When Survivor introduced 90-minute episodes, it allowed more opportunity to explore the game's social side. With commercials, an episode's content is a little over an hour, so essentially fans were given an actual hour-long episode of Survivor each week.
But this week, Survivor 48 squeezed every last drop of social juice out of their time slot, giving us the most dynamic—and talkative—build up to Tribal Council, yet.
Spoilers for episode 9 ahead!
Challenges and Tribal Councils usually run anywhere between 15-20 minutes, individually, usually accounting for half the episode collectively. But this week, they were both around 9 minutes. We also got to see Eva Erickson's taco reward journey play out, but that was only about 6 minutes.
Episode 9 had over 40 minutes of solid social gameplay.
And speaking of time stamps, did anyone else notice that we did not hear a word from Star Toomey or Mitch Guerra for the first 20 minutes? All of a sudden, after the Strong 5 spent a quarter of an hour imploding, Mitch pops up teaching Star how to swim.
The extreme switch from teeth-grinding gameplay to a genuine moment of humanity was a major flag for me. It made it clear that Mitch and Star are not only establishing a good relationship with each other, but also that they might be the only people left who are actually playing with the "honor" everyone keeps preaching this season.
With Kamilla Karthigesu continuously bringing up the importance of jury management, it has me wondering if this might be a season where the jury doesn't choose a winner based on who had the best overall resume, but on who burnt the least amount of bridges. If that's the case, though neither of them has been slacking in gameplay by any means, I could see either Star or Mitch walking away with the title of Sole Survivor.
Lions, and hyenas, and goats, oh my!
One of the best Survivor metaphors of all time came from two-time winner Tony Vlachos (Survivor: Cagayan; Survivor: Game Changers; Survivor: Winners at War) who explained that the lions—the biggest perceived threats—always go after each other while the hyenas—the less obvious, but still just as dangerous threats—wait from the sidelines to clear out the lions after they've already done most of the heavy hitting.
But then of course, Survivor also has the goats—players made to look like they didn't hit the same gameplay levels as those around them—that are often taken to the end because they're considered easy to win against. However, as I noted above, this season being "the goat" might not be such a bad thing, if the jury is going into Final Tribal rooting against lions and hyenas.
But with David Kinne's exit at the end of episode 9, it's a very clear divide of who falls into what category and what the path forward might look like with the "eat or be eaten" gameplay style that his vote out initiated.
Lions: Joe Hunter, Kyle Fraser, Shauhin Davari, Eva Erickson
Hyenas: Mary Zheng, Kamilla Karthigesu
Goats: Mitch Guerra, Star Toomey
Next time on Survivor...
With Mary upset that her number one ally went home, there's no way she's going to want to stick with the remaining Strong 5 members. Considering Eva purposefully never told her about securing Safety Without Power, it seems the Strong 5 doesn't trust her either. Star also wasn't included in the David vote, which gives Mary someone to seek trust in, and with Star connected to Mitch and Mitch connected with Kamilla, we're looking at a team-up of the hyenas and goats to take out a lion.
Of course, one of those lions—Kyle—is still tightly aligned with a hyena—Kamilla. If the two of them can prevent Joe, Eva, and Shauhin from securing the individual immunity necklace, they could put together a master plan where one of them is blindsided and they flush out Eva's idol and Safety Without Power.
I predict another dialogue-heavy, whirlwind of an episode of Survivor 48 that you won't want to miss! Tune in this Wednesday at 8 pm ET on CBS and Paramount+.