Survivor 48 — Season Finale Reaction
Survivor 48 is done, and a new winner is crowned. After today, all talk moves to Survivor 50 (poor Survivor 49). Let’s dive in!
A Fairly Quick Episode 12 Reaction: They (Finally) Make a Move!
I ended up going on vacation before finishing my writeup for the previous episode so I’ll summarize my thoughts here. Finally, someone made a winning move and those people were Kyle and Kamilla, though I thought it benefitted Kyle the most as he continued to be the most in the middle while taking on the most responsibility for engineering the blindside while Kamilla played sidekick as the one outside the Strong Four alliance. It reminded me of Dee’s big blindside in the final six of Survivor 45 that set her up nicely to win the game. Meanwhile, Joe continues to look like a poor Survivor player as he used weird interrogation techniques on Shauhin to eventually believe the lie that Kyle planted, while in reality Shauhin had no intention to vote out Joe because he thought he would beat him in the end. Whether Shauhin was accurate or delulu about his chances of beating Joe and Eva are up in the air; he felt so safe that he was completely oblivious to the possibility that tribemates would turn the vote against him and it cost Shauhin dearly. Personally I was ready to see Shauhin go home because he was on my last nerve… he exemplifies the modern New Era castaway as a white collar superfan with little personality beyond loving Survivor, playing up to producer jokes, and believing he’s the main character.
The only other thing that really stood out as discussion worthy was the heavy, awkward, out of left field Joe trauma dump. Joe shared about his sister Joanna and how she died due to an abusive relationship, and how Joe’s last conversation with his sister was a fight. Very heavy stuff, very sad story. Joe continued to talk about Joanna back at camp and it climaxed in a by-the-ocean monologue where he finally says sorry to his sister with Survivor sticking a camera under his nose. We should really be thankful no one wanted to blindside Joe before the final six in Survivor 48, or else he never would’ve been able to come to peace with the death of his sister. But in all seriousness, it felt as if Joe had a lot of work left to do processing this really hard situation and Survivor wanted to get some sort of inspiring closure moment on video, while I think a real therapy session not on camera would probably have done a lot more justice to Joe’s emotional stress. It was an odd side story to throw into the episode for the sake of emotional drama.
Heading into the finale my power rankings were:
5. Mitch
4. Eva
3. Joe
2. Kamilla
1. Kyle
I continued to feel very confident that Kyle would win the season, only really considering Kamilla and Joe as a possible winner if Kyle was not at the final tribal council.
Only the Strong Survive: Mitch is Sacrificed, Kamilla Falters in Fire
Nothing like leading off the finale with the most undramatic vote of the season! Mitch is basically told he’s going home because he’s too likable… sucks for Mitch, but he had a chance to make a move at final eight by tying the vote and instead he was the one that shut that plan down. It is the consequences of his own actions. As for why Joe wasn’t targeted even though he has been called the biggest threat all season? Joe isn’t the biggest threat anymore. With Kyle and Kamilla’s manipulation of the Shauhin vote, they know that they have the trump card over the Lagi duo in FTC, so they rather send Mitch to the jury as someone who will most definitely vote for one of them over Joe or Eva.
Two duos enter the final four with different philosophies. Joe and Eva are sticking together no matter what and are not fazed by the possibility of dividing votes amongst each other. Kyle and Kamilla are the exact opposite, as they tell each other they won’t be picking each other to go to the end before the challenge. Kyle wins the challenge and takes Joe as a result. Maybe Kamilla should’ve waited to give Kyle permission to send her to fire until the result of the challenge was known, at least to make Kyle’s decision a little harder. Instead Kamilla goes to fire and can’t even get a single spark going in the time it takes Eva to make and lose a fire, have a mini meltdown, and then make fire again to win. Props to the preparation Eva took before going on the show to be competent enough at fire to overcome all the emotions she experienced. It certainly would have made for an uncomfortable firemaking challenge if Eva succumbed to her spiral as Kamilla continued to fail at her fire.
Kamilla played a solid game buoyed by her fantastic working relationship with Kyle, and according to the jury in the reunion they would have loved to vote for her to win as an underdog… which I didn’t really perceive through the edit but hey, I wasn’t there in person. I imagine the season would have been presented very differently if Kamilla made it to the final three, but instead it is the Joe-Eva duo that stays intact for Kyle to dismantle with facts and logic in FTC.
Secret Duos are Simply Cooler
Final tribal council felt a bit disjointed this season, I think mainly based on one pitch being much better than the other two. Ultimately when you look at the gameplay, Kyle’s reasoning to win was much stronger than Joe and Eva.
I perceived Joe’s silence in the final tribal council to be quite loud for someone who was often brought up as the number one threat to beat. Joe banked on a pitch of empathetic, alliance strong gameplay that he himself said was purposely driven by a desire to not make resume moves. That pitch doesn’t work very well when in reality, he did make resume moves with the betrayals of David and Shauhin, two castaways that weren’t turning on Joe. Like it or not Joe went back on promises. Much of what made tribal council feel off to me was the fact that we don’t see Joe face any pushback from the jury at all for what looked to me like loyalty breaches. It’s almost as if Survivor didn’t want to paint Joe in a negative light, so they focused on his challenge strength instead, which is ironic because I felt they spent a ton of time throughout the season making Joe look like a bad Survivor strategist.
Eva, however, surprised me a bit with her pitch. She strongly stood up for her own game and presented her alliance with Joe as a key cornerstone of trust in her social strategy to ensure her safety, in the face of the difficulties she had to overcome with playing a ruthless and draining competitive survival game with autism. Joe really is the perfect ally for Eva — Eva struggles with deciphering lies, and Joe literally committed to playing Survivor without telling any lies. The pitch starts to fall apart when the topic of strategic moves comes up, because Eva leaned heavily on her and Joe being the most dominant duo the game of Survivor has ever seen (holy hyperbole!) with their magnum opus being how they sniffed out that Shauhin was planning to blindside them at final six. The problem is… Shauhin wasn’t planning to blindside them at all, and their whole reasoning for voting out Shauhin was rooted in lies disseminated by Kyle and Kamilla.
The Kyle and Kamilla partnership is revealed here, and I imagine this is when the final tribal council officially swung heavily in Kyle’s favor. Shout out to Kamilla for providing the ultimate assist to her number one ally. She was not swayed by the fire in Eva’s eyes as she won firemaking or a spontaneous feminist urge as a certain jury member was in a recent season.
In the end, the Joe and Eva duo proved to be strong enough to make the final tribal council, but too weak to make a legit case to win. I find myself asking a lot of questions about how strong this duo even was for the back half of the game given the result. Was the edit favored towards the finalists while downplaying the strength of castaways like Shauhin and Kamilla? I imagine new stories will come out of the exit interviews like always to give us new pictures of the Survivor 48 landscape.
Kyle Fraser: The Best Average Survivor Player in Season 48
Few new era players balanced the dance of alliance-based gameplay and strategic resume building in the way that Kyle did as he won Survivor 48 in a 5–2–1 vote.
From the start Kyle was able to find his way into multiple alliances in Civa, first with his Guyanese sister-from-another-mister Kamilla, then with the majority alliance on the tribe spearheaded by David. A tribe swap threw a major roadblock into his game when he and Kamilla were swapped onto a new tribe in the minority against three tightly aligned Lagi castaways. In this trial, Kyle and Kamilla began enacting their secret alliance strategy, presenting themselves as adversaries just trying to survive the next vote against each other. Behind the acting, they quietly collaborated to sus out that Kyle was the “California Girls” alliance target, and Kyle used the idol he found on Civa to save himself and send home Thomas. After that vote, Kyle began bonding with Joe and Shauhin, and at the merge he joined the Strong Five, an alliance composed of physical threats. Kyle, however, was not on board with the “no backstabbing” agenda some in the alliance had, so he kept up his secret alliance with Kamilla as a contingency plan for when he needed a big move.
Kyle encountered a second roadblock when David began to push for Kamilla to be voted out, but Kyle fought for Kamilla and eventually helped turn the Strong Five alliance against the original founder: David. During this time, Kyle became very close with Joe and a new emotional bond was formed. As the numbers dwindled, Kyle refused to vote out Joe due to how close they had become despite many begging him to flip… but he wasn’t opposed to leveraging that relationship for his own gain. At final six he reignited his secret alliance with Kamilla in a new plan, throwing Shauhin under the bus to Joe and Eva with two lies: that Shauhin was going to vote out Eva, and that Shauhin had shown Kamilla a hidden immunity idol. Kamilla backed up Kyle’s story and Joe and Eva ran with the bait, betraying an ally that was loyal to him. Kyle rode this blindside to the final three where he revealed he secretly lied about his occupation and detailed the inner workings of his in-the-middle gameplay with support from Kamilla.
Kyle only found himself in true danger one time in the pre-merge where he saved himself in the idol, and in the post-merge he was so central to the tribe that no one looked to target him as a strong player. It allowed him to play openly in the middle between the Strong Five and his former Civa tribemates risk-free. It is a well-deserved victory.
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Weirdest Survivor Producer Fetish: Mud Obstacles
The boys returning from the final five challenge made a point about how all their challenges seem to involve getting insanely muddy. I’ve noticed too. They really have upped the mud challenges, and I imagine it’s because they like making the castaways look unclean and disheveled, like they are really on Naked and Afraid and not on CBS.
Most Unserious (But Also, Most Serious): David
Turns out that David’s mean mugging we have come to love was ultimately all a setup for him to make a knock-knock joke at FTC, to where he’d reveal he actually had no hard feelings about being blindsided. No hard feelings, it’s not that deep! Then again, David committed to the bit for over a week just to make one joke, which indicates that he is actually super serious… about entertaining the Survivor fans.
Legacy Talk — Rating Kyle’s Win Against Other New Era Winners
Kyle’s win is near the top in my eyes, right there with Dee’s for the best in the New Era. He made big moves and excelled in the social game, crafting an ideal final three where he could stake his claim for deserving winner to the jury. The only real knock I can make to his game is that there was a real chance that Kamilla would’ve beaten him in the final tribal council if she won firemaking. They played similar games, but Kamilla was the likable underdog for the jury while Kyle was the frontrunner supporting the Joe and Eva evil empire. But that’s a what-if that didn’t come to pass.
The Returner Heat Check
MY PERSONAL SEASON 50 LOCK: David
At the time of writing, the Survivor 50 cast was revealed hours ago so we all know who the show decided to invite from this season… David was not one of those people, and that is disappointing to me. He was a very different player than what we get in the new era and he ascended to meme status in a way no other castaway on the season had.
POSSIBLE RETURNEE CANDIDATES: Sai, Thomas
If not David, I would’ve picked Sai or Thomas. Sai was chaotic and entertaining, especially compared to the rest of this cast. And Thomas became a major what-if, as he evolved into a fan favorite for his wit and untimely demise. He would be good for a second chance style season.
UNLIKELY TO RETURN, BUT IRONIC BECAUSE THEY ARE RETURNING: Joe, Kamilla, Kyle
I’ll save my thoughts for a subsequent blog post. In short: none of the three would make my Survivor 50 cast.
THE HALI FORD ZONE: Mary, Shauhin, Eva, Mitch
While Mary and Shauhin were good for entertainment or producer bits and Eva and Mitch are Survivor glass-ceiling breakers, I don’t need any of them on one more season, mainly because they didn’t play well enough on this season.
NO WAY: Star, Chrissy, Cedrek, Charity, Bianca, Justin (Pizza), Kevin, Stephanie
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Final thoughts on Survivor 48? The pre-merge was good, but the stagnant post-merge drags this season down to the Low C to High D tier. The post-merge dynamics were too simple because it was so alliance based and predictable and I found myself missing the drama of the past two seasons. This season really could have been shortened down to 60 minutes and I think it would have been better.
However, the momentum builds for the next cycle of Survivor seasons… especially Survivor 50. Soon I will be sharing my reactions to the newly announced Survivor 50 cast, and over the summer I plan to flesh out a very large ranking of every New Era Survivor player. So stay locked in! Survivor will be back soon and so will I.