Outlast Season 2: Let's Talk About the Endgame Race

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for the Season 2 finale of Outlast. If you haven't seen it yet, you will be spoiled!]

In the end, Season 2 of Netflix's Outlast came down to another race to determine a winner. After more than a month, the survival competition series, in which contestants must team up and endure the harsh elements of Alaska's wilderness with limited tools, had reached its endgame with two teams remaining: Team Bravo (Drake Vliem and Drew Haas) and Team Delta (Eric Shevchenko, Brendon Ash, Joey DiDesidero, Joseph Malbrough, and Tina Grimm). 

Like Season 1, Outlast tasked the remaining two teams with a final objective: to reach a destination before the other team. (Unlike Season 1, there was an additional challenge at the finish line that asked teams to make a fire to light a signal flare.) Drake and Drew of Team Bravo, despite a few wrong turns, were able to reach the end considerably faster than Delta, and will split the grand prize of $1 million. This abrupt change in the core gameplay — shifting from hunkering down with shelter and supplies to getting from one place to another — may not seem fair or true to the game's name to viewers (it was a hot topic when Season 1 ended) or some contestants.

When I spoke with Season 1's runner-up Jill Ashock last year, she told me, "I still think that if we had played Outlast [instead of ending on a challenge], no one would have beat me." Having seen what she's capable of under the show's lax rules, I don't doubt her.

More on Netflix:

• The best TV shows on Netflix
• The best movies on Netflix
• Everything new on Netflix

Realistically, there are real-world and legal issues — the health and safety of its participants (not to mention ballooning production costs the longer the film crew has to be out there) — that make it difficult for Outlast to become a true war of attrition. However, there is precedent that it can be done. History Channel's survival competition Alone, which shares some executive producers with Outlast, frequently has competitors in the wild for more than 70 days and, in one season, challenged its players to survive 100 days in the wild to win $1 million. (It should be noted that Alone has the production advantage of having the competitors film themselves, while Outlast has multiple film crews on the ground with the players.) 

"There are always varying factors [in determining the endgame], but I think it worked really well as a device to see how a team can push themselves at the end and work together as a unit," showrunner Mike Odair told TV Guide via email. "Everything that got them to this point — can they uproot and start a trek all over again into the unexpected and unexplored? Obviously a version of it worked in Season 1 as a compelling edge-of-your-seat finish, so we wanted to see if the contestants could predict it again and see how they'll do with their teams' size/mentality and teamwork. All the things that got them there and allowed them to survive this long, or possibly not."

The winning team agrees that the endgame race fits into the core gameplay. "I think it's a good test of like, OK, how healthy are you?" Drew Haas told TV Guide over Zoom in an interview conducted just before the final two episodes of Season 2 premiered. "How mentally strong are you? And physically strong are you? You know, weeks and weeks into this stuff, and can you still perform? So I think it's fair."

"It really shows how well you took care of yourself leading up to that physical challenge," Drake Vliem said. "You know, if you were out there literally with no food, just starving your bodies, just withering away, how well are you really going to outlast anybody else? So it proved [that by] introducing a last challenge, like a really long grueling hike where you have to use a compass and a map that is very vague. How well can your body and your mind keep working together?" 

And thanks to having seen Season 1 "multiple times," Drew and Drake were able to plan for the endgame before they even set foot in America's 49th state. In addition to running five miles a week barefoot and practicing with a bow, Drew planned to assemble his team with the final physical challenge in mind. 

"Knowing that there was gonna be a physical challenge at the end — that there possibly was one — was big on how I picked my team and why everybody on my team is young and has a good build and is athletic. That was a big strategy of mine," Drew said. (To be clear, Drew and Drake didn't know that there definitely would be an endgame challenge, but they assumed there would be based on how Season 1 ended.)

ALSO READ: TV Guide's fall TV preview

it literally paid off. Bravo was made up of four contestants who were younger in age (Emily was the oldest at 32 years old), while Delta had five players who varied in age, with multiple players in their 40s. The winning duo also had an advantage by losing two team members, Emily and Sammy, to Outlast's version of natural selection. Sammy succumbed to illness, while Emily was literally swept away by nature, forcing them both to flare out. That left Drew and Drake, arguably the season's most well conditioned players, alone. 

Contrast that with the five-player Team Delta, which actually grew after accepting Joey on their team. The team of five had the upper hand when it came to surviving in the wild and likely would have won Outlast had it been about outlasting the other team, as more hands means menial tasks were easier to complete, offsetting the issue of having more mouths to feed, but when it became race time, they were only as strong as their weakest link.

So while having survival skills plays a big part in 90% of Outlast, it's planning for the final challenge that really makes the difference when it comes to the money. Drew wisely chose to get to the endgame by any means necessary, knowing that his team would be fit enough to finish first, which it did.

Just as Drew and Drake studied Season 1, their gameplay in Season 2 should be studied by future contestants of Outlast, if the show gets a third season. But if Outlast wants to make the show about more than being young and fit by making survival skills matter more, it will have to change the way the game is structured. 

But Odair isn't saying whether the endgame race will be part of future seasons. "Maybe so, maybe not," he said, when asked if all seasons of Outlast will end this way. "Where's the fun in giving it away?"

Both seasons of Outlast are now streaming on Netflix.