Despite taking an incredibly risky gamble in delaying the merge by an episode - in favor of a swap to three tribes of four - Episode 6 of Survivor 49 managed to escape disaster, as two horrible possible outcomes (MC or Nate getting cut down in a simple 3-1 vote) slipped away in favor of a satisfying conclusion to a long-simmering storyline: Sage's one-sided feud with Shannon.

Importantly, the outcome (Sage blindsiding Shannon) was a heavy enough lift that two other less-desirable ones on that tribe - Steven also getting brutally cut right before merge due to a simple 3-1 majority of original Ulis, or Jawan leaving, despite his many attempts to improve his position within Uli - seemed more likely at first. Sage's move actually took some footwork to pull off, which made it more satisfying. (And the "Oh no, this move is going to really piss off the original Hina tribe" worries of the past two votes were replaced by "Oh no, this is really going to piss off the original Uli tribe." Everything is worrisome!)

So to sum up: After making a smart move and swapping to two tribes in Ep4, only to have it play out in the most unexciting way possible over two votes, production decided to make an incredibly unwise and risky move, which would have produced extremely unsatisfying and dull outcomes on two of the three tribes, but got incredibly lucky, and the one tribe that lost was the one where an interesting vote was plausible, and it happened! Do the right thing, get screwed. Do the wrong thing, paydirt! So much for karma.

Ah well, on to the stats-based analysis:

"Tribal Council should be terrifying" ... that's why I'm making easy to skip

Jeff Probst said this (the part in quotes, at least), confidently, before the immunity challenge. But why should Tribal be terrifying? Isn't the point of the game to get enough numbers on your side so that it's not? I mean, for new era Survivor, the answer is obviously no. The obvious goal of the new era is to eventually have a Tribal where nobody is able to vote, and someone is sent home based on vibes alone.

Probst loves to characterize the new era pre-merge as a time where there's "nowhere to hide," because of small tribes. (Jawan's "first act of a horror movie" fits this perfectly.) Still, tell that to Kristina and Sophie, who have yet to attend Tribal Council. They hid their way in plain sight through six episodes, loudly chanting "Hi! Na!" and annoying the Ulis, stopping challenges to receive medical attention, and ... they made it! Through no fault of their own, mostly. Neither of them played much of a direct role in any of their tribe's immunity victories (although Sophie helped on a puzzle and a table maze). Rather, they mostly relied on people like MC and Jason to get them through. They now hit the merge probably not on anyone's radar. They're just two mostly anonymous, non-threatening, members of original Hina.

How does this happen? That's easy, it's because of Probst's insistence on two things: (1) Always three starting tribes, which, every time a new episode rolls around, gives each player a 67% chance of not having to attend Tribal Council, and (2) his "sorry for you" bit of taking away the losing tribe's flint, which boosts those 67% odds up even higher.

Let's compare two-tribe pre-merges to three-tribe pre-merges. How many times have people reached the merge without attending Tribal in two-tribe seasons vs. three-tribe seasons? For three tribes, let's specifically focus on the new era (Survivor 41 through 49), because they've steadfastly refused to waver from the three-tribe format at any point, not until Episode 4 of this season, anyway ... and then two episodes later (this week), we switched back to three again. In six of the nine new era seasons (a clean 67%!) at least two people hit the merge without having attending Tribal: six in Survivor 41 (the entire Luvu tribe); two in 44; four in 45 (everyone but Kaleb on post-swap Lulu); five in 46 (Nami, minus medevaced Randen); four in 48 (all of post-swap Lagi, except Mary); and now three more this season (MC, Sophie, Kristina, all original Hinas). To be sure, swaps help limit that somewhat, in breaking up overly dominant tribes, but you know what *really* helps? Starting with two tribes.

For the best comparison, let's look back at single-digit era Survivor (except S8: All-Stars, which also had three tribes). Seasons 1-7 and 9-10 are ten almost-consecutive seasons that, like the new era, didn't have swaps in the first two. Guess how many times people hit the merge without going to Tribal? Just once, in S10: Palau (and we're being charitable here and not counting the Koror tribal where they were forced to boot Willard because production needed a double boot, and didn't offer immunity that episode).

It's exceedingly rare for someone in a two-tribe season to reach the merge without having attended Tribal. It just doesn't happen. The only other non-Palau case in the first 31 seasons is Joe Anglim and Keith Nale in S31: Cambodia, and that's due to a combination of Joe's challenge prowess and a swap *to* three tribes in Ep3 (so it's as much a three-tribe pre-merge as it is a two-tribe one). Yet in three-tribe seasons, at least two people do that two-thirds of the time. This memorably also happened in S25: Philippines (the whole Tandang tribe), and in S32: Kaoh Rong (Nick and Michele), two of the seasons people point to as pre-new-era successful three-tribe seasons.)

Jeff Probst can't stop talking about how *hard* the new era game is. So why is he making it so much easier to not actually play it? It just defies logic that the show spends so much time finding and casting competent game players who are fans of the show, only to prevent them playing it for the first half of the season (and then editing them out of the pre-merge, because they didn't have anything to do). It's the flip side of the disaster tribe problem, and it's just as frustrating to watch. Or in the cases of Kristina and Sophie's barely-detectable screen presence in the first half of the season, not watch.

Racing to the merge

Given that we still haven't seen a quarter of the merge tribe play yet, it's still a bit premature to evaluate how well everyone's doing this season. But we've at least seen enough to think that Jeff Probst's pre-season promise that the post-merge would be "bananas" seems plausible. He's since updated that statement with more details, including that he explicitly told the merge tribe that the cast for Survivor 50 had not been finalized, and if they impressed him, they could still make it. (Which is both clever and icky-feeling, in roughly equal parts.)

So how crazy could the gameplay get? It's clear at this point that there are very few rock-solid alliances, and even in the ones that have voted together a few times, there are cracks. That should work out well for the game.

The Uli Three (plus one or two or three?): The core group of Savannah, Nate, and Rizo has been the main focus the past few episodes, but they also had a lot of airtime when we were mostly mired in disaster-tribe original Kele at the start of the season. All three have worked together well, they've demonstrated solid social games and good strategic thinking. None seems like an obvious target, unlike potential challenge beasts MC and Alex. And each is delivering solid, entertaining confessionals. It's hard to know if they're so present in the edit because they all go far (together), or because they're all good at being on TV.

Like the Reba Four (from S45), each of these three has a solid connection to two other players in the alliance. Unlike the Reba Four, that doesn't leave a fourth person as their most likely target ... unless we include Sophi, who appears to have replaced Shannon as the fourth member of the alliance. At least until she has to use her new advantage against Rizo. (Would we have gotten Sophi explicitly setting up that expectation if it doesn't happen?) Sophi feels closer to Savannah than to the two guys, so that's where that could go.

It'll be interesting to see how they react to the news of Shannon's blindside. Jawan and Sage were clearly outside that group, although Jawan made so many moves to ingratiate himself to them (taking out Matt and Jason when he potentially had the option not to, playing the team disadvantage against Hina, rigging the rock draw for the journey), and could theoretically get back in with them by throwing Sage under the bus for the Shannon blindside. (Even though we've repeatedly been told Sophi is #4 in that alliance, not Jawan.) Part of Jawan's opening monologue in the premiere explicitly foreshadowed "but then you *become* the monster" (in the individual phase), and I really hope we indeed get to see that version of Jawan.

Opposing them are Hina, mostly led by Steven and MC. Alex could be pulled in relatively easily, he seems to gotten along with Steven pretty well. Steven also bonded briefly with Jawan, and could pull him away from Uli. And of course, there are also Kristina and Sophie, one of whom was plotting against the other just this episode, but a merge might fix that.

Most likely, we will see an episode or two of overt "Uli vs. Hina" posturing, then all these grievances and minor disputes could start being settled (Savannah vs. Jawan, Sophie and MC vs. Kristina). Steven and MC were depicted as a pair (when from Jason's exit interviews they were more of a trio), so that bond will probably last for a while.

Trinket watch: Rizo comes into the merge armed with an idol that everyone knows about. MC enters with a still-to-be-found idol, although the ease of Rizo's search makes it seem very likely she will complete the find this week, with everyone in one camp. Only MC and Steven should know about it, which gives MC an edge over Rizo, because as we saw this episode, Sophi now has Knowledge is Power, and is already considering using it on Rizo's idol. Finally, it's unclear if an idol was re-hidden at Kele after Alex played his (it should have been), but if one was, nobody ever found it. But hey, guess what camp the merge is going to being setting up at? See above.

"Intuition"

Earlier this season, we noted that it was quite odd that both the original Hina and Uli tribes spontaneously decided to conduct (separate) group searches for their still-unfound Beware advantage clues, the day before the swap to two tribes happened. This week, we saw Rizo tell Savannah and Sophi that he had "intuition" that there was an advantage hidden at Hina beach. (His exact word, "advantage.")

When contestants leave camp to film a confessional, it's called "taking a walk" (so that when another contestant asks where that person is, you don't get the fourth wall-breaking "Oh, they're off talking to a producer"). I'm not one to indulge in tinfoil buff conspiracies, for the most part, but it sure seems like "intuition" is code for "a producer just hinted that there's something hidden somewhere around camp, and we should look for it right now. Tick tock, tick tock, people."

The even more conspiracy-ish angle to this is: Are we really meant to believe that there was an advantage hidden at *each* camp, and only Rizo was wise enough to think to look for one? (Again, on the day before the merge.) That seems highly unlikely, and it makes you wonder why production was playing favorites and only giving the four new new Hina members the chance to grab a potentially game-changing advantage. (The answer is obvious, this group of people are all great TV, and there was a chance they'd go to Tribal, and if they did, MC would have played her idol, and then there was no way to save the production faves, not without KiP!) Still, couldn't they have waited ONE more day, and put it in the merge tribe camp?

The land of tepid takes

1-for-2 for Rizo: After a visibly dragging Jeff Probst complained about the heat, Rizo's quick-witted "Welcome to Survivor!" comeback was pretty funny, mainly because coming from Rizo it doesn't come across remotely as mean-spirited as it looks written out there. His scene detailing his five-second journey to the water's edge in fishing gear (did nobody tell him he can put those things on in the water?), which us the "Devil's Shoes" title quote, however, was a bit of a whiff. It was funny-ish, but mostly seemed like a premeditated bit that he cooked up with production. (The best part was the end, doing his "RIZ-GOD" thing with the mask and snorkel on in confessional, then stopping to spit because "that thing tasted like garbage.") Rizo is really gifted at light, goofy humor, but his talent is clearly in spur-of-the-moment improv. The "Rizo does not go fishing" segment had a semi-scripted feel, which is a bit of a worry going forward.

Telling people what they want to hear doesn't always work ... especially if they're doing the same thing to you. Post-IC, Shannon tells Jawan that Tribal should be "a no-brainer," what with three ex-Ulis and one ex-Hina (Steven). Jawan correctly agrees, "I think it was just meant to happen that we would come back together." He's not only telling Shannon what (he thinks) she wants to hear, but in terms that she's likely to respond to ("It's fate! It's the universe!") Despite Jawan playing this off as he should be, Shannon still votes for Jawan.

It's striking that all four people on new new Kele were doing this pretty effectively. Her behind-the-back facemaking aside, Sage was excellent at letting Shannon think she was 100% with her (and that Shannon's ideas were the best plan). Steven was also really good at getting close to Jawan in a non-threatening way, and picking up the clues Sage was giving him, while leaving open the option to work with Shannon, if that ended up being where the numbers fell. These are all people playing the game well, you love to see it! (Except, obviously, that Shannon was overvaluing her own persuasiveness.)

I'm Mr. Brightside: Speaking of good-natured, this episode really laid bare how much emphasis casting is putting on finding *extremely* positive people these days. Steven talked about how the game was testing that for him. Alex talked about it as well. Shannon was an extreme example, where she was so relentlessly upbeat that it felt a bit forced. It makes sense that you want players who have enough mental strength to push through hard times, and a deep well of positivity to pull from when the game gets hard. Personally, I enjoy players like Nate, who comes across as thoughtful, calm, and caring, and plays strategically, but in a non-confrontational way. People with that set of tools always seem to go far. But is it possible that this casting focus is eliminating more cutthroat players?