Welcome to Season 42’s Next Time On Survivor feature on Inside Survivor! This is a tiny section where I breakdown the trailers and any other previews and give my personal predictions of the week’s upcoming episode.
This week, we’re over the in-between merge-atory phase of the game and fully into the merged portion of the season. The NTOS trailer for Episode 8 is a confounding splicing of names being thrown about: Chanelle, Maryanne, Romeo, Tori. To me, this series of soundbites cumulatively tells us that there’s going to be a scramble and a little bit of chaos, which Hai mentions in his confessional at the beginning of the trailer.
With 11 players at the merge and many advantages, there are plenty of possibilities for the second half of the season. For a start, a loose alliance of eight was formed in Episode 6, but it sort of morphed slightly with the eventual vote for Lydia. If we regard what happened in the last episode as what cements the alliance, we’ll have Hai, Mike, Jonathan, Lindsay, Rocksroy, Omar, and Drea as a majority, and just Romeo, Chanelle, Tori, and Maryanne excluded.
I guess we’ll see this majority alliance stick around for a while more. It’s rather comfortable to vote in the majority during the early merge, picking off the excluded players for a couple more easy votes. I think this would be especially so for this season, as two players in the minority, Tori and Chanelle, have been deemed untrustworthy by their pre-merge tribes, Ika and Vati, respectively. Word had already gotten round to the rest of the players as they were both potential options in Episode 6 before they became safe from the vote.
In the NTOS trailer, Hai mentions, “We need to get out Romeo,” to which Drea agrees and adds that Romeo is being paranoid. We then get a confessional from Drea saying, “If they gotta go, they gotta go,” followed by what I thought to bevillain-esque laughter and a zoom jump cut for emphasis. This signals to me that Drea’s decision may determine whether Romeo survives or not.
I think Drea has options to weigh—she could maintain her alliance with Romeo, as she may recognise that it’s useful to have other side relationships above the majority alliance she placed herself in. On the other hand, she could also get rid of Romeo as he knows about her advantage, and she may want to cut any loose ends to further her game more cleanly. I’m leaning towards the former as Drea has been presented to be strategic and someone who plans many steps ahead in the game.
Overall, my prediction is that Tori gets voted out next episode. It’s between her and Chanelle attempting to gain the merge tribe’s trust after some incriminating pre-merge mistakes spilling over days later. On top of this, getting Tori out may also satisfy Rocksroy, who was brought in last to the majority alliance.
At the moment, I can’t really see how Tori’s going to get buy-ins from other players or form solid relationships that have the power to control the vote to spare her.
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What happened to the weekly stats? That was one of my favourite segments.
Rob, who writes the Stats articles, recently had a baby and so has been super busy. He will be back at some point and will fill in the stats he’s missed.