Stephen Fishbach's 'Survivor: Millennials vs. Gen X' Premiere Blog: Island of Misfit Ploys

Stephen Fishbach was the runner-up on Survivor: Tocantins and a member of the jury on Survivor Cambodia: Second Chance. He has been blogging about Survivor strategy for PEOPLE since 2009. Follow him on Twitter @stephenfishbach.

Erik Reichenbach is a comic artist, illustrator, and former Survivor Fan Favorite. See more of his artwork and commissions on Tumblr.com and follow him on Twitter!

“You don’t move forward with an alliance of numbers. You move forward with an alliance of comfort – who you’re happy to be around.” –Tony Vlachos, Survivor: Cagayan

Survivor premiered last night with a battle of the generations and a massive new twist in the game:

Apparently I’ve been cloned?

An anxious writer who feels out of place on a tribe full of manly men? Check.

He scrambles across the island looking for idols? Check.

He struggles to break sticks? Sadly, check.

Poor David. I have so much sympathy for my doppelnerder; I’m just praying his feet stay healthy. So much of Survivor is the luck of who gets cast on your tribe. I bet if David were hanging out with Zeke and Adam and Will and Hannah, we’d be seeing a very different side of him.

Instead, he’s got Bret and Chris competing for a walk-on role in a Vin Diesel movie.

But all is not yet lost. After an earnest plea to his tribe, David skirted the vote. In fact, only outsider Cece wrote down his name, and the tribe sent Rachel home.

So in the words of Michael Jackson, “I’m talking to the man in the mirror. I’m asking him to change his ways.” Stop freaking out, stop scrambling around the island hunting for idols, and start building bonds.

Maybe like me, you’ll find your idol in your ally’s heart.

The Outcasts Twist

David’s plight brings up one of the most interesting generational differences between the two tribes – not whether they prefer chicken or fish, but how each group of outcasts conceived of itself.

Gen X, of course, was notorious for being a bunch of disaffected solitary loners. So perhaps it’s no surprise that David, Ken, Cece and Rachel never band together against the burly Gen X majority.

Each of them frets alone. David spins in neurotic circles on the beach. And that scene between Cece and Rachel, gazing over the cliff at their tribemates strategizing in the water below, felt like some kind of profound commentary on humanity’s fundamental inability to connect.

Rachel: Who do you think they’re thinking about?
Cece: I don’t know.
Rachel: We’ve got to stick together today, okay?
Cece: All right.
Rachel: Something weird is going on, isn’t it?
Cece: Yeah.
Rachel: What do you think they’re thinking?
Cece: I don’t know.

Millennials, meanwhile, are renowned for letting their freak flag fly in massive online communities of likeminded deviants. So of course the outcasts on the Millennial tribe are sticking together – led, just like in real life, by the nearest “social media influencer.” Video gamer Mari Takahashi (who has 447,000 Twitter followers) pulls together weirdos Hannah, Adam and Michaela. And can we count Zeke and Will in that, too?

“My goal is to play this kind of like I’d play video games,” Mari says. “So I’m pulling together the misfits and the outcasts.”

Maybe it’s because I’m an old Gen-Xer, but I’m not sure how “pulling together the misfits” would actually apply to video games. (Is Luigi a misfit?) Still, it seems to work here. Especially because Mari’s competition is the blissed-out beach bros Taylor and Jay and their dudettes, Figgy and Michelle. Taylor is trying so hard to make “triforce” happen, that he forgets that the “tri” means three – i.e. a very small number on a tribe of 10.

Of course, in the land of shirtless bros, the man with the Hawaiian shirt is king. Who really cares if the Misfits or the Triforce reigns triumphant when we have Zeke in the middle, laughing at it all.

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The Fishy

Perhaps it’s only right to give the Fishy to Gen-Xers Chris and Bret. There’s something classic and old-school about the way the two of them fist bump, build a shelter and lock up a six-person majority alliance. In today’s frenetic and fast-paced game of (clears throat) voting blocs, maybe old-school solidarity is a revolutionary idea.

Survivor: Millennials vs. Gen X airs Wednesdays (8 p.m. ET) on CBS.