that this is likely the high-water mark for the series. There’s books I remember fondly coming up, but this one feels like Jacques truly had a vision — one that he executed to near-perfection.

Martin the Warrior is the best book in my re-read so far.

1) Martin the Warrior

2) Mattimeo

3) Redwall

4) Mossflower

5) Mariel of Redwall

6) Salamandastron

This is a weird one. I remember as a kid that this was one of the last ones I read prior to new books coming out (I think the first then-new book I have clear memories of is Taggerung), and since it’s situated before the literary KT-boundary that is the time-gap between Salamandastron and Redwall, it feels oddly placed within the broader context of the series, the first instance perhaps of Jacques writing the kind of monster-of-the-week story that would become much more commonplace in the post-Taggerung era. There’s some real structural curiosities here, some high-highs (Ferahgo), low-lows (the opening quarter or so really drags; the Abbey plot), and some kick-ass cover art.

Since Jacques juggles four (!) separate plots here, let’s take them one by one before bringing them together to see how they shake out.

Mara & Pikkle

This is probably the strongest of the early plots; the closest comparison Mara has to any other character is Auma from Mattimeo, but Mara has greater depth and seems a little more headstrong. Starting off with her and Pikkle (who seems unusually gluttonous, even for a hare) on the lam from Salamandastron works for me, as does having her befriend Klitch and his lackey. I think Jacques intended us to view her as naively as Urthstripe does, and I’ve promised myself that the way the vermin dynamic is treated in these books is something I’ll only handle in true depth when Outcast comes around, so I won’t linger too long here, but I will say some of Urthstripe’s lines are a bit much, even in context:

Friends? A ferret and a weasel, they are not friends, they are vermin! Have you no sense, Mara? Ferrets, weasels, stoats, rats, and foxes have caused murder and warfare in Mossflower since before the days of my ancestors.”

And then later:

Vermin are vermin, no matter what — I’ve learned that much.

I know Jacques was pulling on folkloric perspectives when casting out his world and he meant no harm, but just as we talked about the woodlanders being kind of bloodthirsty in Mariel, I think it’s worth mentioning this one part of the series that’s aged a bit, especially when read back-to-back.

Other than this, I do like Mara and Pikkle’s journey through Mossflower — even if brings back the underwhelming toad beats from Mariel and Mossflower —simply because these two and the Guosssom work really well together. Pikkle’s scoff-off with Tubgutt, Mara’s rescue of him, and their journey to the Great Inland Sea all work well for me.

Samkim & Arula

Like the Salamandastron plot, we have two threads coming out of Redwall. I think there’s an argument that neither of these are particularly necessary, but of these two, I think this plot is superior.

The Redwall action starts really roughly — I don’t know what it is exactly about this book, but the way the Abbey is portrayed and the characters described feels somehow like a reversion to the odd world-building of the first Redwall book. Here, we’ve lost the term Dibbun and instead just have a baby; having a Badger Mother is officially something Redwall has, rather than something informal; even the characters are named oddly, with “Mrs Faith Spinney” being just like a whole-ass lady’s name.

I do think think this section picks up a bit once Dingeye and Thura show up, and I genuinely like the idea of two vermin refugees hiding out in the Abbey. Unfortunately, this plot runs into some of the same problems that I mentioned above, where the Abbey-dwellers are entirely untrusting of the two stoats — even the Abbess grimaces when they touch her paws. A far cry from Abbot Mortimer offering shelter and hospitality to Cluny the Scourge! Worse yet, their fears are validated when Dingeye and Thura accidentally kill a Redwaller. This looks like it’ll take an interesting turn when Samkim is momentarily blamed for it, but between his quick pursuit of the two stoats and the arrival of Dryditch Fever, this thread is abandoned in favour of not one, but two quest narratives!

I do actually also like Samkim and Arula’s journey through Mossflower. While I think think it’s the lesser of the two quests — the joking about the bloodthirsty mole is a little goofy for me, and Spriggat doesn’t quite land as a character(please give me a good hedgehog, Jacques!) — having these two join up with Pikkle and Mara’s story is a really fun interplay that I wish we’d seen more of in the books.

This journey ultimately brings them to . . .

Salamandastron!

This is where the real juice of this book is, and if I have one major critique of the book, it’s that we spend relatively little time at the titular place, and all of it is so good that it feels like a real missed opportunity. Still, what happens here is we get our first true siege since Redwall, only this one feels far more organized than Cluny’s two attempts. We also get a better sense of how Salamandastron operates militarily, with our best look yet at the roles of the Long Patrol and Badger Lords in protecting this world’s western shore. I like Urthstripe as a gruff military leader who stands with his chipper hares against overwhelming odds; characters like Oxeye and Sapwood are distinct from previous hares, and we get a real sense of their desperation against Ferahgo. I do wish perhaps things had gotten slightly more dire — it never felt like they were truly in peril — but everything that happens here is a joy to read.

The reason for this, of course, is Ferahgo the Assassin, one of Jacques’s best villains. Unless I’m mistaken, he’s the only weasel leader we see in the series. I loved the way Jacques portrays him as this analytical smiling live-wire of a commander, and while I do wish we’d seen a little bit more of how his charisma might make people want to follow him, he has several good moments where he really stands out as someone to fear. Perhaps the best of these is when he discovers the assassination plot against himself and Jacques describes him just casually killing one of the foiled attackers in passing before turning to the other. Better yet is his dynamic with Klitch, which is utterly unique in the series — I love how they seem to harbour a kind of begrudging respect for the other, with their back-and-forth elevating both characters as they seek to breach the mountain. I do wonder perhaps if there was a missed opportunity to parallel Mara and Urthstripe against these two, but this is a Redwall book, so unfortunately Mara had to be off questing.

When she returns in front of an army of shrews, along with Samkim, Arula, and Urthwyte, there’s genuine catharsis in the way that she is able to save the mountain, but not reunite with her adoptive father in time. While I have my problems with the setup, Jacques’s structural gamble pays off big time here, with perhaps the best finale sequence since Redwall. Mara’s ultimate decision to return to the Abbey makes sense, and I do love the way it seems like Martin’s hand guides events here

Oh yeah, there’s the plague.

Then there’s the Dryditch Fever plot, which feels almost entirely superfluous to what’s going on in the rest of the book. It feels once again like Jacques didn’t feel entirely comfortable leaving Redwall alone once Samkim and Arula had set out, so he invented this plot, which necessitates a whole other journey from Thrugg and Dumble to go get flowers from some heretofore unmentioned northern mountains.

I actually dig the pair of Thrugg and Dumble, and while the journey to the mountains doesn’t offer a lot of surprises, I do unironically think it’s awesome that Jacques:

a) called his Scottish eagle King MacPhearsome

b) kept having his characters talk about how unintelligible their accent was, which is extremely funny coming from a Scouse writer

This plot generates some pretty harrowing scenes at the Abbey, but it really should have been placed in a whole different book, because it didn’t get enough time to breathe here and ultimately gave us less time with the best parts of this story.

Final Thoughts and Rankings

This one was a really tough one for me to place. I like the Ferahgo and Salamandastron plots a ton, and I admire the structural gambles, but this book drags in a lot of places. I thought about placing it above Mariel, but I think that book focuses better, with an Abbey plot that feels much more essential. Furthermore, I think Mariel works better as a part of an ongoing narrative than Salamandastron, which is easily the most skippable book yet. This lands Salamandastron at the bottom of my list.

Next up: Martin the Warrior!

1. Mattimeo

2. Redwall

3. Mossflower

4. Mariel of Redwall

5. Salamandastron

Mariel of Redwall is a weird entry. On one hand, I really like a lot of what it’s doing. On the other, it’s oddly disjointed and feels like it’s repeating beats from earlier books. It as if Jacques first had the idea to do a story with a female protagonist and then figured out the rest later. I think it comes together all right, but it’s the first Redwall volume that feels to me like he’s spinning his wheels a bit while he figures out the plot, and as such it ultimately winds up feeling a little inessential.

The Next Generation

One thing that’s fun about these early books is seeing how Jacques connects them temporally. I don’t think we ever got a clear answer on whether saying a mouse is eight seasons old means two years or should be read more as them being eight years old, and ultimately I don’t think Jacques really cared that much. By later entries, he gives up on connecting things in time almost entirely and so seeing him slot in these earlier entries against existing novels is fun. This book, which at the time of release was the next book chronologically from Mossflower, does some fun things with this. I love the depiction of the Abbey as something with a relatively short history; characters like Sunstripe/Sunflash and Gonff are not yet distant legends and are instead slightly immediate ancestors of our heroes, and even Martin is spoken about in less mythic tones. It makes the Abbey feel like a place more grounded in reality somehow, less a place of magic; more tangible.

The downside of this approach is that a lot of characters end up feeling like re-runs of characters we’ve seen before. Dandin is a blend of Martin and Gonff. Bernard is no more distinct than Mordalfus or Mortimer; Mother Mellus is essentially Constance. Rufe Brush and Oak Tom somehow are two separate squirrels yet seem the same even in the same book, and Durry Quill is yet another hedgehog who doesn’t really seem to have anything unique about him. Did Jacques just struggle with the hedgehogs? Last, for some reason, I find Rawnblade especially lacking — there’s lots of Badger Lords in the series, most of them rock, and yet Rawnblade always is a blank spot in my mind. He hates searats and has a big fuck-off sword and that’s basically it.

Other characters fare better — the three Long Patrol hares, especially Rosie, all kick ass. They’re the first real examples of the Long Patrol that we see in the series, as I think Jacques hadn’t quite figured out their whole deal in Mossflower. I love how their lackadaisical attitude contrasts with their grim stoicism in a really compelling way, and basically anything with these guys is the highlight of the book.

Then there’s Gabool and Mariel. Both of these characters start strong, but I have problems with how they develop. Gabool is a striking figure on the page, a wonderfully-painted picture of a corsair rat, but he’s basically crazy from the jump and so there’s no real development here. He just hangs out at Terramort having nightmares and killing his own guys until the good guys show up to toss a scorpion at him. Credit to him for having one of the gnarliest deaths in the series, but he feels like a wasted opportunity.

Then there’s Mariel. I really like her as Storm Gullwhacker — there’s something about the fiery amnesiac traumatized mousemaid that I think really works — but the problem is that once she regains her memories she basically becomes like every other warrior character we’ve seen in the series. I think there’s a missed opportunity here to lean into her loathing of Gabool and everything he did to her.

On The Road Again

As for the actual plots of the book — we have one that doesn’t work for me and one that mostly works. The one that fully doesn’t work is the journey to Terramort — it’s essentially a redux of the quest narrative in Mossflower where a riddle guides our heroes, down to the ford crossing, the giant bird and the swamp. We get a few small differences with the first appearance of the Flitchaye and the fun lobster sequence, but ultimately this is a pale imitation of what we got in Mossflower, where it was already something that didn’t fully work for me. It’s also rushed here given that the first part of the book is in Mariel getting to Redwall and rediscovering her memory, so it just zips from plot-point to plot-point.

The other plot in the book, where rogue searats try to breach the Abbey, kind of works for me. It manages to avoid feeling like a re-do of Cluny’s attempts by virtue of the fact that Greypatch is unconfident and leading a mutinous and desperate crew. While I do have my reservations about this particular group of Abbey denizens, I do like seeing them collectively re-learn how to fight, both independently and then with the help of the Long Patrol. Most interesting to me here is Saxtus, who I think is by far the best character in the novel and one of the more interesting characters in the series thus far; he’s a bookish sort of mouse who hangs around with Dandin but ultimately is more of a scholar than a fighter: he participates in the battle and is deeply shocked at what it takes to defend his home. I like the contrast here against the typical way that the woodlanders become stoic defenders when the Abbey is in danger.

This is for kids, right?

Now, the searat plot plays out in a way that isn’t all that different from the Ironbeak plot I complained about in Mattimeo, with them basically being handed a series of humilating defeats, but it resolves itself with such gravitas — the hares stolidly walking into their camp with only death and violence on their mind — that I think it works much better. Everything here from the rescue of the slaves to the last stand of the Long Patrol (and Pakatugg, who is fun because he’s a squirrel who sucks!) to the straight-up execution of Greypatch by Oak Tom — it all kicks ass. It’s easily the darkest content in the series so far. Between this plot, the depictions of slavery on Terramort, and Rawnblade’s dedication to revenge, Mariel of Redwall isn’t messing around. And while I appreciate Jacques’s willingness to take a darker tone, I think sometimes it doesn’t quite mesh with some of the silliness the book also adopts.

After all, this is the book that introduces the term “Dibbun” for Redwall’s children. We essentially had this before in Mattimeo, and to a lesser degree with Ferdy and Coggs in Mossflower, but Rollo is the only real Dibbun we’ve seen at the Abbey before and he was presented as more of an infant than the scamps we see in this book. I seem to recall having mixed feeling on the Dibbuns in the series, but my memories aren’t clear enough for me to want to guess where I landed. What I will say is that the trio of Bagg, Runn, and Grubb mostly actually work for me. I prefer Dibbuns more when they’re kind of clueless rather than precocious, but I think Grubb saying “hinfant” in molespeak is funny enough that these guys mostly get a pass. Yet it’s also a case when Jacques’s tonal experiments are somewhat at odds with one another. Having Saxtus recoil from violence mere chapters away from babies casually slashing the rats’ grappling hooks kind of muddles whatever Jacques was going for, and while that’s not necessarily the fault of these characters, I think this won’t be the last time that naive youth deal out death in the series.

Closing Thoughts and Rankings

This one’s gone long, and if it seems like I had little to say about the finale on Terramort, it’s because I really don’t think there’s anything that remarkable about it. Like with the fall of Kotir in Mossflower, beseiging Bladegirt relies on a lot of things going right for our heroes all at once, all right at the end. It doesn’t feel totally earned and as such is cool but ultimately unsatisfying. The character of Tan Loc is perhaps most emblematic of this dynamic; he shows up at the end and Joseph tells us he’s sworn to kill Hookfin, with no leadup beyond that. We see Hookfin running away later, and Tan Loc shows up. The end. It’s all cool in principle, but the lack of build-up neuters any sense of catharsis.

To that end, I’m placing Mariel of Redwall at the bottom of my re-read rankings. I like it well enough, and I think there’s some good ideas floating around in here, but tonal oddities, a repetitive journey, and a rushed conclusion ultimately keep it from reaching the heights of other books.

Next up: Salamandastron!

1) Mattimeo

2) Redwall

3) Mossflower

4) Mariel of Redwall

Orlando the Axe was following the fox!

Alright, here we gooo! Now this is some real fuckin Redwall! Mattimeo feels to me like the first Redwall book where Jacques is firing on all cylinders. For one, it’s one of the few proper sequels in the series; almost all of the cast of Redwall is here, but they feel more alive as characters for being written in a world that Jacques has sketched in more consistently. At the same time, Jacques takes a more expansive look at the world around the Abbey. The first Redwall book suffers in some regard that the environs outside the Abbey and Mossflower feel far more a part of our world than their own world — the church, the barn, the quarry, Portugal — but everything in Mattimeo is very fitting to the world Jacques expands here. I love the journey south, which I suspect will be a rare feeling for me as I’m already nearly finished Mariel of Redwall and (spoilers for my next write-up) I found its quest narrative to be largely a repeat of Mossflower. But it works here! It works really friggin well here!

Why does it work so well?

Well, for starters, there’s real stakes. Slagar is undoubtedly the best villain in the series so far; what I find compelling about him is that he has actual motivation outside of Evil, and while I very much doubt Jacques intended to keep Chickenhound alive, giving him an origin story works to further tie the books together and deepen his character. More than this, the kidnapping of the kids — who we get some lovely introductions to in the beginning — adds some real stakes. Sending a whole crew of characters we know and love from Redwall after him heightens them even more. I do think the group gets a little bigger than necessary here — Orlando kicks ass, and I’m a Cheek fan, but I’m not really sure what Jabez adds to the novel. More than that, I’m starting to think Jacques uses the Guosim as a cheat code for when he needs to give the good guys cannon fodder. Still, I love our traveling warband of fox hunters, and this plot is undoubtedly the highlight of the book.

Previously, on Redwall:

I’m actually going to take a second here to really compliment Jacques on how this book starts out. We spend real time in the Abbey and get a sense of how it’s grown and changed since the last book, and I love how carefully Jacques draws out the scene.

Resounding with the noise of busy creatures and laughter, mixing with the smell of woodsmoke and cooking aromas, the sunlit afternoon stretched into warm windless eventide, turning the red sandstone Abbey walls a rosy hue with the speckle of golden dust motes drifting lazily on the rays of the setting sun.

Like this is great! I think there’s something really special in how Jacques doesn’t write down to his audience. His stories may veer into the formulaic, and they’re certainly uncomplicated, but the language he uses is remarkably expansive for his demographic, and I’m sure all of us learned a lot from these books as kids. I don’t have kids, but I certainly hope writers today consider Jacques’s model when writing for them.

But back to how things have changed. Matthias is more mature now, Mordalfus is Abbot, Basil regularly visits, and the beaver had to go back to his home planet. This section is really restrained though! Jacques has a vaguely annoying habit of not really understanding what chapters are for and intercutting between multiple scenes and perspectives pretty much at random. There are times this works, but it seems largely like he wrote books without chapters and then broke them up to better serve young readers. Yet these opening bits do a wonderful job of actually intercutting Abbey business with Slagar preparing his troupe and drawing out all characters involved. It builds to the climax of the feast and kidnapping for almost 100 pages, and I love the imagery of Slagar dancing on the fire-lit Abbey lawn to close the chapter. Moreover, the opening scenes on the rainy morning after the feast are wonderfully dreary, with a real sense of doom behind them.

(A)B(bey)-Plot Blues

All of this said, I do think the book loses some steam in the middle. For one, I think Jacques felt obligated to include the Abbey considering his heroes are away from it for so much of the book. But the riddle-work here is largely repeating ideas that were more interesting in the first two books, and the end result of the effort doesn’t really help our heroes until their quest is nearly over. Narratively, it helps to get the sparrows out of the Abbey so that Ironbeak and his army can move in, but I don’t think this was strictly necessary. And while I love Ironbeak himself for crowing so much about why he’s the most feared bird in the northern lands, I don’t think this plot entirely works either. For one, it veers a liiiittle too much to the goofy side of things, with his army portrayed too unseriously to really come across as threatening. It’s almost saved by the way that they slowly make their way down into the Abbey, and I love the imagery of the Abbey-dwellers barricaded in Cavern Hole, but it never really feels like they have the upper hand. Worse yet, Stryk Redkite showing up in the last fifth of the book feels like just too much of a gimme, even though I love her and her fierce affection for Sissimay.

If this all sounds too harsh, it’s only because I really like the main plot so much and think it could have been better served (and I suspect this will be a common theme) by allowing its characters more focus. Imagine if we didn’t know anything going on back at Redwall while the characters ventured further and further from home. We’d be able to spend more time with the determination and desperation each party feels, and the characters would feel more and more isolated as they went. The threats would seem greater, each loss harsher, and the story may sing more as a result. We could also spend more time in Malkariss, which is undoubtedly one of Jacques’s coolest, maturest, and most underdeveloped ideas.

Final Thoughts and Rankings

If I seem unduly harsh, I want to stress that all of my critique comes from a place of love for this world. Reading them back-to-back as an adult certainly is going to be a different experience than as a kid, but I think kids are smarter than we give them credit for and these things were apparent then too. I loved Mattimeo most when it broke the formula, and while I think the episodic nature of the series is a large part of why it feels like home to so many of us, I also think Jacques’s experiments are worth celebrating.

With that in mind, Mattimeo is my favourite book in this re-read so far.

1) Mattimeo

2) Redwall

3) Mossflower

Nobody’s Favourite Season

Ah, Thailand. The black sheep of the pre-All Stars era. Frequently cited as one of the worst seasons of the show. Virtually every vote is predictable. The pre-HD cameras leave the location looking muddy and washed out. The cast is full of unlikeable people who all seem to loathe one another. Our first truly boring tribe. Grindgate.

Approaching Thailand in my re-watch, I was bracing myself. I remembered it being dull, having horrible vibes, and just generally wishing that I could skip to The Amazon in previous re-watches. I was ready to re-evaluate it — that’s the point of this exercise — but I felt like that would be limited. Maybe I’d find one or two things, and at least I could appreciate Robb again, but that’d be it. Right?

Wrong.

I can’t believe I’m saying this . . . But I loved Thailand.

The Final Social Experiment

Look, I’m not pretending anything I mentioned above about Thailand isn’t true. It’s an ugly season full of assholes who treat each other like shit and the winner is the asshole who cared the least about all of the other assholes. It’s not a fun watch, and if you’re the kind of viewer who simply wants to know who goes out at the end of each episode and who wins, you’re not gonna have a good time here. But if you’re interested in Survivor as a show that tells a story about people from different walks of life working together — I would argue that Thailand is the last version of that show that was more or less pure.

See, I’ve already started watching The Amazon, and it already feels like a different show. I won’t say too much about it here, but the producers weren’t as interested then in how people lived together so much as how they played the game against one another. It feels there like the show’s being made with a different purpose — one that continues into Pearl Islands (as great as it is, the pirate theme with the plunder and the Outcasts and all of that . . . that’s a game show) and onward. Thailand is the last time that the show really embraced the social experiment.

Villains vs. Villains

My Marquesas post went way too long and I’ll try to be briefer here, but there’s something darkly fascinating about how the show presents all of these people more or less as they are, with little editorializing. Neither Sook Jai or Chuay Gahn are presented all that well. Sook Jai are dysfunctional, and while Jake himself cuts a vaguely heroic figure (as does Ken, the NYC cop in a post-9/11 world), the tribe itself is full of bickering and weirdly bland personalities.

Only Robb, Jake, and Shii-Ann really stand out, and even then, they’re mostly negative figures outside of a few key moments. Sook Jai is easily the dullest tribe pre-All Stars, with underdeveloped dynamics that made me wonder what I was missing — like when did Penny become so sneaky? Outside of Robb genuinely learning a life lesson, there’s little time with Sook Jai that feels valuable. In this sense, I think this represents Survivor’s first real big editing miss.

On the other hand, you have Chuay Gahn, would in most seasons would be our heroes — the underdog tribe of older players who turn the table on the dominant Sook Jai — but in practice, the five who go into the (fake) merge are hard to root for. The closest thing we have to a hero, Helen, is still bitterly acerbic and jokes about shooting Jan and then herself. Moreover, she recognizes the social conundrum and apparent hypocrisy of supporting Ghandia in the real world and then still voting against her. I don’t have much to say on Grindgate that’s not already been said, but it was interesting how the show tried to present it at arm’s length compared to the ickiness of trying to manufacture a #MeToo moment in Island of the Idols. Of course, that distance disappeared when they presented Ghandia’s explosive cry as a wacky teaser for the following episode, then made it a punchline at the reunion. It’s undoubtedly the lowest point of the season and I wouldn’t blame anyone for tuning out here, especially considering how the show seems to embrace Ted in the end.

As for the rest of them — Jan is quirky and entertaining and though we don’t see much of her, I love that she went so far. Brian is a complete nothing of character. I’m not going to go so far as to say I buy the “sociopath” moniker that’s tossed around with him, since I think that’s more than we can say from thirteen hours of edited television. I do think it’s kind of darkly fascinating to watch someone just decide that they don’t care about anything but the win — everyone before had a line they wouldn’t cross, or at least made a show of remorse if they did. Brian apologized a few times at Final Tribal Council, but I struggle to find any kind of sincerity in that performance. Watching him win was interesting from a sociological angle, if nothing else.

The King of Thailand

All of that said — I like the concept of Brian, but his confessionals are so juiceless there’s not really much entertainment to be found in watching him. Instead, all of that is reserved for Clay Jordan, who to me is indisputably the star of the season: the five-foot-five Louisianan jackass who shirks his work, pisses in the cave, brazenly lies, talks shit about his tribemates, ogles them and their wives, and yet is clearly so much more authentic than virtually anyone else out there. Clay may be the single most authentic castaway who’s ever set foot on a Survivor beach — a guy like him would never be cast today, and even the outright assholes of later seasons had at least some sense they were on television . . . When you watch Clay, you’re watching a real human being, and despite his many faults, he’s oddly endearing, he’s a good narrator, and in a certain sense, a really great foil for Brian. They don’t have a ton of meaningful direct interactions that we see outside of their reward, but there’s a kind of bleak conclusion to the fact that the jury was presented with the choice between an inauthentic sleaze who charmed them and a person who was unapologetically himself and lost them in the process. The jury obviously voted for Brian and I won’t say he didn’t deserve the win, but I’d love to live in the alternate timeline where Clay wins out. When you watch Thailand next, watch how much the show lingers on Clay. He’s the most human person out there, and Brian’s victory over him despite that feels like a dark thesis statement on what it takes to win Survivor.

Best Moment: Robb's epiphany is the most moving, but I love basically everything Jan does. Her screaming at the men in the water about American dollars is probably the funniest moment of the season for me.

Favourite Characters: Clay, Robb, Helen, Jan

Not much to say here that hasn't been covered elsewhere -- the first three here are remarkably well-rounded characters, real people that leap off the screen. The fourth is a kooky old lady who wears her heart on her sleeve and lasts 38 days in Thailand with some of the most misanthropic people who've ever been on the show.

Final Thoughts and Rankings

Thailand is not going to be for everybody. But part of the fun in revisiting the series is in re-evaluating what I get from the show and viewing it in light of what it is now. I oddly think Brian still does well in today’s game up until the end; much has been said about how the game is weightless for modern casts, how people congratulate their opponents when they’re blindsided, and how the show celebrates the “it’s just a game mentality. . .” Yet the “business trip” mentality doesn’t exist in this space. There’s still a spirit of camaraderie, and to that end, it’s fascinating to look at Brian’s game and Thailand as still completely unique. Of the sixteen people on this season, how many would realistically be on a modern season? Two? Thailand is Survivor looking at humanity and finding an answer so repellent it threatens the whole enterprise. It’s fascinating stuff: grim, ugly, moving, compelling, and often very funny. If Australian Outback is a companion piece to Borneo that shows how good people deserve to win, Thailand is its polar opposite, the yang to *Australian Outback’*s yin, and my #2 season so far in this re-watch.

1) Borneo

2) Thailand

3) Australian Outback

4) Marquesas

5) Africa

Mossflower! Jacques had a habit of naming things by combining two nouns, and while I’m sure we all have our favourites, the word “Mossflower” likely conjures up specific images to each of us. I picture a rolling and expansive forest filled with a kind of verdant light. To compare to other famous fantasy forests, it’s neither as dark as Mirkwood or as brilliant as Lothlórien, nor does it thrum with magic like the Old Forest or Fangorn. Mossflower feels more real than any of these places in my mind. It’s welcome, warm, and feels like home.

That feeling is likely in no small part due to the book Mossflower, which differs from almost every Redwall book by virtue of the fact that the Abbey itself is almost totally absent. The story takes place instead under the trees of Mossflower, over the western plains, and in the shadows of Salamandastron and Kotir.

When I was a kid, I probably would have called Mossflower my favourite in the series. Even now, I think it’s held in fairly high esteem by most. It feels in many ways like Jacques at his most creative — someone in my Redwall thread reminded me that that novel had never been intended to be published, so Mossflower represents the first in the series that was written with a more expansive scope in mind. It’s here that much of what we would come to love in the series is introduced — we get the story of the Loamhedge mice, of Lord Brocktree’s family tree, of Salamandastron, and we learn how Martin came to save Mossflower country. We get our first real journey narrative as Martin and Gonff travel to find Boar the Fighter, and the undercurrent of mysticism in this series is heightened through their time there.

I think part of the reason I loved Mossflower as a kid is because I didn’t read it first and borrowed it from a friend after obsessively re-reading Martin the Warrior and Mattimeo and Redwall and Outcast of Redwall. This book was something new, and more than that, it’s really different than a lot of the rest of the series. The Kotir narrative, which I think is the better of the two streams, is something almost wholly unique; a case where our heroes are laying siege to a vermin fortress rather than the opposite. Even those other cases are far away from the country we love. Without the red sandstone walls to protect them, our heroes feel more vulnerable, more desperate.

To that end, I was really excited to re-read this book, and in that excitement, I think I was let down slightly. This book isn’t as tightly-written as Redwall, with the questers’ journey being a little too picaresque for me, and while I like the ultimate scuttling of the Wuddship as a mean to dam the river and flood Kotir, it feels like much of that side of the story is stalling for time with the rescue narrative. I especially was frustrated with two characters introduced late on both sides — on the Kotir side, Bane is introduced and then disposed of very rapidly, serving little purpose plot-wise other than to reinforce Tsarmina’s garrison. More egregiously, Martin finding his long-lost friend Timballisto aboard Ripfang’s slaveship feels just a little too deus ex machina; my issue is less with the fact Martin finds him and more that he happens to find the guy who knows how to make siege weapons. This strains credulity to the point where I think it actually takes away from the impact of the Corim plan to sink Kotir.

All of that said, there’s a lot I really like about this book. I like that this is our first frame narrative, with the story being a tale told to some Redwall children. I love the depiction of Kotir as this dark damp slimy castle in the middle of the woods — it feels perfectly oppressive, a symbol of something that doesn’t belong in that place, and the novel’s at its best when it spends time there. Though I critiqued stock characters in my Redwall post and this book certainly has more of them, I think Martin and especially Gonff are so satisfying in what they are that this doesn’t really matter.

More than that, the character who does work really well — Tsarmina — is so spectacularly paranoid that she effectively serves as a foil for almost the entire cast of the novel. She thinks she’s smarter than she is, she thinks she’s braver than she is, she thinks she’s more loved than she is; she’s Cersei Lannister in wildcat form, and pretty much anytime she’s on page is a good time. Even more, she’s actually a threat! She kicks the shit out of Martin in their last fight, and everything about this last siege sequence (I’ll admit the ballistas are cool) rocks. I like the final sections with the vermin being released, the setup for Redwall’s construction, and the closure of the frame narrative. The only thing that doesn’t totally work for me here is the final chapter, with Sunflash arriving at Salamandastron. It feels tacked-on, like a teaser for a book that wouldn’t come for six more entries. Maybe it actually was? Bizarrely open-ended after a really solid closer with Gonff's son.

Rankings:

Going forward, I’ll be ending these posts with a ranking — placing Mossflower is hard because I have a lot of nostalgia for it. In the end, I think Redwall is probably a better book, while Mossflower is a better Redwall book, if that makes sense.

Up next: Mattimeo!

1)Redwall

2) Mossflower

Recently, I’ve felt an urge to revisit the series that made me into a reader. I haven’t looked at or considered Redwall in almost twenty years, aside from briefly revisiting this single volume years ago. I haven’t even read the final two books, which came out as I began university and so were completely off my radar. Though much time has passed since, I’ve found that reading as an adult isn’t as effortless as it was when I was a kid; whether it’s my time or my attention span or a faint sense that I “should” be reading something else, making a point to revisit something meaningful has never felt worthwhile up until now. What’s ultimately changed my mind is that these are the stories that made me want to be a writer myself. I almost feel like I owe it to Jacques to revisit them.

So let us begin! This is the first in a series that will ultimately capture my thoughts on Jacques’s novels as a whole. I don’t believe these books are without critique, of course; I’m sure many would bemoan the black-and-white nature of Jacques’s world and how formulaic later books got. Yet I’m going to try to meet them on their own grounds, speak to the good and to the bad, and hopefully offer some cogent thoughts on how this series has aged forty years since it began.

Revisiting Redwall was more challenging in some ways than I expected because it’s almost impossible for me to have a straightforward opinion on it. It’s immensely nostalgic, of course; I still remember my tattered Red Fox paperback copy with Cluny wickedly lashing his tail atop the horse cart and Redwall Abbey in the distance. Almost every beat of this novel was familiar to me, from Cluny’s opening visit to the Abbey to the incident with the Shadow to both sieges to the Sparra to Asmodeus to the final conflict . . . there were no surprises here, and even scenes from the cartoon played in my head as I read. More than that, Jacques’s voice isn’t quite as mature as I remember it, feeling more explicitly coded for children than I’d recalled. There’s some early-bookisms in here as well that I’m sure no one would deny (the horse, the beaver, Portugal!), so I’m curious how his voice shifts through the series.

Despite all that - this book rips. Jacques writes in a way that doesn’t talk down to his audience. He crafts really beautifully-detailed prose that is neither overly complex yet still trusts in the reader to follow along. Obviously his impeccably-detailed descriptions of food are legendary, but credit should go too to his depictions of nature, of the Abbey, and the land of Mossflower. Even more, any writer will tell you that writing in dialect is almost always a bad idea — at best it can come off as hokey and at worst, offensive — yet the way he writes the moles and the sparrows is incredibly consistent and deepens the world for his commitment to the bit. The sparrows especially ended up being my favourite part of the book on a reread, mostly because I think they’re incredibly funny; there’s something about tossing “um worm” wherever you want into a sentence that really makes me laugh.

If I have any critiques of the novel, it’s that pretty much every character is kinda stock. The only person who has any sort of a journey is probably Matthias, and even that is pretty thin since he rarely faces any real setbacks that require him to grow. His arc is pretty much bang-on Joseph Campbell stuff, right down to the death of Methuselah, and while this works for this story, it’s something that I hope broadens as we move on in the series. I seem to recall Martin the Warrior and Outcast of Redwall having much better character work, so I’m eager to get to those volumes. I was similarly disappointed in Cluny, who I remember being one of the better villains. I’m hoping that my brain classified him as such because the tail-barb setup is pretty badass, but his character is pretty much just a bigger and more arrogant version of the rest of his army. I don’t recall many villains later on who have a ton of depth, but this will be a piece I track as well going forward.

In the end, I still had a ton of fun with Redwall. Meeting characters like Basil Stag Hare and Jess Squirrel and Constance all over again felt like revisiting old friends, and whether the overly-familiar feeling is a detriment instead of just a byproduct of nostalgia is ultimately immaterial. This is a book that’s aged remarkably well, and I still think a child could read it today and get a ton of out of it.

Forty years on, Redwall is a certified classic.

I’m continuing my Survivor re-watch journey with Marquesas. It’s a funny season for me because it (along with Palau) were two seasons I caught snippets of in re-runs. Since I first started watching during Fiji to try to be able to talk about it with a crush during high-school, both of those seasons acquired a kind of mythic deep-cut quality in that pre-streaming era where they each had really unique locations and creative challenges and strong storylines. Marquesas itself also has kind of a perennial reputation as an under-watched gem. That, along with an endearingly slapshod production that I assume was a consequence of the last-minute location swap, (kites! stilts! Tribal Council is a beachside pavilion!) means that in my mind, Marquesas has always felt faintly like a season I half-dreamt once.

Anyway, all of this is to say that it makes it so that every time I revisit this season I get something new out of it! Remembering that I approach each season in terms of how it’s story is told, I gotta say first that the pre-merge cycle of Marquesas is another really strong one out of early Survivor. Both Maraamu and Rotu have really distinct identities as a tribe, with Maraamu being the dysfunctional chill beach and Rotu being perhaps the best (and only?) example of the show truly running with the premise of “building a new society;” Rotu goes long enough without losing that they’re able to truly fall into rhythms together and though Kathy is always close to the outside, even she has a chance to integrate herself into their society before they’re forced to confront reality.

Don’t have much to say about the first two votes except that the snippets of Peter being paranoid in the recap episode helped me understand his vote a bit better. It’s with the Hunter vote that things really start getting interesting: voting out a guy like Hunter is the first of several times Marquesas’s players bucked trends in the show up to this point, and I think there’s a really great bit of contrast in Hunter and Gabe going out so close together (with all respect to Sarah). There’s a lot of talk about how luck is a factor in Survivor, and I think the role of luck in producing a good story is more underrated than it is in producing a winner. Every winner — good or bad — needs luck to get their W, and a lot of the time the editors can product a workable story from whatever is there. Yet to have a truly good story come to existence through the course of events? To be able to thread pieces through an entire season like we see here in the show’s handling of the pre-merge, the swap, the pairs of Sean & Vee + Neleh & Paschal, the Rotu 4, Rob vs Hunter and then Rob vs John, and then finally Kathy’s whole journey? Like there’s fucking layers to this season, and that’s without mentionign the thematic handlings of topics like race and religion and honour.

Back to Gabe. Rotu is a tribe fulfilling Survivor’s mission. When they lose, it looks like Rob or Sean are cooked — John has the numbers, they’re original Maraamu, plus they’re annoying — what’s to miss? But Gabe doesn’t want to play. He’s unwilling to go along with the lying and scheming and alliances. So John pivots and decides Gabe’s a liability, ending his adventure for good. What a contrast from the current show! Gabe was there for the experience, and the show largely presents him as naive for that. Compare Gretchen’s tragic ouster in Borneo to Gabe’s and it’s clear we’re a long way from where we started. End of innocence, indeed.

From there, the swap continues to play out and I don’t have a whole lot to say on this other than that if we’re gonna have tribe swaps, I think keeping the odd numbers rather than seeking to rebalance the tribes presents an interesting dynamic, because it preserves the “mindset” of the original tribes a bit more. Maraamu were the losers — welcome to the losers, Paschal, Neleh, and Kathy! Putting them in that position isolated them more from the Rotu 4 and very likely empowered their later decision making.

Jumping ahead a little bit more, I’ll start by saying this is by far my favourite version of Rob because he’s just an antagonistic young loudmouth who quotes the Godfather and talks shit before he gets smacked down. Him against John — aside from a ghastly moment when pulls a Shannon Elkins and directly asks John if he’s gay — makes for an entertaining dynamic, especially with John as the ultimate victor.

I don’t have much to say about the Coconut Chop and subsequent events that hasn’t already been said, but I do want to take a moment and say that of the two faults I have with Marquesas, one is that it feels like they spent all of their narrative juices for the Rotu 4 on John. Tammy is cool and her “Zoe’s a bitch” confessional always makes me laugh, but there are diminishing returns with the General and Zoe. It’s probably for the best: John is one of the best characters in Survivor history: multi-faceted, arrogant, cocky, and yet deeply human. Yet there’s only so much airtime, and defining him properly makes seeing him go out all the more satisfying. And how great is it that he goes with just pure social maneuvering? Imagine a version of this season where John has an idol so they decide to split their votes between Tammy and the General because they’re worried about a SITD play. Except that wouldn’t really be possible with these numbers anyway, so instead they just stack votes on Zoe. Is that more narratively satisfying than just taking out the king in one shot? Do we get the “checkmate bruh” confessional if that happens? A recurring theme of these rewatches will be how Survivor’s transformation into Mario Party has neutered the show of virtually all storytelling heft, so if you find this annoying, well, these may not be for you.

I don’t mind the few episodes after as the Rotu 4 get Pagonged, but I do think there is a bit of a lull as the show transitions to focus on the Paschal and Neleh pair and the Soliantu lovefest. Your mileage here probably depends on how much you vibe with Paschal and Neleh, and I definitely struggle with this pair a bit. The problem I have here is that even though Sean has lots of confessionals about Neleh playing up the Sweetpea thing to hide a gamer’s attitude, the show never really commits to showing us that. We see scraps of it as she tries to convince Paschal to flip on John or Kathy to stick with them at 5, but it feels underdeveloped, and so I’m forced to conclude she’s really just that earnest and sweet. This means she’s probably a lovely person, but I think it undermines her character because she lacks the depth the other four members of the final five have.

Paschal, meanwhile, has tons of depth — the man goes through a genuine journey out there. His confessional about how long it would take to spend 900 hours with someone back home should be required viewing before anyone complains about a ‘bitter jury’ ever again. His commentary on Sean and Vee at 5 has certainly not aged super well, but it explores a dynamic that the show has shied away from in recent years (outside of Survivor 42) in its ugly, naked truth without becoming overtly difficult to watch. Where I struggle with Paschal is that a lot of his stuff hasn’t aged super well in light of post-show events — I try to stay away from parasocial stuff like this, but given how much of Paschal’s content is about his relationship with Neleh or how much he loves his wife or how he’s a forthright judge there’s just a lot that just doesn’t quite sit right anymore.

Comparatively, I think basically everything about the Sean and Vee dynamic works beautifully. I said this in one of the WSSYW threads the other day, but I’m really curious how Sean’s commentary on the racial dynamics was perceived at the time: were they interested? Or did they just call it “PC” instead of “woke?” Moments like Sean speaking to the perception he and Vee must be aligned, or when he brings up Al Sharpton jokingly, or when he speaks on how Vee and him have a bond that other people just can’t understand, something more fundamental than anything that can be built on that island, something that exists outside of the game as a part of their basic humanity — it’s not a hot take to say that Sean’s one of the most compelling characters in Survivor history, a narrator who is so self-confident and eloquent that he’s willing to challenge the show’s unspoken racial biases in only its fourth season.

Last thing I’ll say is that even though I don’t believe in ranking winners, I do think Vecepia’s game is one of the most quietly effective games in the show’s history. She’s got a quieter edit for sure, but she ingratiates herself easily and manages to always stay out of the targets. Her move during the Final Immunity Challenge is shocklingly cutthroat for the era — she’s essentially doing loudly what Rich did quietly in Borneo—and I think she deserves more credit as somebody who was gaming hard out there.

Best Moment: I’ve already said a ton above, but there really is no surpassing Sean’s voting confessional to John. Maybe the most singularly important moment in the history of the show; the Gretchen boot was a symbol that this show wasn’t what it was pitched as, but the John boot is proof this thing had legs.

Favourite Characters: Sean, Kathy, John, Rob.

I could probably add a bunch more to this list, but I’ll take a moment here to touch on Kathy since I didn’t do it much above and say that her story from outcast mom -> gamer remains the best iteration of this arc, especially for how expertly it’s woven through virtually every other thread of the season.

Updated rankings and links to previous post:

1) Borneo

2) Australian Outback

3. Marquesas

4) Africa

Rewatching Survivor from the beginning and wanted to jot down a few thoughts on each season as I go. This will be my third full watch-through, and my second watch of each New Era season whenever I get there. Wish I’d started this earlier (I’m on Thailand now, and Marquesas is fresh enough it’ll get a post of its own) so before I begin this project, let’s take a look at each of the first three.

—

Borneo: Brilliant. Genuinely brilliant. I never appreciated it this much before but once you start to view the game as a vehicle for telling a story rather than just treating it as a game show, the best seasons acquire a narrative heft that’s comparable to real scripted dramas. Borneo is among the best of these — there’s a real sense of the production kind of winging it as they go, and while they definitely had their thumbs on the scale in these early days, there’s no writer who could have handled the story here as naturally as this cast handles the slow creeping realization that there’s an alliance, that it may be against the spirit of the game, but hey, them’s the breaks.

Best Moment: “Snakes and Rats” is obviously iconic, but I wanna give it up to “J for Jenna.” This might be a hot take, but the fact that Snakes and Rats is immediately undercut by Gervase being like wtf? kind of sucks the air out for me. Meanwhile J for Jenna is the knife in the heart of Pagong, and the reality of that is real to everyone there.

Favourite Players: Sean, Rich, Gretchen, Greg.

All of these characters are great, but Sean’s so funny to me. I love how ambiguous it is whether he’s playing dumb or just is dumb. Every season needs a Sean.

—

Australian Outback: For my money, this is possibly the best pre-merge cycle in the history of the show and is the #1 reason why, if I had my way, the tribe swaps would be killed entirely. This doesn’t become a problem until much later in the show’s run, but the recent feeling that the pre-merge is essentially just fluff time until the merge has led to some abysmally bad and twist-heavy crap in these later seasons. The lack of tribal identity was purposefully killed to make for more dynamic television. It worked in that regard (some of the time, anyway) but we lost some real quality drama along the way; Australia is proof that you can tell a great story from episode one. Both Kucha and Ogakor have dynamic characters, their conflict has real stakes, and when it all comes to a head after Mike’s evacuation, it really feels consequential.

This early conflict transitions then into a survival-heavy post-merge where the rainy season comes in and the entire landscape of the show changes in a way we’ve seldom seen. Yet after Tina does one of the most badass things in the history of the show by swimming out for the rice, the post-merge does lose a little steam and the finale is mostly the final three giving endless confessionals about how grateful they are for the experience. I would be too! But it’s kind of dramatically inert.

Best Moment: Trial by Fire. The whole thing is edited like something horrible’s about to happen. Watch this episode and tell me that Burnett only aspired to make a game show. No one’s editing the Price is Right like this.

Favourite Players: Tina, Jerri, Colby, Kimmi

Honestly half this cast is great, but I told myself I’d cap at four. Not much to say about the first three so I’ll take a moment for Kimmi and say that I honestly think a twenty-something year old girl taking a very public L for her ethics is admirable stuff. I don’t think the show really presents it this way — she’s treated as kind of a dork for caring about the chickens, but I don’t care. It’s sweet and she deserves credit for sticking to it, especially when she’s young, starving, on the outs, and there’s a million dollars on the line.

—

Africa: I like a lot about this season, but it’s hard to deny it’s lacking some momentum in places. The conditions in Kenya really limited a lot of what this cast could do, and while seeing them drinking out of tainted waterholes certainly inspires a kind of awe from our current vantage point, it’s stymied by the fact that they are mostly just getting by outside of that. The only real drama pre-merge, aside from the premiere fight about cherries, comes from the old/young dynamic on Samburu. This is the first example that we see of a tribe really riven in two, but the problem is that I think the older folks aren’t quite as compelling as the younger cast(aside from T-Bird); I actually think Frank is hilarious — he’s the exact kind of guy that the show doesn’t cast anymore, but he’s more caricature than character. But the Mallrats get interesting shading in Brandon throwing away his game because he hates Frank, Silas’s assassination, and Lindsey’s too-late maturation.

Still, the season does pick up a little in the post-merge on the back of Lex, who I think is one of the most compelling narrators of the early series — I get why folks might not like him; to me his strange blend of sincerity and hypocrisy make him a really dynamic figure compared to Ethan’s more boy scout vibes, and I ultimately think that Africa would have been a far lesser season had Kelly gotten her way. Sadly he was defeated by diarrhea and the Ethan/Kim J final is a bit of a snoozer, but I think Lex is more interesting as a loser than he would be as a winner anyway.

Favourite Players: Lex, T-Bird, Kelly, and Lindsey.

I love flawed people and Teresa "T-Bird" Cooper

Best Moment: Lots of good stuff, but I’m gonna say Kelly voting for Lex after his witch hunt. Honourable mentions to “I’ve never broken the honour of a handshake,” “she’s so concrete she’s buried in the Hoover Dam” or “I went through 9 months of softness in my mother’s womb, everything after that was hard.”

Rankings so far:

1. Borneo

2. Australian Outback

3. Africa