Why ‘Survivor’ 47 Winner Wants to Ditch the Fire-Making Challenge

The Tribe Has Spoken

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[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for the Survivor Season 47 finale.]

The Survivor fire-making challenge has been determining the final three for several seasons now. Before it was introduced, tribal council voting is how players made into the final round (and oftentimes it was just two players pitching their cases to the juries). But the challenge has fans and players divided. We asked Survivor Season 47’s winner — a self-proclaimed Survivor superfan with encyclopedic knowledge of the CBS competition show’s history — what they think of the challenge that is loved by some fans and players and disliked by others.

The fire-making challenge takes place in the season finale and requires two players to compete against each other for the third spot in the final three. The two players are chosen by whoever wins the final immunity challenge. That winner gets to bring one player with them into the final three, and the remaining two have to build a fire high and hot enough to burn through a string of twine suspended above their station. When the twine snaps, a small flag raises, and the losing player joins the jury.

This heated event is seen as an equalizer by some fans. With it, the immunity winner can potentially send the season’s biggest threat to compete in an elimination challenge where there’s a 50-50 chance they’ll lose. If they couldn’t send them home through votes, this is an appealing option. But then there’s the argument that if you weren’t a strong enough player to get a major threat voted out, do you deserve to win the $1 million? It would also benefit this strong player, who could save their skin in the game by winning the fire challenge and thus preventing the majority from voting them out. And then there are people who think that if you didn’t bother to learn how to make fire for a show with survivalist elements, you don’t deserve to win it all. As Jeff Probst says, “Fire represents your life in this game.” Fire-making challenges are also used as a tiebreaker in tribal councils when needed, but it’s a rare occurrence.

Season 47 winner Rachel LaMont is of the belief that Survivor isn’t about surviving the elements but rather a game of social politics. As she explains it to TV Insider, Survivor “is about voting people out,” so she feels the final three should be determined by voting. Rachel won the final immunity challenge in the December 18 finale, and she brought Sue Smey with her into the final three, leaving Sam Phalen and Teeny Chirichillo to make fire. Teeny looked like she was winning for a long time, and then a big gust of wind redirected her blaze just as Sam was catching up. Sam ended up winning, and some fans on social media noted that the challenge isn’t as fair as the format implies.

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“At what point do we stop calling this a Fire-making challenge? Congrats to Sam but Teeny objectively had fire before him lol like there was an inferno. That was a fire,” one fan tweeted. “A million dollars should not come down to literally which way the wind blows.”

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LaMont’s game wasn’t ended by fire, but she’s still not the challenge’s biggest fan. “I don’t love fire because I think that at this phase in Survivor, probably half the time we’d end up in a two-two [split vote] anyway [in the final four] and go to fire [as a tiebreaker],” she says. “So I don’t understand why we just can’t have a normal vote.”

She continues: “I get the idea of letting perhaps the favorite, like a Jesse [Lopez, a fan-favorite to win in Survivor 43 who lost the fire challenge] have a shot when everyone’s going to overwhelmingly vote them out. Or if I had lost that immunity, they would’ve overwhelmingly voted me out. And to be able to redeem myself in fire would be cool. But I think that the game is about voting people out, and that is a very crucial vote at the very end of the game.”

If they had gotten to vote in the Season 47 finale, LaMont confidently believes that she, Sue, and Teeny “would’ve voted Sam out.” That would’ve made her less “intimidated” by his strong jury pitch, but that still made for good TV in the end and LaMont still walked away victorious.

Making fire instead of voting in the final four “does change the dynamic,” LaMont says, but “you play the game that’s presented before you. We have fire-making, and that’s part of it. And so we anticipate fire-making and we plan around it, but it’s not my favorite.”

What do you think about this challenge? Do you want Survivor to return to voting in the finale? Let us know in the comments below.

Survivor, Season 48 Premiere, Wednesday, February 26, 8/7c, CBS