- Joined
- Aug 2, 2021
That's the thing though, is that removing the rules also removes motivation to participate. James is really only worth watching because he's good at the social game, and Emma is only worth watching because she's good at challenges. If they're both demotivated because they were effectively punished for playing the game, then production traded away two fish to get Bashir back, which is worse for content overall.
He was warned that he'd be eliminated if he didn't do something in the next ten minutes, and chose to shit himself and do nothing. No one is expecting him to win the season at this point, he's only here to be an antagonist, so there's really no reason to bring him back as a fish.
That's actually another thing that removes motivation: they successfully hassled her off the show, and were punished for it by bringing back someone they hated even more. The next time someone's eliminated, there's going to be motivation to walk on eggshells so that no one storms off and replaces themselves with the eliminated fish.
As far as what they could do, off the top of my head:
Ask Emma how much she'd need to get paid to bring back Bashir. Announce his return and inform everyone that it's Emma's fault he's back. Emma doesn't lose agency, gets rewarded with money, becomes secondary antagonist so that Bashir doesn't just get dog piled, and hate is directed at Emma instead of production. James still gets fucked, but he didn't actually lose agency because he didn't actually win the challenge: he could have stolen the stump to prevent it. The way things played out today means he lost agency even without winning, because nothing would have changed if he stole the stump and shot Bashir.
If Emma won't take the bribe, bring him back as a freeloader (since we already know he can't win anyway). Have him be a spiritual guide and keep track of everyone's sins, least sins gets immunity for the next challenge. Or bring in Jon as a freeloader as well, make them choose teams, and have a holy war. See how long it takes them to realize it's a holy war.
The only motivation anyone has to participate in the game is to eliminate other contestants either via elimination challenge or forcing walk outs, and bringing back Bashir is actively punishing people for doing either of those two things. We're back to a Josie meta, where the winner will be whatever contestant avoids ever doing anything.
The dumbest thing is that they're running a game where players are encouraged to try to get each other to quit and then having no plan for when someone quits. The second dumbest thing is that they're still running eliminations where a fish gets to choose who to go home and will always pick either the fan favorite or the antagonist, the two most important fish to keep. These are lessons they should have learned from the previous seasons, and have actually vocally admitted were flaws with their game this season, but have made no attempt to fix. There are so many solutions to these problems, the most obvious one being to just do away with eliminations all together.
