We have the Sole Survivor of season 48…
Congratulations to Kyle!
What an interesting first journey into edgic this has been. This seemed like a divisive season for both online and casual audiences so it’s been fun to try and read the edit. I’m going to talk mostly about the finale here and then do a full season postmortem separately at a later date. Overall, I felt like this episode was kind of strange for almost all of the players honestly. Let’s get into it.
This episode spent some time revisiting Eva and Mitch who had fallen off to varying degrees, and continued Kamilla’s growth arc that’s been brewing over the past couple weeks. Notably, this episode seemed to deal a lot more with Kyle and Kamilla’s partnership over Joe and Eva’s for the first time in a long time. Joe in particular seeming to recede to more of a supporting character. Mitch goes out at Final Five, Kyle wins the Final Immunity Challenge sending Kamilla and Eva to Final Four Fire Making. Kyle wins the final vote 5-2-1 with Eva and Joe finishing second and third, respectively.
Breaking things down a little more, Mitch gets heralded as a huge threat that no one could possibly fathom taking to the end. He is showered with his pre-merge positivity on his way out although thematically, he’s someone who sat on his hands all game and missed his opportunity to make a move. Despite his increased visibility in this episode, that’s pretty much all I’ve got for Mitch. Unfortunately we weren’t really shown consistently why he was such a threat, especially since he was the one who took so much heat in the edit for not making a move.
Kamilla! From dragon to growth arc? Honestly as I’m writing this I don’t really know who the “dragon” really was. Was it supposed to be Mitch? I felt for many weeks it would be Kamilla but she’s the player who ends the game with the prize of believing in herself due to the lessons the game taught her. Don’t get me wrong, I have so enjoyed seeing Kamilla reemerge in the past couple weeks. She’s strategic and entertaining and received a ton of positivity this episode. I am happy for her that she was able to end the season with her flowers even though she didn’t end up winning. Kamilla’s level of “attacking the game” elevated to a new level when she won her second immunity and accepted her fate as a Final Four Firemaking participant and although she never got a spark to catch, she didn’t give up. She tried, but she just didn’t quite make it to the end.
What an interesting end for Joe. For such a big character throughout this entire season, his storyline seemed to come to a comparably anticlimactic end. Even though we got a little less from him than other major characters, he often felt like the hero of the story. In the finale he seemed more like Eva’s counterpart rather than the inverse. The shoe I’ve been waiting for to drop, drops in the finale. Apparently Joe sacrificing his game for Eva wasn’t by some dramatic move, but by aligning himself with her in the first place? Okay… This is kind of what I took from his remarks about their alliance at Final Tribal Council, at least. I went into this episode thinking it was between Kyle and Joe. However, once the episode started and we saw that Joe and Eva were unaware that they had been duped, it felt like Joe suddenly almost immediately lost. Despite being called a big threat to win, whatever was left of his chances at that point seemed to slowly decline throughout the episode. From stating it was time to go for it in the last episode, jokingly calling himself “just the dumb firefighter” multiple times throughout the episode, and getting dunked on in Final Tribal Council it just felt like at the final hour we were being given reasons to not feel too bad for Joe’s eventual third place finish. Of course he had positivity too, he always does, but it felt less heavy handed than usual. At the end of the day, Joe never really attacked the game. Of course he was playing, he was always playing, but at every turn he was advocating for the most conservative move possible while becoming more and more riddled with hesitation and paranoia.
After a couple of quieter weeks for Eva, she reappeared with emotional complexity and a lot of positivity. She sort of took center stage again in a way pushing Joe to the side making herself seem like a viable candidate for the title of Sole Survivor throughout the episode. She talked about her priorities, her strategy, her strengths, her weaknesses. She was presented as likeable and a fighter. At Final Tribal Council, it felt like she was outperforming both Kyle and Joe for a lot of the time. She was clear, confident, and unabashedly herself, which were all shown very positively. However, the tide turned heavily in Kyle’s favor when Kamilla set Kyle up for the alley-oop. I personally feel like Eva does embody the main theme of attacking the game. Perhaps her actual moves could be considered pretty conservative, but she pushed herself far out of her comfort zone to play Survivor while opening herself up to a lot of challenges by being open about her Autism. Again, while the moves weren’t big or flashy, they didn’t need to be because she was in a tight duo within a majority alliance for most of the game. However, she confidently played an out-in-front game for the entire 26 days and never received a vote. In that case it even makes sense thematically that she placed second over Joe.
Our winner Kyle has a fairly good episode, but for it being his eventual coronation there were definitely a few moments where his erratic, pre-merge persona came out which made me wonder if he was going to fumble the bag at the last second. Bringing Joe to Final Tribal Council, considering putting himself into fire instead of Eva, seemingly needing to be coaxed into revealing his game at Final Tribal Council. However, Kamilla told us that if Kyle could clearly articulate his game, he would win. When heroic music underscored the reveal of his undercover partnership with Kamilla and how they took out Shauhin, I knew it was a wrap despite Eva’s solid performance. I think Kyle was by far the most complex player in the finale, which feels like it makes sense for a winner. In the end, Kyle is the player who has repeatedly attacked the game throughout the season without slipping and falling along the way. He survived poor odds on New Vula, he saved his number one ally from elimination, he took out his rival in Shauhin, and he won the last immunity challenge to get himself to the end. He chose his moments carefully, but when Kyle swung, he didn’t miss. I think I want to talk about Kyle more in the context of the whole season, so I think I’ll leave it for the full season postmortem for now.
It’s been a wild ride Survivor 48. Hoping to continue learning more by going back to some Survivor 50-relevant old seasons while we wait for Survivor 49 in the fall.