Survivor fans, we wish you happy holidays and Merry Christmas!

After an up and down year for Survivor fans in 2018, we at Surviving Tribal would like to wish you all a safe and happy holiday season.

What an odd, strange trip it’s been for Survivor this year. We started out with a tribute to the game’s history with Ghost Island, bringing back trinkets from past castaways and re-introducing them into the canon to test whether or not they were truly cursed. In fact, it wasn’t so much the trinkets that were cursed as much as it was the tribes themselves.

Despite being the “best tribe ever,” Malolo experienced a failure to launch, losing the first two Immunity Challenges and swapping at a 5-4 disadvantage on both new tribes and, later, a Malolo disadvantage on each of the three swapped tribes. Naviti was cursed in the idea that you either needed to follow along for the greater good or get chopped off early, leading towards an inevitable end.

In the second half of Survivor in 2018, we were blessed with one of the greatest seasons this show has seen, bringing forth 20 great personalities on an island together, breaking them down to the underdog and the privileged with David vs. Goliath. Everyone was humbled by the Fijian weather, bringing folks together despite their differences and making sure everybody wanted to compete and play the game hard.

Sure, there was a medical evacuation and a medical-adjacent quit, in addition to a number of no-shows at the reunion, but that did not detract from a character-driven pre-merge that set up everyone’s personality and goals within the game, nor a game-dynamic post-merge phase where twists and turns kept players (and the audience) on their toes.

Survivor has been emblematic of 2018 as a whole; especially so with David vs. Goliath. Sure, it may seem like the little guy keeps getting beaten down over and over as the upper crust knock them down over and over. However, for all the bad news that keeps pouring in, the glimmer of hope shines bright, and the underdog looks poised to win it all, bringing hope into the future.

From all of us at Surviving Tribal, we would like to wish you happy holidays and Merry Christmas!