On this week’s premiere of Survivor 49, one of the big stories immediately was that we had two last minute alternates in the game. So, what happened to bring in the alternates? Jeff talked about the situation on this week’s On Fire With Jeff Probst Survivor podcast. He told the story saying “So the way it works is in the days leading up to the beginning of the game, all the players are together. They’re at a place we call Ponderosa and our casting team is there. So you have all of your competitors, but you’re not allowed to talk. That’s why we have so many handlers there to make sure nobody’s talking. You can obviously look at each other. You can try to make eye contact. That might work for you. It might not. A lot of people scribble down assessments of their players like, I think this or maybe I’ll get aligned with that person, whatever. The only thing is we have rules and the rules are you can not talk to each other for obvious reasons. And in this season, season 49, we had two players who were disrespecting that rule. They just kept talking so much so that I got a call from our Ponderosa team saying there’s a level of concern. And so we asked them, please remind them with a stern warning that you can’t talk. And I went and met with our executive team and said, look, we might have a situation. And before we could even finish our discussion, I got a second phone call saying that the level of disrespect had reached an even more blatant level. And that was all it took. Candidly, the decision was made in that moment to immediately remove those two players from the game and replace them with our alternates, Jason and MC. It sent shockwaves through the rest of the players as it was very clear that something was happening with those players.“
You can listen to more of it at this link:
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