Well, I have to disagree that Sophie's story fulfilled the how you start and finish theme. No more so than any winner by definition finishes well.

First off, she started out just fine. She was in a dominant alliance by Day One, was never a target at all until F5. She pretty much had a charmed life as a Survivor princess, she and Princess Albert were peas in a pod until the alliance had to break up.

Far from a positive finish, this winner arrived at FTC to be told that NO ONE wanted to vote for her. She only won because the jury was LESS willing to vote for the other two. But the jury majority WOULD have voted for Coach if he had said the right things. They didn't want to vote Sophie.

That was not true of Natalie White for example. Erik spoke vehemently in her support, and they jury never leaned towards rewarding Russell. Nobody advocated for Sophie.

The "how you finish" quote applied to Brandon, the one who said it, to Coach (negatively), and to Ozzy (positively). Ozzy took his early mistakes and turned them into landslide Fan Favorite.

The weird edit of this season wasn't about how Jeff and the editors didn't like the way the jury voted, so much as that no one was happy with the F3. Sort of like the F2 seasons where the F3 person was the star of the season (Marquesas, Amazon, PEI (to a degree). The F3 was introduced to try to keep that from happening (per Probst).

This is the stupidity of the RI twist. It created hope in the jury that they would have a candidate they liked, then they had one day to get over the disappointment, and it wasn't enough.

Of your examples, I won't count the early seasons because Burnett was still hands on, and this is Probst-directed editing now.

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- Guatemala: Judd, Stephenie, BJ, Gary.
- EI: Shane, Terry, Courtney, Cirie.
- CI: Jonathan, Parvati, Ozzy, Nate.
- Nicaragua: Jimmy J, Jimmy T, Marty, Jane, Na'Onka

The obvious difference is that Probst liked Danni, Aras, Yul, and Fabio, but I agree with your general argument that the editors can round out the characters of all. There are usually some big characters, but ever since Tocantins brought us Coach and Samoa produced Russell, Probst has forgotten the value of ensemble casting, and has treated some of the players as the leads, and the others as either supporting or pure extras.

I know that most here don't play the CBS Fantasy Game, because it's hard to play competitively if you don't look at spoilers, although some do. Anyway, the game gives points for name calls by Jeff. Sophie was consistently a horrible pick this season, except for the episodes where she won or finished second in a challenge. Jeff said her name at TC rarely.

In fact, she and Rick were the best overall picks for Biggest Loser, the players who got the least points per episode. Coach had it once. Very unusual for a winner of the game to not be a generally good pick in the FG. Ozzy was a no brainer pick most episodes (as were Matt and Boston Rob last season). Last season, Ashley, Natalie, and Andrea were disastrous picks for most of the season, so Sophie was par with them -- only they weren't winners. Her presence as a Coach cult member was not much better than a Rob's Zombie.