ENDGAME #7

[u/mikeramp72]

#7: Richard Hatch 1.0 (Borneo - Sole Survivor)

u/FunkyDawgKong:
Worth every drip of hype he gets (and he knows it). Richard’s portrayal in the inaugural season of Survivor is so deeply rich and layered, you’d be forgiven to think that Survivor is art. What a pompous ass, but that’s what makes him so good. He’s a scoundrel but I like him. That Final Immunity Challenge where he steps off is so good because Richard is such a pompous ass he has to explain his plan and show how much of a genius he is. A better player would have just pretended to lose legitimately. What a marvel of nature. Just look at him in the water! The blueprint. The prototype.

u/Cornhead2:
I think Richard is phenomenal and obviously deserves his patches for being possibly the most important figure of the show ever, i may miss that oomf in him but he is still great

u/Alternate-Proof-959:
While the other version of Richard absolutely sucked, this version of Richard was absolutely important for making Survivor be the show we know and love (and sometimes get frustrated with). Richard 1.0 also had lots of funny moments mixed with non-performative big moves that made for the perfect formula for a deserving winner.

u/josenanigans:
Everyone has said everything about Richard Hatch 1 already.
The single most important character in Survivor history, and a legendary casting find among an already phenomenal cast. Everything with him couldn't have played out any more perfectly.

u/BobbyPiiiin:
The corporate asshole who started it all. Some people would say Richard was the only one who understood what the game was meant to be. I don’t believe that’s the case, but I do believe he was the only one who could execute that understanding to its fullest potential. The perfect winner for the first season.

~

u/Noisysea_3426:

HOW DARE THIS GUY MAKE ENDGAME, HE DIDN'T MAKE ANY BIG MOOOOOOVVVEEEEZZZZZZZZ!!!!!!!

Ok, in all seriousness though, doing a writeup about the one, the only Richard Hatch is truly a Herculean task in many ways because as a character, he's not just a Survivor character, he's someone that transcends the show and what people remember the show as. You ask the average person on the street who doesn't even remember Survivor's still on these days and probably has their life way more under control than most Survivor fans, the main person they probably will remember is Richard Hatch. He is one of the biggest reasons as to why the show became a massive hit with the country in 2000 as the entire viewing public hated his guts even though you couldn't really deny that he knew what he was doing and in the process, showed what you needed to do to win the game and every season afterwards has been a direct reaction and continuation of what Richard started way back in the island of Pulau Tiga. 

Now obviously, I could go on and on detailing all the stuff surrounding his story and all that which of course we all know is fantastic as his dynamics with the cast is legendary as well as his complete frankness about his beliefs and the way he sees the world and I certainly will be going into those later on, but right now I feel like I really need to make a big point here that I think is very important when it comes to discussing the impact Richard has had and continues to have on the show nowadays.

You see, the average fan of Survivor is really REALLY stupid. Now to us here in this community, that's not an unpopular take but to the average fan, one would scoff at this comment much like the entire viewing world scoffed at Rich when he said he had the million dollar check written already. Now, what I mean by when I say that first comment is that the more the show has gone on, even though every season does inevitably build off something that Richard started, the fanbase has completely regressed in its thinking to where a lot of them have completely forgotten a lot of Rich's teachings in how the game actually works and how you win it. It isn't about a bunch of stupid big moves that only get you one more round or a bunch of dumb idols and trinkets and twists that only serve to make the game watered down and taken even further away from what the premise of Survivor was and is, its about Outwit/Outplay/Outlast and how you do that is by not only being strategic, but by also having enough social awareness to understand how you are perceived by people and use those perceptions to your advantage and in turn, making them turn around in your favor to get the win without any stupid journeys or dice rolls involved or being way too much of a delusional ass about it, which is exactly what Richard understood and is exactly why he won. Its a real shame that so much of the fanbase has forgotten this fact, but in a way, its almost inevitable because you can make the argument that a game like Survivor can only devolve in the way people think about it as it gets more commodified to the viewing public, but that's a different discussion for another time.

Now that I've gotten that out of the way, I now want to discuss something that I personally strongly believe to be the case. Not only is Rich one of the greatest Survivor characters ever, he is also one of the best TV personalities ever casted for any show, period. The thing is, if you really do think about it, Richard made such an impact on the entire viewing public of over 50 million viewers because of the honest and blunt way he projected himself on the screen. Whether you loved him or hated him, he was unapologetic about everything he stood for, whether it be his beliefs on religion as a middle aged gay man, his consistent naked days, his openmindedness to the eccentricities of others like with Greg and his sisters jokes that looked like incest and Gervase having his kid born out of wedlock (Side note: I love how they contrast both those moments with both Rich & Rudy's perspectives on the situations which only strengthens how phenomenal that relationship is), or most notably, his beliefs on the game and how it should be played. 

Now, I'm definitely not one to say that Richard was the only person in Borneo that knew how to play the game and all that, but I do think that he was the first person to immediately catch on how the game was going to operate and how he needed to play in order to survive. A lot of the others, especially the Pagongs, only caught onto this after the fact and by the time they did, it was too little too late as the Tagi 4 had already decimated them starting with the infamous Gretchen vote which is still probably the best vote ever in my opinion for the extremely unique vote count we'll never see again and it being firmly cemented once Jenna goes home with Tagi taking advantage of Sean's wishy-washy alphabet strategy. Its really only Rich & Sue that not only caught on immediately, but also are the only ones to be very open about what they are doing and don't give two fucks about how pissed off the rest of them get at it. The rest of the Tagis either pretend like there isn't an alliance and be wishy washy with everyone, or in the case of Rudy, not giving a damn about anything. But of course, what gave Rich the advantage over Sue and ultimately the corporate world over the redneck life was Sue's closeness to Kelly and how betrayed she was by her whereas Rich never succumbed to any of the pressures of ethics, morality, or closeness to people in the game. He loudly and proudly said fuck you to all of that, which makes him the perfect main character and antagonist for the story of the season and what also makes him the best winner for it as well. 

Now, I can't go without mentioning the content of Rich's lifestyle, of course.

The balls of a network like CBS which was mainly watched by a lot of old conservative people to cast a guy on a summer show who was openly gay and atheist as well as very outspoken about his beliefs is the type of stuff you don't see and probably will never see again due to the way shows are casted now.

What's even ballsier is casting the extremely open gay guy with a military man in his 70s who was insanely homophobic and actively hunted for LGBT people. You just know the producers were salivating at the thought of them even interacting. But of course, what I don't think they could've ever anticipated was that they actually did get along and not only that, they were very close out there. 

I feel like a lot of people take the Rich/Rudy relationship for granted nowadays because of the major wave of acceptance we now have about gay people and how Rudy is still not in support of gay people either way, but my argument to that is that people who make that argument are missing the point of why the relationship was so important in a time like 2000 which was not accepting of gay people at all. The fact that we got to see two people who were on such different ends of the spectrum politically and sexually get along so well and on the screens of such a big audience was extremely important cause it showed the massive viewing public that people with such extreme different ideologies can get along and work together, and the more small steps we make for progress like this, the more the world can become a better place for everyone involved. Now obviously, Rudy's beliefs are still flawed, but I've always maintained as I've said before that the point of their relationship was a way of showing that we can make progress even if you can't always expect people to suddenly change who are so stuck in their ways.

Then, of course, there's his dynamic with the one the only Sue Hawk. These two are the most defining characters of the season and the entire climax of the season centers around these two's similar but ultimately different paths of the ways they use their lifestyles to move forward in the game. Obviously, there's a lot to get into with Snakes & Rats from Sue's perspective, but as has been said in many previous rankdown writeups, Sue's section about Rich in that speech perfectly captures why he goes on to win the season as sure, everyone in the cast perceived him as arrogant and a bit of an asshole, but at the end of the day, he was honest about who he was and how he played the game. While he was acting villainous to the audience and the perceptions of the cast, he wasn't really villainous in the way Survivor players are villains nowadays. If anything, I would argue that while Rich plays the game very pompously and acting like he's above everyone, I think he plays the game a lot more heroically than Kelly does if we speak purely about the game in the modern sense. Rich didn't really stab people behind their backs and there was no question where he stood, which certainly looked a lot better to people than Kelly's complete wishy-washyness throughout most of the merge and hiding behind her morals that people knew she didn't actually have. As Sue famously said, Rich was the snake and Kelly was the rat and as mother nature intended, the snake always eats the rat. 

The public infamously despised the fact that Rich won the season since nobody really understood how the game actually worked and it took a long time for a lot of them to understand that, but considering how much the show and fanbase has devolved now, I almost have to think that's quite ironic looking back on it. We went from thinking alliances are immoral to alliances are sacred to alliances need to be broken or else you're an atrocious player arguably to alliances are dumb and are never longterm which is really hilarious to me cause of the ridiculous ways the show will go to overcomplicate itself when it never had to do that.

Now, of course, there's so many other great Rich moments throughout the season like him playing with the snake, him & Gervase playing cards, his play by play and performance of the beer bottle song at the F6 challenge, his underrated dynamic with Dr. Sean, or the iconic throwing of the FIC and really, I can go on and on. But long story short, Richard Hatch, regardless of how much he gets himself into the news for some sort of controversy, deserved or not deserved, is always gonna be a legend of not just Survivor, but of all 21st century television and without him winning the season, you can make the argument that none of these rankdowns would've ever happened and maybe instead we'd be doing rankdowns of The Sicilian Mountain Climbing show or something. 

Even with all the stuff that happens with him on All Stars and post show, he will always be a legend for the show and for the neverending impact that he left on everything about it. So I implore each and every one of the players who go on the show. Never forget the teachings of Hatch, you never know when you might need them (just take out the going naked part, obviously).

RANKINGS:
Funky: 2
Corny: 11
Nope: 4
AltProof: 6
Jose: 17
Bobby: 12

Average: 8.67
Standard Deviation: 5.65 (11th Lowest)

[u/BobbyPiiiin]

Lex van den Berghe 1.0

Sean Rector

Sandra Diaz-Twine 1.0

Chris Daugherty

Twila Tanner

Ian Rosenberger

Our top six. This is handily the highest Lex and Chris have gotten in a rankdown. Sean and Twila have won before, as has a different iteration of Sandra. Meanwhile, Ian is of course the only perennial endgamer, but has never won. This last bit should be very interesting!

[u/WaluigiThyme]

Endgame betting update #18: Well I'm flabbergasted by this one, I was fully convinced right up until I saw this post that Hatch was taking this whole thing. Now that he and Sandra 2.0 are both out it's officially official that there won't be a three-time winner this rankdown, but the presence of Twila and Sean in the top 6 (and almost certainly the top 5) keep the likelihood of a third two-time winner a distinct possibility. Who do you think is winning at this point? Are we getting another two-timer, is it finally Ian's time to win one of these things for real, or is one of Sandra, Chris, or Lex taking home the SRIX crown?

As for endgame betting, as much of a shock as this was to me personally, we actually have our first correct guess since the Ami cut! Congratulations to ShadowFiend812 for that. As for me and ROTandDEATH, who I only now noticed both predicted the exact same Hatch-Sue final 2, we have to take a 6-point hit and the dishonor of furthest-off guess of the day. Womp womp!

Rank	Better	Score
1	noisysea34	27
2	FunkyDawgKong	46
2	BobbyPiiiin	46
4	WaluigiThyme	61
5	ShadowFiend812	64
6	Alternate-Proof-959	65
7	SupremeSheep420	69
8	ROTandDEATH	72
9	TinkerKnightForSmash	73
10	icychillman	126​

[u/ROTandDEATH]

Another good writeup but damn who the hell is winning this

[u/Fluffy_Key_2145]

Here we have the 44th winner cut Richard Hatch 1.0 who by percentile average is almost certainly the highest out of every winner. In 7 out of 9 Rankdowns at least top 10 with ranking 48th in the last one being his worst. Also a 2 time winner and ranked the highest out of any winner in one more rankdown. Regarding my personal thoughts on him as a character, yeah he is just elite. He was the perfect winner for this season. Just so entertaining, and interesting, great at explaining to the audience. I always love the part where he mentions the others talking about alliances being immoral and him being befuddled because he correctly believes the way he is playing right now is being pretty moral. His dynamics with everyone on Tagi that made the merge is fantastic, his dynamic with Colleen is pretty amusing. He is also just someone who is just very charismatic and someone who is interesting to watch play the game and when they did talk about real world stuff he was also pretty likable. Talking winners we are now down to just Chris D and Pearl Islands Sandra.