A shuffled deck changes the dynamic early on
Welcome back to our weekly Survivor recap series on Eva Erickson, GT 2022 grad who is participating in Season 48 of the show. We’re covering her gameplay each episode she’s in during season 48 of Survivor. We did not cover last week’s episode as I was on vacation but we’re back for episode four! Let’s get it on!
SPOILERS FOR SURVIVOR 48 EPISODE 4 AHEAD
It’s day eight in Fiji, which in a surprise early twist saw host Jeff Probst say one of his iconic lines: “drop your buffs.” That’s right, it’s a tribe swap.
This puts Eva’s immediate future in a troubled state as it does for the other 14 players. After winning three straight challenges with Lagi, cementing a strong bond with Joe, and not needing to worry about tribal council one time, everything was up in the air with how the tribe swap would land.
For Eva, she notes in a confessional that she’s scared of losing Joe, which makes perfect sense knowing he’s the only true ally she’s made thus far in the game. Being on a different tribe than him would mean she would have to restart her social game.
Once the tribes were shuffled, Joe and Eva were not together. Eva stayed on the Lagi tribe along with Star while bringing in three new tribemates in Mary, Charity, and David. On their face, they’ve got plenty of strength. The trouble spot is with Star – the one person Eva actively didn’t get along with on the original Lagi tribe and who threw her name out as a possible option to vote out very early on. Eva either would have to figure out a relationship with her, or move forward with someone else.
In her confessional after the tribe swap, she says “going at it alone is going to be hard and new,” essentially ruling out the Star idea, which based on what we’ve been shown had no real chance at this stage in the game anyways. Thankfully, a new person was at the ready for her.
Enter: David.
Eva and David waste no time bonding and quickly hit it off. They’ve got the sports backgrounds and both generally spend their time with the opposite sex so both were able to walk into each other’s comfort zones very quickly given the circumstances. It’s a huge moment because in early tribe swaps like this, having some sort of cross-tribe alliance can be massive in being on the right side of the vote. While no specific hierarchy had really been established yet at the reformed Lagi tribe, the fact she basically rolled in their on her own for the time being put her near the bottom of the tribe.
Emboldened and knowing she had an ally, more work was to be done. The fact Star is still on the same beach as her is a problem, especially knowing that Star has yet to crack the code for her idol, so as of now Star does not have a vote but has an idol potentially coming. Eva tells the rest of her new tribemates about Star’s beware advantage and that it’s been a few days since she found it but hasn’t unlocked it yet. Knowing how many options she had at the moment, it’s a solid move to at least put the heat on someone else if they lose at the challenge.
Speaking of the challenge, we get a mix of strength, dexterity, and puzzles in a challenge called “Flips, Flops, & Flags.” Lagi falls behind in the middle part of the challenge where they have to throw two small sandbags through a breakable loop on top of a barrel despite Eva landing one sandbag early on. The setback meant they got to the tower puzzle last behind Civa and Vula with Civa nearly completing the puzzle first before getting two pieces wrong that required them to deconstruct their tower puzzle.
Eva is on the three-person puzzle team for Lagi, whipping through the puzzle remarkably fast, finishing first in the challenge after being in dead last going into the final stage. With the reward they were treated to a large bundle of fruit, so for the first time in nine days most of the players left will have had their first bit of normal food.
At this point, Eva pretty much is holding firm. She might be in a better spot now than she was last week because she’s not so obviously clinging to Joe anymore. Only Star would know about that, but it’s not relevant right now with Joe on another tribe. It will be interesting to see if Eva decides to tell David about her autism, or if she even gets to a point in her relationship with him where she feels comfortable enough to tell him.
If I’m her right now, using this opportunity to make real connections with Mary and Charity woudld be my primary objective. She was not at the top of the original Lagi tribe, but at worst here she use the knowlege of Star’s beware advantage to keep herself off the bottom at new Lagi, using that as a platform to make inroads with new potential post-merge allies. If they keep winning challenges, which this tribe is strong enough to do so, the merge will likely come after two or three more tribal councils.
Overall, she’s still generally in a good spot. In her first true test of Survivor adaptability, she passed. Moving further in the game will require many more instances of that, so we’ll see how it all goes!