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.
Warning: This article contains a spoiler of the immunity winner, as shown in the preview.
Without a doubt, the headline story for the upcoming episode is the double elimination. Jeff announces at the challenge, “Two people are going home tonight” while standing next to two individual immunity necklaces. If things are going as per last season, we’ll see the twelve players split into two groups of six for the challenge. Each group will have one immunity winner and will go to tribal council separately, where one person from each group will be eliminated.
By carefully viewing the shots in the preview trailers, you’ll be able to make out the division—we see Tim, Hunter, Tiffany, Kenzie balancing on orange platforms in the sea while Q and Ben sit on a bench nearby. In some others shots, Liz and Tevin are seen standing on purple platforms, and from there we can deduce that the remaining four players—Soda, Maria, Charlie, and Venus—are grouped together on purple.
Additionally—and here’s a spoiler warning for those who don’t want to know the outcome of the challenge—the preview sneaks a shot of some players walking down the beach, presumably to tribal council. It’s only onscreen for a quick moment, but we see that Kenzie is the winner from her group as she’s wearing the individual immunity necklace.
So let’s start with my predictions for the orange tribe: With Kenzie winning immunity and serendipitously grouped with her Yanu teammates Tiffany and Q again, they have the majority of three out of six players versus one player formerly from Nami, Hunter, and two players formerly from Siga, Ben and Tim.
There are some hints from the NTOS trailer of fractions among the Yanu 3 though—Tiffany rants to Kenzie, “This is not the Q show. That ain’t gonna work for us.” And Kenzie declares, “This could go into chaos mode.” Even though on paper it seems Q has been making inroads forming alliances and securing new social bonds with other players since his journey, I find that he’s also been somewhat undermined as a difficult player. This snippet from the preview extends my belief that Q is going to get blindsided by his former Yanu tribemates sooner or later.
However, for this split tribal double elimination vote, the turbulent, ever-twisty nature of the new era almost means it pays to play it safe. I think the Yanu 3 will stick together for now—Kenzie and Tiff will put up with Q for just a few days more, as he’s a familiar, reliable number on their (or at least Tiffany’s) side.
Instead, my prediction is that the orange tribe vote will be between Hunter and Tim in a battle between Nami and Siga again, similar to the last episode. I feel that Hunter will be targeted as players may see him as a challenge threat. Over the past few episodes, there’s been casual mention of his puzzle-solving abilities, and he’s clearly performing really well at challenges.
As for Tim, there’s this lingering unresolved feeling that he’s going to be blindsided for tunnelling in pretty hard on solving Jem’s rehidden Beware Advantage clue and not noticing how he was coming across to others. I feel like that might come back to bite him, especially in this period where Siga versus Nami seems to be the dominant narrative.
For the purple group, we don’t know who’s winning, so it’s quite tough to predict how the dynamics will play out. However, there are a few foreshadowed clues we can build off—of course, one would be Venus being at the bottom of Nami and perhaps even the merge tribe. She chaotically sews discord and isn’t working with anyone in particular. She would be an easy choice to vote out for this double elimination episode.
There’s also an arc about Tevin and Liz wanting to blindside Soda. I think this would be the likely turn of events, and we’ll see Soda eliminated, which would be cause for Tevin’s soundbite in the NTOS preview, “It could be a blindside tonight.” This scenario has just been set up one too many times over the last few episodes to be a decoy.
I also think we’ll see the Maria and Charlie duo last for a while more as a pair that manages to sneak through the cracks undetected, controlling votes from the background and not drawing attention to themselves. Even though they’re outnumbered four to two by Nami here, I think this vote will be the one where they’ll break Nami apart—when the tribe/group is small, encouraging them to make a move.
This episode’s going to be pretty brutal for at least one of the players. If Season 46 follows the events of last season, the first person eliminated would be just shy of making the jury.
Nonetheless, it’ll make for an exciting episode for us! What do you think will happen? Leave a comment with your predictions!
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