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The stakes feel high.
Its such a bafflingly absurd place to find oneself.
Do you make your next decision based on common sense?
Do you chuck it all, lean into the absurdity, and just do whatever seems silliest?
That dizzying surreality makes you feel disconnected from the usual order of cause and effect.
How much of this could possibly be real?
How much of it is a fantasy?
What happens when your underwear torch goes out?!
But there are a few notable twists.
The other, more important twist is thatYou vs. Wildis interactive.
to participate in the story.
Grylls spends most of the series speaking directly to the camera.
Youdecide, he says, over and over, while asking viewers (participants?)
And then, obligingly, he does whatever it is.
In some moments things do look quite dire.
Grylls called for a helicopter to lift him out.
Then the episode ended, and Gryllss strangely upbeat voice-over arrived.
Youve learned a valuable lesson, but we can never give up, he said.
A replay episode option popped onto the screen.
I replayed (rewatched?)
it again, and this time I selected the army-crawl option.
But what do I know?
She was very cute, and Bear Grylls saved her eventually.
The consequences for everything are both intense and meaningless.
(Stomach rumbles, read the closed-captioning.)
He vomited noisily into a field before radioing for help.
By making it seem more real, by giving viewers (data-producing subjects?)
the opportunity to participate in the real choice of what comes next,You vs. Wildjust seems faker.
Your eye is drawn even more irrevocably toward the artifice.
Its hard to know the right yardstick with which to measureYou vs. Wilds success.
But to say that it is simply not very good doesnt feel right either.
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