75. Ben Driebergen (Survivor: Heroes vs. Healers vs. Hustlers, 1st place) Let me just get this out of the way before I go too deep into this write-up. I have the utmost respect and support for our servicemen and women past, present and future and hold nothing against Ben for being a former Marine or wanting that to be a part of his Survivor story and experience. In fact in the episode where Joe held Ben's Marine status over his head in an argument I thought Ben was 100% justified in going off the rails on Joe the way he did.
With that out of the way, Ben as a Survivor character is a completely different story. Early in the season I had nothing against him. I thought he seemed like a nice guy, but not especially interesting amidst all the colorful characters this season had to offer. But as the season went on he started to become this asshole who the producers constantly shoved down our throats, not as a villain, but as a hero, to the point where his edit in the last three episodes (including the fucking reunion) made him so completely irredeemable that it actually dragged what was up until that point a very solid, potentially top 10 season of Survivor into meh territory, and thats something that I cannot forgive. And that is the specific reason that he is at the bottom of this list.
I hate to say that a winner didn't deserve it, and even more so I hate to say that the producers rigged the game in favor of one castaway, but the final few rounds of this season seemed to work out SO perfectly for Ben just when he needed it most that it's hard to imagine that there wasn't a point where the producers decided they wanted this guy and his story to be the hero that America wanted to see win (despite the fact that at that point he had long since become an overbearing asshole and got even worse once things mysteriously began going his way). Case and point, Chrissy said in post-show interviews that the final idol he found was hidden in a spot that he frequented every morning just to sit and think, so there was a high chance that he was going to be the first to find it. Then the stupid final four "advantage" comes into play just when a big "favorite" needs something like that the most and screws the ACTUAL best player of the season out of a spot in the final three (and almost certainly a million dollars) that he completely worked for and deserved and would have gotten under the normal rules of the game that they were all expecting. So despite having been sitting at the bottom of the tribe since the final 7, waving idols in peoples' faces and insulting them, then crying when he thinks he's finally lost (oh hey that description kinda reminds me of one other Survivor contestant), on very little of his own merit and mostly by producer interference o wate i mean pure dumb luck, he gets to go to the final 3 with arguably the two least-respected players of the entire final 9 and win.
But Ben somehow manages to become even worse at the reunion, where literally the entire pre-final 3 cast except Lauren is ignored in favor of multiple extended montages of Ben like we've never seen before, and his Marine buddies coming up on stage to congratulate him and take up a ton of time. Because them shoving this jackass down our throats even more was somehow a better use of time than catching up with Jessica and Cole on their relationship and how it affected their games, or chatting with the ever-entertaining Joe. I usually love Survivor finale night, it's like a gigantic event to me. But this time it was just three hours of the entire Survivor staff jerking off a guy that I was already long-since tired of seeing and it made for a really, really sour ending and left a huge black mark on an otherwise solid season. So fuck Ben.
