The ‘Outlast’ Jill Backlash Is Wildly Out of Control, And Borderline Offensive

Reality television gets a lot of grief over its name. All reality TV is produced and edited, and the people involved are often consciously or subconsciously influenced by the presence of cameras. It’s hard to view reality TV as reality because a lot of it looks like Selling Sunset, which sometimes feels more rehearsed than most scripted shows.

And then there’s Outlast, Netflix’s new survival reality show. It’s kind of like Survivor if you removed the telegenic host, all of the games, the kitschy Tiki aesthetic, the eliminations, and pretty much all of the rules. On Outlast, 16 people — ranging from unemployed reality TV bingers to lifelong survivalists — are dropped in the Alaskan wilderness and tasked with surviving. The only rule: they must curb their lone wolf tendencies and remain in a team in order to win. That’s it. Otherwise, they can pretty much do whatever they need to do in order to win a million dollars. While Outlast has producers and editors (a.k.a. storytellers) working behind the scenes, what unfolds on screen as these players try to take home the prize feels real — frighteningly real.

That brings us to Alpha Team. Maybe it was the producers’ fault for naming the teams the first four letters of the phonetic alphabet, because Alpha Team really leaned into the aggressive implications of their name. Alpha Team is comprised of four members: Lee Ettinger (who fired his flare and left the game in Episode 2), Justin Court (a skilled hunter who acts as the team’s muscle despite being wiry), Amber Asay (who describes being shot in the face by the man she loved as not the worst thing that’s ever happened to her), and ringleader Jill Ashock (when anyone else starts slacking, Jill pulls them taut).

Let’s get this out of the way up top: Outlast is a reality TV show and, while it definitely seems way more real than pretty much every other show in the genre, it’s still produced. While these contestants endure a lot of hardship, it’s also clear that the production will intervene once the hardship crosses into “oh my god I’m going to die” territory. This happens a number of times throughout the season, so it really helps to keep that in mind while watching Alpha Team make their own rules and then run the game.

At first it was easy to root for Alpha Team — especially Amber and Jill. Immediately after losing Lee, the show issued one of its very few structured challenges: whoever’s the first to reach some crab traps located on an island gets all the crab traps they can carry. This means they need a raft… a raft that Justin takes forever to build. Fed up with waiting and watching the other teams float on by, Amber and Jill decide to wait until low tide and hike to the island on foot. Their mission is a success, but they fail to find the traps before the tide comes back in. That means they have to wade chest-deep in water that’s below 40 degrees, crab traps in hand, risking hypothermia. And when they get back to camp, Justin is too wrapped up in still building the raft to hear their requests for help getting a fire going. You can feel Jill’s freezing pain and fiery frustration over this.

This is when the game starts getting real. After seeing another flare go up across the river, signaling that a player on Charlie or Delta have tapped out, Jill has a realization: players will have to forfeit if they leave their teams and can’t find a new camp. All Alpha has to do is make the players in Charlie or Delta miserable enough to want to leave their teams — and then they just refuse to take them in.

“That’s my goal,” says Jill, “is to knock out the north side of this island. All of ’em. Let’s just cut their heads off.” Amber replies, “Fuck yeah.”

That night, Justin comes up with a plan: since they’re pretty sure a Delta just tapped out, Justin can cross the river, steal the team’s sleeping bags, and leave the remaining Delta members exposed to the frigid Alaskan night. Delta’s already reeling from a loss and vulnerable, so they gotta strike now. And strike Justin does.

In a sequence pulled straight from a thriller, Justin sneaks into Delta camp while remaining players Dawn and Joel are foraging and steals the sleeping bags. He’s almost caught when Dawn and Joel realize something’s up, which delays his return across the river and makes him have to go across at high tide just like Amber and Jill had to during their mission to secure the crab traps. It’s a tense, high-risk moment in the series and it ends up having high rewards… for Alpha Team alone.

This ends up being the defining moment for the entire season. Up until this point, the four camps were playing fair — whatever “fair” means in a reality TV competition. With this proactive move, though, Alpha Team showed their hand and revealed that they were willing to go further than everyone else. Bravo Team, their neighbors on their side of the river, were horrified when Alpha asked them to potentially force loners out of the game. This strike against Delta’s camp, one cooked up by Justin and cheered on by Jill and Amber, let every other team know that Alpha was ready to play dirty.

Things somehow escalate even more after Dawn and Joel go a night without sleeping bags. Across the river in Bravo camp, 59-year-old construction worker Brian tapped out after seeing what his neighbors in Alpha were capable of. That left Javier — arguably the most knowledgeable survivalist and someone Tumblr users would describe as a “cinnamon roll” — all alone… with the sleeping bags of his old teammates. The new plan: have Dawn and Joel cross the river and join with Javier to form a cozy new Bravo camp, complete with enough sleeping bags for everyone.

When Alpha hears this plan (it’s hard to plan things in secret when you have to literally shout across a river to communicate), Amber suggests that she and Jill ransack Bravo’s camp while Javier is helping Dawn and Joel cross the river. They want Javier out of the game and they definitely don’t want Delta moving in next door. This plan plays out, but it doesn’t play out as neatly as Justin’s stealth mission because Amber and Jill are just wrecking shit in broad daylight.

What follows is truly tense, borderline upsetting television as Javier (a.k.a. Outlast’s cinnamon roll) gets probably as angry as he’s ever been in his life, watching as these two people destroy his camp and then refuse to budge until he taps out of the game. Javier can’t wrap his mind around this ends-justify-the-means methodology. Jill, however, is very —

Mind you, she is not wrong. The lack of pre-established rules is literally part of the opening credits of every episode!

Jill is literally playing the game by the rules, the rules being that there are no rules.

And while Javier and Jill have a battle of wills, Amber pops the inner tubes on Javier’s raft. Having someone vandalize your house and pop your tires is incredibly stressful anywhere; imagine dealing with that while also being cold, wet, exhausted, and malnourished.

On a human level, everything Alpha Team did was reprehensible. They knowingly inflicted pain on other people — and not the usual reality TV pain, like hurt feelings and mild embarrassment. Their schemes led to real physical jeopardy, exposure to harsh elements, and unfiltered mental anguish with the only safety net being an attentive production team somewhere off-camera. Makes being intentionally left off a guest list seem like not such a big deal, doesn’t it?

As for the response to this behavior — would you believe that Twitter is upset and disproportionately angry at Jill and Amber? I’m not embedding here because oh my god but just browse through the quote tweets on this:

Amber and Jill on #Netflix #Outlast were absolute garbage. Their ruthlessness had no bounds, and they truly disrespected themselves and the spirit of competition. #sad #scary #noseason2 pic.twitter.com/R8XcY80s3B

— Cesar Jones (@TheGaucheG) March 11, 2023

Not shockingly, the majority of tweets about this prime example of reality TV show villainy are focused on Jill and Amber and feature some incredibly rude, crude, misogynist, and disproportionate attacks. A lot of people are claiming that Jill and Amber are so bad that they have to use the C-word, and these people say they never use the C-word!

Also not shockingly, there are precious few attacks on Justin, the guy who literally came up with and executed the plan that started all of this. In fact, Justin’s later act of sabotage against his ex-teammates on Alpha gets praise.

Seeing Justin sabotage camp Alpha was exhilarating. But the sanctimoniousness of Jill and Amber playing victim? Wow, these 2 truly lack self awareness 🤣🤣🤣 #outlast #Outlastnetflix I’m not a fan of Justin but I’ll root for anyone who destroys these 2

— Robert (@RobertAWils1975) March 12, 2023

We do remember what he did to Joel and Dawn, right? Because Jill does! As she wrote on Instagram:

You can’t see the truth for the drama!!! A game! A game show! Absolutely no one was EVER EVER in true danger! Wake the fuck up people. And no one else was smart enough to even move their pieces around the board, let alone win. I got outrun. Not outwitted, and sure as hell not outlasted!!!

If it sounds like I’ve done an about-face, going from hating on Alpha to defending them — you’re right. We’re somehow 25 years into reality TV being a major part of television and people still do not know how to engage with it. People still don’t understand that reality TV is television and that what we’re seeing is footage that’s been crafted to tell a story. And if you think Outlast isn’t telling a story, then ask yourself why the editors chose to use this slow-motion shot of Amber looking like a damn supervillain immediately after Justin hatches the plan to steal the sleeping bags, underscored with unsettling music and a wolf howl.

It’s like the editors are choosing shots to really make you feel a certain way. Huh! Sometimes the story that’s told adheres to reality and sometimes everything is taken out of context. I’m not saying that’s what happened with Jill and Amber and Justin, but the way that people hop on twitter and hurl slurs around while convinced that they have peered into the darkness in Alpha team’s souls just because they binged a Netflix show is wild, immature, ignorant, and exhausting. And if you’re going to be a hater, at least take a second to think about who you’re hating and why — and also who you’re not hating on, and why. You won’t be any closer to knowing who these TV personalities truly are, but you might learn something honest about yourself.

I do not know Jill, Amber, or Justin. The only thing I’m sure of is that I would never go camping with any of them; but I’d also never go camping. What I hope I’ve proven with the first 75% of this recap of some of the most egregious TV villainy I’ve ever witnessed in my life is that one can be absolutely gobsmacked by a TV show and still talk about it without succumbing to malicious behavior. It turns out that the reaction to Outlast the reality show is an equally stark reflection of the best and worst aspects of human nature.