Welcome to Season 46’s Next Time On Survivor weekly feature on the Inside Survivor site! If you’re new around here, I’m Steph from sunny, tropical, humid Singapore. This is a tiny space where I give my best attempts at understanding preview trailers and make my predictions for the show’s next episodes.
Episode 5’s NTOS trailer begins with Kenzie joking, “What will Yanu lose today?” Indeed, the Yanu tribe has been on a losing streak since the premiere episode, having lost the immunity challenge every single time. As predicted, Bhanu was finally voted out last tribal for being too much of a liability.
Despite this cut, I’m not sure if Yanu has much of a chance to succeed at this point. Tiffany, Kenzie, and Q are physically depleted without flint at camp to start a fire since the start of the game. They’ve also had to participate in every challenge without rotating out, which the other two tribes can afford with the extra tribe members.
The Yanu tribe’s best hope may be for a swap or an earlier merge/mergatory to save themselves. That comes with its own set of challenges to navigate, but at least it switches things up with new tribemates to work with, especially for team challenges.
Another possibility in favour of Yanu would be that the other two tribes may be itching to go to tribal at this stage and may opt to deliberately throw the immunity challenge to get there. Whether it’s to actively get rid of someone on their tribe or to unlock the next step of the Beware Advantage, it’s a potential opportunity for Yanu to avoid going to tribal again.
As such, despite the depressing trailer and constant downward spiral over the past four episodes, I wouldn’t write Yanu off as a hopeless cause.
The next portion of the trailer highlights the Nami tribe with Soda’s confessional sharing, “Looking for an idol is difficult, but we don’t want it to fall into the wrong hands.” As she says this, her voice-over is paired with a shot of Venus smiling, perhaps implying that Venus found the Hidden Immunity Idol or the Beware Advantage on Nami. Soda isn’t working with Venus, and she considers her to be someone she cannot connect with or read, so she certainly wouldn’t want Venus to find the advantage.
I assume the Beware Advantage was rehidden when Randen was pulled from the game. It’s anyone’s to find, and this trailer sequence doesn’t reveal much about it. My wild guess is that Hunter’s going to find it. He’s been portrayed so far as someone hiding under the radar but revealing his intense knowledge of the ins and outs of Survivor in private confessionals.
Separately, Jeff has noticeably highlighted Hunter’s challenge skills. For now, it hasn’t been taken negatively by other players deeming him as a challenge threat, but I have a feeling it’s foreshadowing something to come, perhaps at the individual challenges portion of the game. In any case, the additional Beware Advantage now would certainly give Hunter the security to blindside Soda with Tevin and Liz, as they planned in the last episode.
I’m sticking to my prediction last week that the Nami votes will be split between Soda and Venus. Even more so after Episode 4, I feel that Soda is getting blindsided sooner or later by the people she thought she was working with. She’s portrayed with too much overconfidence while being undermined as an annoyance to others in the tribe. For cunning players like Tevin and Hunter, who are strategising moves ahead, it’s more fruitful to keep Venus, who seems to have few alternatives, over Soda.
Lastly, for the Siga tribe, we see Tim asking Jem, “You moved the Beware Advantage?” which Jem immediately denies. In episode 4, she re-hid the Beware Advantage clue and led her tribe to its location, managing to cause much confusion, wasting her tribe’s time and energy, and inciting some paranoia, all while having some fun in the process.
After much futile digging, the consensus from the Siga tribe is that the Beware Advantage was planted there and not by Jeff or the production team, creating a distrustful hunt for the liar amongst the six Siga players.
This is echoed in Tim’s exasperated confessional: “Somebody’s not telling the truth; we’re all suspects”. It seems like the suspicion isn’t on Jem but on Tim. And from his preview confessional alone, it doesn’t sound like he’s all that aware that people are suspecting him, perhaps too focused on trying his best to find the advantage and track down who’s the culprit.
I think Jem will continue to stay under the radar in the coming episode. She has the majority of the numbers with Moriah, Maria, and Charlie. At the same time, she’ll continue throwing Tim under the bus since they don’t seem to be working together. Tim seems a little too naive, so I think he’ll be the next to go if Siga loses the immunity challenge.
What do you think will happen in Episode 5? Leave a comment with your predictions!
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I’ve been saying it for weeks but I agree that Tim is the next boot. I don’t see Soda going this early and I think the purple 3 make merge.
I sure hope the episodes get better. Blami was the saddest excuse I have seen for a player on Survivor, and was a disgrace not only to himself, but to his culture of people. Crying and being pitiful gets you nowhere in Survivor. This lame was drawing the game down. I can’t wait to see all of his team reduced to either vote out with nothing, or else jury. Without an idol or chance, they’re not looking at all too good, and the whole remaining lot of them are rats! Good Riddance, Blami! U truly sucked, in more ways than one.
Tiff has an idol, and I can see the girls playing the middle enough to go deep