Episode 8 of Survivor 49 gave the audience a feel-good, playing-from-the-bottom narrative, or at least it might have if the path to that outcome didn't feel like it had the heavy hand of production on the scales. (Also, it probably might have felt more uplifting if the editors hadn't decided that "no, Rizo and Savannah are actually the bad guys!" the second the merge hit.) The central culprit in the discontent? A forced separation of the just-merged contestants into two teams, one of which did not attend Tribal Council, putting the fate of the booted contestant in the hands of four people decided by yet another a random rock draw (the third in the last five episodes). The four then became five when *another* twist was added on top of the first, and Savannah potentially got to add her vote to the mix. She didn't, but her presence was enough to drive the outcome.

The "split-squad challenge" in the post-merge, where two random teams are formed and attend Tribal Council separately (or only one does, as we saw here and in S44 and S47), has been a near-constant presence in the show since S36: Ghost Island. It first debuted in S14: Fiji, where it was highly unpopular with the audience, and was wisely shelved for the next 22 seasons. I'm going to suggest something radical here: Maybe they should retire it again for a while?

This mechanism can serve an important purpose: Given that Pagongings are boring for the audience, randomly selecting teams can be a roadblock to a big majority alliance (which we had here) sucking the life out of the early post-merge by plodding along, picking off the hopelessly outnumbered minority one by one. Preventing that from happening is a reasonable goal! And it works best when there's a need - usually it's *also* done to work a double boot in, to quickly reduce the number of players. Production likes to have an excess of players, especially early, in case there's a medevac. (I would argue that even then, it's better to do double boots in the pre-merge, whenever possible.) In this case Jake's departure in Episode 3 had already eased that burden, so there was no real need for teams here. It was more a split-squad of choice situation.

That was one reason why this felt extremely Production Interference-y. It was unnecessary. It was a choice. Especially considering Rizo already had an idol. There was no real reason not to just have a straight individual IC. Teams are for reward! But the vaguely icky feeling was given more substance by the results - all the prizes went to people on the bottom (Rizo and Savannah, also maybe Sophi) and they most benefited from the twist. Setting aside those things, which producers didn't directly control, there were at the least three other factors in play that helped swing Jawan and Sage from working with old Hina (MC and Sophie) to voting against them, some of which production *did* have their fingers on the scale for:

(1) Rizo's idol: Clearly, after he announced his plan to play the idol last Tribal, then did not do so, the obvious move for the majority was to just vote Rizo on the next round, and at least flush the idol. The chances were pretty good he was going to hold on to it again. Not following through on that is 100% on the other four people on the losing team.

But that idol was still an obvious threat, one that was magnified by the miniscule numbers. If you pile all the votes on Rizo and he plays his idol, you have a 1-in-4 chance of being the person booted, which is especially stressful because Rizo's decision to play his idol isn't really something you can control. (Note that this risk feels a lot less threatening if it's 1-in-9 chances on the full 10-person tribe.) So the next safest option is to vote for someone who isn't Rizo. Sage and Jawan don't want to vote for each other, so that leaves the two Hinas. Sophie's attempt to drop a hinky vote on Jawan, as we saw, predictably made Jawan mad. So that probably settled for Jawan that a Hina, preferably Sophie, had to go. Production didn't do a lot to drive this sequence of events - except, obviously, the tiny five-person tribe/team twist. It's the Michelle Yi boot in S14: Fiji all over again, a twist that famously riled up the fanbase at the time. Back again, because ... reasons!

(2) Savannah showing up: If the numbers were already tilting in favor of moving the target off of Rizo initially, Savannah showing up - and being able to cast a sixth vote - probably sealed it. Also, because Savannah was immune, they couldn't just do the obvious 2-2-2 idol-dodging split. So Sage and Jawan were more or less forced to work with Savannah. Savannah adding an extra vote gave the old Ulis confidence in their numbers for taking out a Hina. With six people, you need a group of four, and original tribal lines gave them that in a simple, reliable package.

This twist was 100% production's choice, even if they didn't know ahead of time who was going to be there. They might have picked a better alternative, like perhaps the John K one from S9: Vanuatu, where he had won individual immunity himself, and he got to visit Yasur camp, talk to everyone, then hand a necklace to someone from their tribe (Ami). (Note that this was very, very pre-merge in Vanuatu, not the second vote of the post-merge.) Here, that would pretty obviously just have ended with Savannah giving Rizo immunity, so we would likely have seen a similar outcome to what actually transpired. The S47 version (Savannah remotely sending a person of her choice - again, probably Rizo - a choice of Safety Without Power or a vote block advantage) might have been preferable. But the *most* preferable alternative would have been all 10 people left voting at a normal Tribal.

(3) The subliminal factor - The location: Production had a choice of Uli camp or Hina camp (or even some random neutral beach!) as the destination for the losing team. They chose Uli. While Jawan and Sage were on the bottom of original Uli, it never felt like Jawan was 100% sure he was, and he actively worked to re-ingratiate himself with the core four, at least up until the second swap. So while coming back here was probably a negative experience for Sage (who was gung-ho on booting Rizo), it was likely less so for Jawan, and instead, maybe it reminded him that he still had a fairly decent bond with Rizo. Sure enough, Jawan was the one to back out of the plan to target Rizo, leaving Sage with little choice but to join him. Had they been at Hina, maybe they're more likely to stick with the Hinas?

All in all, the biggest driver of this outcome was the split-Tribal twist itself. Small numbers at Tribal are, to use Probst's new favorite word, "terrifying." So of course nobody tried to power through it and force Rizo to play his idol. And that cascaded down to the original Ulis sticking together and voting out a Hina. All from a simple rock draw. Probst's hands are clean! He was just holding the bag!

Say hello to Alex vs. Rizo?

In a sense, this episode was sort of a strategic debut for both Alex and Rizo. We haven't seen much of Alex talking about the game since he found and played his idol, way back in the pre-(first) swap days. Here he floated the possibility of selling out Kristina's newfound (so-far secret) idol if it suited his purposes in the future. This is also a nice parallel to his original-Kele colleague, Sophi, and her stated willingness to use her Knowledge is Power advantage against Rizo. Also, during the reward feast, Alex mentioned his glee at the five people on the losing team having to whittle down one of their numbers with no input from his group - because it got him closer to the finals without having to get his hands dirty.

This was interesting phrasing, because shortly after that, we saw Rizo launch his first boot-organizing campaign, and his target (MC) was the person who ended up leaving. Rizo noted (correctly, as far as the audience can tell) that Sophie was everyone's favorite for the vote, but she had no connections, so she could be taken out at any time, whereas MC had lots of connections, so she made more sense. "Why should we do everyone else's dirty work for them?" he mused. (I will also note that this was shown *after* Savannah arrived, but it seems likely he had already pitched it to everyone before that happened - Jawan even had a confessional that called Rizo a "shark" earlier in the episode, which made no sense at the time, because Rizo had yet to do anything strategy-wise except find an idol with his entire tribe's help, including Jawan's.)

If this juxtaposition was intentionally hinting at something, it should be fun to see Alex and Rizo - who memorably faced off in the "Fight for Supplies" quasi-challenge in the premiere - directly taking each other on strategically in the near future.

The no necklace/idol immunity challenge

One of the oddest parts of the episode was Savannah winning immunity for the blue team, lasting the longest in a classic immunity challenge, "Chimney Sweeps," then ... being dismissed with her tribe to go back to camp. No immunity idol for the team. No necklace for Savannah. Just, "So long, have fun eating you sandwiches!" (As we saw, she instead picked up the necklace at treemail, and had to put it on herself, which was profoundly weird.)

The most likely explanation for this is that the last iteration where a whole post-merge group won immunity was in Survivor 47's Ep7 RC/IC, and that also ended with weird optics. In that challenge, one team was immune, and Kyle Ostwald won individual immunity, as the longest-lasting member of the losing team. Probst gave him a necklace, which he wore at Tribal, but did not give any necklace or other idol to the *two* people from the other team who beat him, Teeny and Genevieve. That was also very strange. It made sense in the context that they weren't attending Tribal, so they didn't *need* necklaces, but it still felt really awkward to disrupt post-challenge tradition in this way. But this solution: Where *nobody* got a necklace, except Savannah, in private, as part of her advantage, felt just as odd.

I get it, the tribal immunity idol is for *tribes*, duh, and this was just a temporary team. We're also past the tribal phase of the game, and in the individual phase, so Probst has already said "The tribal idol is no more." But it was still pretty anticlimactic to just have the winning team sit down, banter with Probst for a bit, then leave. If production was looking for cleaner solution, this wasn't it.

That said, there is an extremely obvious solution: Don't do team challenges for immunity in the individual phase of the game. The version where there are two teams with separate individual challenges, and each winner gets a necklace? That's fine. Do what you have to do to get the numbers down. This one, where a whole team is immune? Don't do that. That's for the tribal phase. We should be doing individual immunity. The necklace should not just be "a reminder that you are immune" at Tribal, as Savannah's note said.

You win individual immunity in the individual phase of the game. I dunno, I think it has a ring to it.

Pre- and post-challenge headshot reading

A lot of times, the people the camera flashes to when Probst talks about things like immunity (pre-challenge) or being voted out (post-challenge) accurately represent the most likely people to fall into those categories. So it's a bit weird that for the past few episodes, poor Sophi has been highlighted in the "in danger" shots. This episode, for example, when Probst said "someone will be the ninth person voted out [sic.] of Survivor 49" - we saw a reaction shot of Sophi as he said "ninth person," then a pan from Rizo to Sage during the "voted out" part. (Side note: Who on earth is itching to vote *blue Sophi* out? Did the editors just get mixed up about which one was which?)

In contrast, Savannah received a ringing endorsement of either her short-term or long-term prospects (or maybe both) this week. Probst said of the RC/IC, holding up his bag of rocks, "could be a million-dollar pivot, right here." And who do we see next? A beaming Savannah, solo and centered on the screen. And then to further sell it, we hear Probst tell Savannah, as she draws the final rock: "This is it, Savannah. Right here." She does, of course, go on to the win the challenge after being the #1 target, so it's possible all the intended foreshadowing has been completed this episode. But the "million dollar" part does hint that maybe all the "Savannah is getting on everyone's nerves" talk that saturated the rest of the episode could also ... pivot? This is interesting because it's a subtle visual counter-narrative to the overt "Everyone hates Savannah" theme of the episode.

The post-challenge head shots were less informative, although they accurately highlighted the two people most in danger as everyone left the challenge. As Probst dismissed the losing team with, "See you at Tribal Council tonight, where someone will be the ninth person voted out and the second member of our jury," we started with a headshot of Sophie, followed by an extended shot of Rizo. Obviously the vote didn't end up on them, but they were the initial targets. The extended focus on Rizo may be to highlight how much of a hole he was in, but dug himself out of. (Without playing his idol, even.)

The land of tepid takes

The "MC didn't trust us!" brigade: At the top of the episode, a couple of people (Sage and Jawan) point out that MC playing her idol at the Ep7 Tribal Council showed she didn't trust them. This is some solipsistic thinking. That was MC's first Tribal! She'd been waiting more than half the game to get her idol, she finally had a a chance to do so, and Savannah caught her, red-handed. There was a really good chance Savannah and the Ulis were going to vote for her! That same Tribal was Jawan's fourth one. He was mad that MC didn't believe him when he told her where the votes were going. What evidence did MC have that he wasn't just telling her what she wanted to hear, as he had just done with Matt, with Jason, and with Shannon? MC's idol play was 100% the right thing to do, based on the information she had. Get off your high horse, Jawan.

The anti-46 season: I guess enough time had passed since the parade of people leaving with idols in their pockets in S46, and true, this cast had cleansed their Survivor palates with all of S47 and the first half of S48 before playing. I think MC was definitely influenced by the S46 example in her idol play (as was Alex, probably), which makes everyone's hesitance to target Rizo a little more baffling. I would imagine next episode, when (if?) we have a full nine (or ten with Savannah's extra vote) people voting, the idol will seem like less of a threat. Still, it's weird that Rizo has skated completely vote-free for two straight Tribals now since brandishing his idol at last week's Tribal.