The smokes don’t seem like that big of a deal but the fire seems like it is a complete disaster for fairness. That’s actually pretty horrific - the other contestants out there working and suffering their asses off to survive and he gave a huge leg up to arbitrary competitors? I should hope he got in serious trouble - can you imagine an official in a sports competition casually messing with the game w/ $1M on the line???
I regret to say that the show is probably only concerned with the appearance of fairness, as viewed by edited footage post-hoc. Not the experience of the contestants so much.
For example, I previously believed the contestants to be truly alone, in that each potential encounter with bears would be hugely risky. But now I know that was a minimal risk because a bodyguard was close enough to intervene, and was probably monitoring grizzly activity in the area.
The mental changes that happen to a contestant when they can even see someone nearby kind of invalidates the whole premise a little.
