“This has never happened before..” Jeff says through tears…
…In reference to him crying on camera. Don’t get me wrong, this episode of Survivor was powerful and I think that they handled Eva’s story really well. However, the promos had me conjuring up even more dramatic scenarios than what we got, if you can believe it. Either way this episode sets us up for an interesting post-merge. Before we get to that though, let’s talk about our most recent boot, Bianca.
Such a bummer! I was really enjoying Bianca in the past couple of episodes. She was fun and seemed savvy. Unfortunately not savvy enough. Bianca’s elimination really epitomized Jeff’s line from the opening monologue, “just because you attack the game, doesn’t mean you’ll succeed, but better to fail in pursuit of something amazing than fail out of fear.” When Bianca shows up to the reward challenge and sees that Thomas has been sent home, she turns on the jets. She actively positions herself well in between the original Civas, Mitch and Chrissy, and the original Vulas, Cedrek and Sai. It seems like she might pull off forcing the tie she wants. However, she underestimates Cedrek’s willingness to vote for Sai at this point. She divulges to Cedrek that she doesn’t have a vote, hoping to convince him to just vote for Sai to hide the fact she doesn’t have a vote to avoid post-Tribal Council damage control. In a turn of events completely unexplained to the audience, Cedrek and Chrissy vote together to eliminate Bianca, seemingly leaving both Sai and Mitch out of the vote. Bianca leaves in tears. Sad! I think you can look at it in a couple ways thematically. She played hard but still felt flat, but at least she tried. Alternatively, she played hard, but at the last second, fear for her future game took over causing her to make a move that prevented her from surviving the night. Either way you slice it, Cedrek claims yet another victim during this pre-merge. The player he is!
So how do we look going into our Mergatory episode next week?
Contenders
Kamilla - Kamilla remains at the top for me, for now. I’m really curious to see how she navigates the rest of the game, but she’s in a great position. She and Kyle pulled off a good move last episode, but Shauhin and Joe seem more upset with Kyle. After the reward challenge the four of them bond over the struggles their parents faced. Kamilla gets to tell her parents' story during this first emotional inflection point in the episode, but she also gets to explain the strategy for this new alliance moving forward. Kyle and Shauhin say they’re in on it, but Kamilla gets to say how they’re going to run the game. Great, well-rounded episode for Kamilla.
Joe - Joe continues to be shielded from the California Girls blunder last episode, he talks about his parents starting their relationship during segregation, and he helps regulate Eva in the aftermath of her episode. Joe’s emotional content was turned up to another level this episode, which is obviously good for him. He actually got zero confessionals, but I’m not going to rule him out based on that right now because it really didn’t feel like he was absent from the episode. In fact, quite the opposite. Joe maintains a high position in my rankings, but I think he’s going to need to start showing some more strategy because I do feel like that’s been lacking for him so far. We see that you’re a good man, Joe, but are you a winner? There’s still a lot of time to find out.
Eva - This was an excellent episode for Eva. The past couple of episodes had her slowly dropping down the ladder due to her sloppy gameplay and social misreads. However, perhaps that is just the pre-merge danger Eva’s edit would need if she does end up being our winner. What really helped Eva reestablish herself as one of my main contenders was what happened on Lagi after her episode. Eva clinched the second immunity idol for her tribe and her vulnerability and authenticity was received really positively by her tribe. So positively in fact that Star resolved to bury the hatchet with Eva, “comes clean” about the Beware Advantage, and lets Eva keep the idol after she cracks the puzzle. Eva is ready to “get after it” now and she’s ready to be a true contender.
Shauhin - Shauhin gets the first confessional after getting dunked on over and over again last episode. I think it was okay for him. It wasn’t exactly the heel-turn resolve I was looking for but he knew he screwed up and was disappointed in himself. What really keeps him in the mix here is how involved he was in the post-reward challenge conversation with the other members of new Vula. He and Kamilla seem to dominate this segment, and Joe gets some time in there too. After this conversation he says he’s all in on this new alliance. I kind of have a feeling he may be more likely to be our likeable, strategic player that falls short toward the end. Think Charlie Davis. We’ll see though. I’m not going to count him out yet.
Kyle - Kyle is feeling confident after the success of his and Kamilla’s move to take out Thomas. His calls for the new Vula to bury the hatchet and just move forward and win seems to come to fruition via the formation of a new alliance between the four over pastries. I think Kyle and Kamilla are a strong duo and have a good chance to go far, and he could be our winner. However, out of all the new Vula members, he was the only one who didn’t get a segment about his parents, which would lead the audience to probably be more emotionally invested in the other three. It’s not a death sentence, but certainly a knock against Kyle’s chances, especially among the others in the contender category.
Some Hope
David - Yet again, David got emotional content this week. However, this time it wasn’t about needing $1 million to give his (ex..?) girlfriend the stay-at-home mom lifestyle and four children she deserves. It was with perhaps his actual one true love, whole milk. Soaring, heroic music under footage of you gulping down multiple glasses of milk? That’s wild stuff to me, but I think it’s supposed to be perceived positively. I think David could pull himself back into the contender pool, but it depends on how strategic he can be moving forward. I thought he was taking a turn in the past couple episodes, but he went back to purely fun, “what a good, fun guy” content this week. A lot will change in the next couple weeks so I’m still waiting to see exactly what the edit is doing with David.
Mary - Quiet episode for Mary this week, but all of her content was positive. We get a little reemergence of Mary and Sai’s relationship when they aren’t even on the same tribe after the reward challenge, and we are likely meant to feel like Sai is being petty. She is shown being very supportive of Eva throughout the challenge and in the aftermath back at camp. Despite minimal content from Mary this episode, I still feel like I left the episode having felt her presence. I think we’ll have to see where the story takes her. I feel that it’s unlikely that any of the original Vula members will win this season, but of the three of them, I think Mary has some hope.
Unlikely
Sai - Sai’s negativity makes a pretty big resurgence this episode. Chrissy and Mitch are annoyed with her. Bianca says she’s willing to vote her out if it saves her. All of new Lagi talk about how she rubbed them the wrong way by saying that they won the reward challenge without tact. They even say that none of them would ever work with her. Cedrek talks about knowing he needs to cut Sai eventually, calling her a liability. She’s left out of the vote and learns that, of all people, Cedrek knew that Bianca didn’t have a vote. Yeah, rough episode for Sai. I think that ultimately, even if Mary and Sai work together on something in the future, it just feels unlikely that Sai has enough good will from her castmates to win this game.
Mitch - I don’t think that it’s great for Mitch that somehow Cedrek and Chrissy voted together to take out Bianca when in just the previous episode, Cedrek and Mitch bond over their experiences with stuttering. I personally felt like Mitch seemed genuinely surprised that Bianca got voted out. Bianca has said in her exit press that she told Cedrek right before they left for Tribal Council and watched him like a hawk to make sure he didn’t talk to anyone else. So I think if that’s true, Mitch being left out of this vote is supported by this evidence. I don’t know, as much as I like Mitch, I feel like his chances of winning are dwindling. I think he would always receive a positive edit, similar to Eva, but I just feel like Eva’s edit has both the emotional and strategic components making sense. I don’t feel that for Mitch right now.
Got Nothing For Ya
Charity - We have been told repeatedly that other castaways don’t trust Charity. Kamilla, David, Chrissy, and now Eva. Not great. Especially since I would say that the audience knows more about each of David, Kamilla, and Eva than they know about Charity. Additionally, all three of those players have been cast in a positive light. What might be worse is that Charity seems to have absolutely no idea that she’s being perceived this way. It’s not looking good for Charity. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s our mergatory boot or that one player that makes the merge but doesn’t make the jury.
Star - I still don’t think Star is winning this season but she had a positive episode. I think perhaps it’s actually smart that she passed off this public idol to Eva, but I don’t think she did it for that reason, necessarily. This was a better episode for Star, but something about it still just feels like it fell kind of flat. It just maybe implies that Eva and Star don’t really get to a point where their truce impacts the story much. It felt like the story ended for Star in this episode. I don’t know, maybe she makes it a little further, but I think her time is coming.
Chrissy - Chrissy has had more visibility since the formation of new Civa. We can definitely understand her decision to take out Bianca when she learned that Bianca didn’t have a vote because in the previous episode, we hear her saying she wants to weaken the original Lagi. Here’s the problem: we have absolutely no idea how she finds out that Bianca doesn’t have a vote. If Chrissy were our winner, I would think that the show would bother showing us that. Instead, we see her desperate to boot Sai because she’s so annoyed with her all episode. Maybe Chrissy sticks around, but she’s not winning.
Cedrek - Cedrek… This guy drives me crazy. On the show only, of course. The big problem I have with Cedrek’s edit is that if he was the winner, they could make him look much smarter and more adept. From what we know about him, he seems like a chill guy who wants to play a straight-forward, sensible, inoffensive game. Obviously, there is something about him that makes people want to work with him. We see people going to him with plans over and over again. He has been influential in almost all of the Tribal Councils we’ve seen this season. However, we never really get the “how” or “why” behind almost anything he does. They only show him and Justin figuring they should turn on Kevin at the last second. They never explain how Cedrek came to the decision to vote out Justin who is supposedly his #1. This episode he says that the person he trusts the most in the game besides himself is Sai. Yet somehow it’s him and Chrissy voting together? Cedrek did say that he needs to cut Sai at some point, but he didn’t in this moment, so it doesn’t really add up to keep her but not tell her about the vote. Of course he could be keeping her as a shield or to offer her up as the Mergatory vote, but why leave her out and incur her wrath? He has to know it would be coming. I don’t know, it just feels like there could be totally sound reasoning for his decisions that are being left out in favor of him looking confusing at best and dumb at worst. He’s been in this category for a bit now, but man. I just am continuously baffled by what’s being shown to us.
Typically at this point in the season we see some sort of Mergatory episode where the castaways have to “earn the merge.” In the New Era, there have been eight jury members, so oftentimes the next person eliminated after Mergatory also does not make the jury. Some seasons have had a double elimination episode after Mergatory where one of the players makes the jury and the other doesn’t. Basically, this leads to some cagey gameplay. Anyone who seems like they might be an easy vote is in danger because everyone is so close to making the jury and they don’t want to miss out.
Going into this next phase of the game, the entirety of the original Civa tribe is present. There seems to have been a background rivalry between Civa and Lagi prior to the switch. However, now we have Kamilla and Kyle willing to work with Shauhin and Joe, but the plan is to play the middle and influence the game as they please. I think we can all safely assume that Eva will get pulled into this and probably David because he was already working with Kamilla and Kyle from his original tribe and bonded with Eva on the new Lagi. Is this about to be the second coming of “The Six?” If so, I hope it goes better for them than it did for the iteration from Survivor 46. That leaves question marks over Sai, Mary, Cedrek, Charity, Mitch, Chrissy, and Star.
Chrissy seems like a straight shooter and will likely assume that she’ll be joining back up with David, Kamilla, and Kyle. She’ll probably want to bring in Cedrek and throw Sai under the bus as a chaotic player. Mitch also tried to broker something with Kyle before the swap to make a four between them, Charity, and David. Mary, Sai, and Star seem like they are true free agents at this point, although Star will probably try to link back up with her original Lagi members since she and Eva have made up. There are also two advantages in play. Mitch has a Block a Vote that all of original Civa knows about and Eva has a hidden immunity idol that all of new Lagi knows about. I think these next couple of votes really come down to how much Kyle, Kamilla, Joe, and Shauhin want to reveal their alliance to the rest of the group. I think they could easily lay low if the next two boots are some combination of Charity, Star, or Sai. From there they could “run this game” as Kamilla said.
What does that mean for my pick this week? Last week I chose Mitch. Charity doesn’t seem like a safe choice right now. I may go for Mary, Cedrek, or David.