Welcome to Season 48’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.
This week’s NTOS trailer heavily centres around David, who looks slightly frantic as he goes around talking to his tribemates. Joe says to Kyle, “David is losing his mind. It’s going to cause a rift between all of us.” My guess is that the “us” refers to the merge alliance of Joe, Kyle, David, Eva, and Shauhin, who might be feeling some hesitation as David deviates from their collective plans.
Next, Kyle is seen confronting David, almost in an attempt to calm him down or help him refocus. I bet this happens after the immunity challenge when some players are on journeys and may come back with advantages, jeopardising David’s prior plans and causing him to spiral.
But what I found most interesting from the trailer, was Kyle telling Kamilla, “David is trying to flip it to you,” again highlighting Kyle and Kamilla’s secret alliance that seems to be key in this post-merge stage of the game. I can see the duo going far together, as I believe both understand that it’s valuable to have such a hidden alliance at this point of the game, and it’s not much use targeting each other just yet.
In any case, we see Kyle staying true to his main ally, revealing David’s plans to her. Honestly, I think it’s too obvious for Kamilla to be the real target. Instead, I guess that David offers her name as a secondary option just in case his main target wins immunity or plays an advantage. I predict that Kyle, and possibly others in the alliance, would be able to dissuade David from voting Kamilla and change his vote to someone more immediately threatening, like Mitch, who isn’t working with the group. I don’t think Kamilla will be catching stray votes in the coming episode.
Moving on from David, the promo trailers show significant focus on Chrissy. As she declares, “I’m not going to sit back and let them run the show. Not playing that way,” the shot lingers on Shauhin and Eva in the background. Chrissy is clearly on the outs without a strong majority alliance—she seems aligned with only Mitch, and we haven’t seen much of her other relationships, unfortunately.
Nonetheless, I found this interesting as we are also given a sneak peek at a scene where Mitch confesses how he wants to get the original Civa members back together. There are five of them left—Chrissy, Kamilla, Kyle, David, and Mitch himself—making up just half of the remaining ten players in the game. I can definitely see Mitch and Chrissy working hard in the next episode trying to gather these numbers again.
However, I’m not very hopeful for them. The alliance of strong players seems to be more dominant. They each have close relationships out of their core five that they can work with. For example, Kyle has Kamilla, and Eva and Joe have Star. Unfortunately, I think Chrissy and Mitch are just on the wrong side of the numbers, waiting for their time to get voted out.
Finally, we learn a bit about the challenge from the episode’s press release which states that the players are “forced to divide into pairs” to compete for immunity. Assuming the challenge is a format similar to past new era seasons, it will likely be played in three stages. The last pair to finish the first stage loses their votes but gets a chance to earn them back on the journey trip, and the final pairs that make it to the last stage get reward and compete for individual immunity.
My predictions for the episode are as follows—as mentioned, I think Chrissy and Mitch are sitting ducks at the bottom. My best guess would be that either one of them goes home this week, after a good fight trying to reunite the original Civa tribe, but I’m leaning towards Mitch as he’s perceived as a greater jury threat.
What are your predictions for Episode 8? Leave them in the comments below!
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Hmm, I think it will be Chrissy going out after her speech at tribal. It might even be what makes David “spiral”
Wow that a good prediction