What a time to be a Survivor fan. The good: The reality competition series has been going strong for 26 years and counting and will celebrate its 50th season next month with an all-star cast of returnees, including Cirie Fields, Coach Wade, and Mike White. The bad: Jeff Probst doesn’t seem to know what fans want these days, considering Survivor 50’s bizarre casting choices—including the exclusion of New Era breakout star Carolyn Wiger—and, well [gestures at MrBeast]. But even if Survivor’s seen better days, I can think of no greater endorsement for its enduring cultural footprint than that the series is a major source of inspiration for a new Sam Raimi movie.
In Send Help, which came out on Friday, Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams) works in a Fortune 500 company’s strategy and planning department, where she’s promised a promotion to VP. Things take a turn when her boss dies and his entitled son, Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien), takes over and would rather promote his golf buddy Donovan (Xavier Samuel). While Bradley, Linda, and some select higher-ups are traveling to Bangkok to complete a merger, their plane crash-lands in the middle of nowhere. Bradley and Linda are the only survivors, forced to fend for themselves on a deserted island as they wait for when—or if—they get rescued. Oh yeah, and Linda also happens to be a Survivor superfan. She auditioned for the show and everything. (If I were Jeff, I would’ve cast her.)
Now, Linda gets to live out her wildest Survivor fantasies, and since I'm a fan of both the series and horror-thrillers where characters are isolated before slowly losing their minds, Send Help was a Dumpuary godsend. It also got me thinking: If the premise of Send Help were somehow turned into a season of reality television, who’s got a better résumé for being Sole Survivor? (The obvious answer would be Linda, but she has one fatal flaw that could hurt her case.) Below, I’ve broken down Linda's and Bradley’s respective “games,” as it were, in several categories to determine a winner. Survivors ready? Go!
Pregame
In Survivor, players spend about a week before the start of the show in “pregame,” which includes everything from final medical checkups to press and photo ops in close quarters. Ideally, contestants aren’t allowed to strategize during this time, but it can prove difficult to keep them in check. (See: The Survivor 49 pregame drama, as explained by Sage Ahrens-Nichols.) Obviously, the characters in Send Help weren’t exactly planning to find themselves stuck on an uninhabited island somewhere off the coast of Thailand, but Linda and Bradley both failed to make a good impression in their respective pregames.
Let’s start with Linda. She is exceptionally talented at her job—a “savant” with numbers, as Bradley describes her—but she’s never been a good hang at the office. Her coworkers find her awkward to be around—none of them want her to come to karaoke night and sing Blondie’s “One Way or Another,” even though it’s a certified banger—and she doesn’t stand up for herself when a peer takes credit for all her hard work. To make matters worse, when Linda greets Bradley on his first day as CEO, she has a piece of tuna salad clinging to the bottom of her lip, and by the end of their conversation, it lands on Bradley’s hand. I don’t blame him at all for reaching for the hand sanitizer; that shit’s nasty.
Bradley, however, is no better. He’s the kind of boss who’s ascended the corporate ladder only because daddy ran the company, and when Linda goes into his office to ask why she was denied a promotion, he’s interviewing an attractive secretary in a way that suggests he wants her to go [clears throat] above and beyond. Bradley plans to have Linda come to Bangkok for the merger just so she can do some busywork before transferring her to another office. When Donovan pulls up the video of Linda’s Survivor audition tape on the plane, Bradley openly mocks her. Basically, Bradley doesn’t like Linda’s vibe and wants to keep her around only while she’s useful. Unless you’re part of his sycophantic inner circle, Bradley’s quite unlikable. He’s in for a rude awakening when the tables turn and he’s not in charge anymore.
Who’s the better Survivor? Neither character covers themselves in glory during the pregame, but I’m giving the edge to Linda. She might lack social graces in the office, but I have no doubt that the company would be in shambles without her strategy and planning. Bradley is a nepo baby who, if left to his own devices, would care only about golf trips and harassing his prospective secretary.
Survival
While new-era Survivor has scaled back the actual survival elements—contestants are stranded for 26 days instead of the original 39—it’s still an essential component of the show. If a tribe is going to outlast the elements, they’ll to need to make a shelter, build a fire, and hunt for food. Without these things, a tribe can get caught in a vicious cycle of being too sleep-deprived and starved for challenges, which in turn leads to members continually being voted off.
This is where Linda runs circles around Bradley. She isn’t just a Survivor obsessive—her apartment is a testament to her love for adventure. She’s visited the Grand Canyon and has a whole shelf of survivalist books. When the duo is stranded on the island, Linda wastes little time putting together a shelter, collecting rainwater using coconut husks and leaves, and foraging for food. (She even creates makeshift chopsticks out of bamboo, a wild flex.) She’s so good at surviving that her entire demeanor changes from meek to confident almost instantaneously. Dare I say, Linda also gets more attractive, following in the grand tradition of Survivor contestants becoming Island Hot.
Bradley, by contrast, is a fucking disaster. In his defense, when Linda finds him passed out on the beach, his leg is injured and he’s unable to walk. But even when he regains enough strength to limp around, Bradley proves to be woefully out of his depth. For starters, he’s ungrateful to Linda for nursing him back to health while believing that the workplace dynamics—he’s the boss; she’s the underling—still matter on the island. Then, in an iconic display of unearned confidence, he thinks he’d be able to build a shelter and hunt for food better than Linda. It goes horribly wrong—as in, he’s shivering in the cold during a storm and eats a gross insect that causes his tongue to turn black. When Bradley finally begs Linda to welcome him back to her shelter, it’s the kind of humbling he’s needed his entire life.
Who’s the better Survivor? It’s Linda in a landslide. She reminds me of a classic old-school Survivor player: She’s great at the literal survival elements, and if she was voted off early, the rest of the tribe would suffer for it. Bradley, meanwhile, is a variant of a new-era player: He hails from corporate America, and you wonder whether he’s even been camping before getting stranded on the island.
Challenges
Challenges on Survivor can be for a reward (typically food oriented), tribe/individual immunity, or both. They test a player’s physical endurance and mental fortitude, whether it’s hanging on to a pole for more than five hours or eating gnarly local delicacies. While winning too many challenges—also known as being a Challenge Beast—can put a target on a player’s back, a clutch win at the right time can help them reach the final tribal council. (Survivor 47’s Rachel LaMont, for example.)
Unfortunately, Linda and Bradley’s predicament doesn’t include Jeff emerging from the jungle to say, “Wanna know what you’re playing for?!” There are, however, moments when they’re put through an ordeal with genuine life-or-death stakes, which, to me, feels very challenge coded. The greatest challenge on the island is when Linda goes hunting for a wild boar. The upside: Catch the boar, and this plucky tribe of two will have sustenance for a while. The risk: A wild boar is quite dangerous and is liable to kill you. The wild boar puts up a good fight, but Linda comes out on top. As she jokes to Bradley, she literally brings home the bacon.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but this is where Bradley fails. We don’t see him successfully hunt anything—unless eating that gross bug counts—and the closest thing we get to Bradley undergoing a challenge is his insistence that the best way to get rescued is building a raft and paddling out to open sea. I highly disagree, but when Bradley does get the chance to escape in a raft—after feeding Linda poisonous berries to incapacitate her; not cool!—it breaks apart after a few waves. He nearly drowns, and the only reason he survives is because Linda drags him out of the water and performs CPR in between puking her guts out. (She mostly vomits on Bradley’s face, and he deserves it.)
Who’s the better Survivor? Again, it’s Linda. She’s the definition of a Challenge Beast, and if she were on actual Survivor, I wouldn’t be surprised if she broke the record for most individual immunity wins by a female contestant. As for Bradley, well, he’s got the makings of an early boot.
Social Gameplay
For all the emphasis on literal survival and challenges, winning Survivor ultimately comes down to a player’s social game. Your fellow contestants are the ones deciding who wins a million dollars, and if you ruffle enough feathers, they might vote for someone else. (Even if you thoroughly dominate a game like Russell Hantz, it won’t matter if you’re a dick to everyone, like Russell Hantz.) Whether it’s because of bad vibes or a bitter final jury, the person the audience perceives to be the “best” player on Survivor isn’t always getting the most votes.
Unfortunately, this is Linda’s downfall. Her lack of social graces around the office extends to the social dynamics on the island. Yes, Bradley is an ungrateful asshole, and I don’t blame Linda for losing her temper with him at times, especially after he poisons her to try (and fail) to escape the island in a raft. Still, Linda’s decision to punish Bradley by [deep breath] feeding him a neurotoxin that paralyzes his body before threatening to cut off his manhood if he disobeys her again is … not how I’d go about handling tribal conflict.
Linda also casually admits her indirect involvement in her ex-husband's death—she handed him car keys after he got drunk and wanted to storm out of their apartment—and, despite spotting a boat early into their ordeal, decides not to wave it down in order to live on the island longer. Later, when Bradley’s fiancée and a local guide miraculously find Linda by the beach, she elects to murder them instead of, you know, returning to civilization. Throw in the reveal that there’s a billionaire’s luxurious getaway(!) on the other side of the island, which Linda keeps from Bradley to maintain her domineering position over him, and she really loses the plot.
Conversely, Bradley is a savvy player at times. He’s duplicitous, but he repeatedly proves that he can disarm Linda with his charm and good looks. In the game of Survivor, what matters is perception more than reality, and one could argue that Bradley makes the most of a difficult situation. Linda does the majority of the work around camp, and he reaps the rewards. He successfully lulls her into a false sense of security with the poison berry meal before unsuccessfully trying to escape the island. There’s more than one type of person who gets on Survivor, but I maintain that the game can favor a manipulative player who knows how to push the right buttons. (See: Survivor: Thailand’s Brian Heidik.) Of course, Linda does wise up to Bradley’s deceitful nature, and by the end of the film, she beats him to death with a golf club. In the game of Survivor and the game of survival: If you fuck around, you might get found out.
Who’s the better Survivor? Even though he's straight-up murdered, I’d argue this is where Bradley’s game really shines. Linda is almost entirely responsible for them staying alive on the island, but Bradley’s shrewd social maneuvering is the kind of thing that could win him a million bucks if he’s got good jury management. Linda being stuck doing all the hard work while Bradley gets the plaudits? Sadly, that might remind Linda of their dynamic in the office.
Final Tribal Council
OK, so let’s say that the ending of Send Help didn’t happen—that, instead of Linda and Bradley fighting to the death in the billionaire’s home, with Linda delivering the fatal blow, Jeff Probst has them make their case to a jury of eliminated castaways. Since nobody else survived the plane crash to judge their performances, I’ve asked a jury of Ringer colleagues who’ve watched Send Help, including me, to vote on a winner. I’ll go tally the votes.
And the winner of Survivor: Send Help is … Linda Liddle!
Congrats, Linda. Despite some highly questionable decision-making—namely, killing the people trying to rescue you—you proved that you’ve got what it takes to be Sole Survivor. I’m sure CBS would love nothing more than to cast you on a future season of Survivor, with one condition: If you have any disagreements with a tribemate, hash them out at Tribal Council—and leave the knives back at camp.
