Survivor: Cagayan – Season Recap

Remember when Kim Kardashian West recently tweeted about her private birthday party? You know, the one that went like this: “After 2 weeks of multiple health screens and asking everyone to quarantine, I surprised my closest inner circle with a trip to a private island where we could pretend things were normal just for a brief moment in time.” Since my birthday’s around this time of the year, I’m going to do the same thing. I’m spending it by recapping Survivor: Cagayan.

Season 28 of Survivor is highly regarded as one of the best seasons in the entire series. However, it needed a reminder of how special it was. With Survivor currently idle (Get it? Because they love idols.), fans had to resort to binge-watching previous seasons, which they had no problem with, since their views on recent seasons continue to be lukewarm. The entire Survivor catalog is available to watch on CBS All Access, plus a good majority of it can also be streamed on Hulu and Amazon Prime.  However, this wasn’t enough for the show. They needed a very prestigious outlet to highlight its finest moments to an audience that either hasn’t seen the show, hasn’t seen it in forever, or has been watching since the beginning. Something that was the right mixture of viewers to get back into those watercooler conversations. So this past month, Netflix put two highly-praised seasons of Survivor on its streaming service: Heroes vs. Villains and Cagayan. This got a lot of people talking about it again at a level that hasn’t been seen since the early days, either on social media or in conversations. Matthew McConaughey even talked about watching it for the first time recently on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

With all this renewed discussion of the show, I thought I’d choose one of those seasons to do a recap on. While Heroes vs. Villains is the better of the two seasons, I’m choosing to cover Cagayan, because I feel like I can get more material out of it at this time. It not only shows the gameplay at its finest, but it also displays how to best evolve as a series deep into its run.

So let’s find out what currently has Matthew McConaughey going “Alright, alright, alright!” This is Survivor: Cagayan!

100 Best Survivor Vote-Offs

There have been many changes to the game over the years, but there have been a few elements that have stuck with it as well. There are three guarantees in life: death, taxes, and tribal councils on Survivor.

For this list, I’m only including eliminations decided by tribal council voting results. No medevacs, quits, or sudden death eliminations like the Final 4 tribal councils in Heroes vs. Healers vs. Hustlers. I will include tie-breaking outcomes that take place after a vote. So if a sudden death elimination came after a vote in order to resolve a tie, then it can go on the list. Also, the criteria is for a vote-off to be not only satisfying, but also wonderfully edited and told. So even when it’s not the person we wanted to see get voted off, it’ll still make the list if the outcome was well-presented. Finally, we’ll also include vote-offs that had an equally-entertaining timeline of events that led up to that tribal council.