Survivor Season 48 - 2025
Spoilers follow for Season 48 of Survivor and seasons 1-6 of LOST
I’ve been revisiting LOST with my wife, who’s never seen it. It’s a fascinating parallel dive into early aughts peak TV alongside Survivor, a show that I am approximately 3/4 of my way through binging. Watching LOST and Survivor at the same time makes it very clear that the former was heavily influenced by the latter. A group of castaways needs to form a rough society in the jungle! Factions break out and fight over resources, and castaways are brutally eliminated! The first season increasingly centers around a Hatch! The signs are there. I have no doubt that “Survivor but fiction” was somewhere in the original ABC pitch, and it turned out pretty well.
This time around, I am watching LOST alongside reading A.R. Moxon’s incredible companion series, an ongoing and seemingly novel-length dialectic examination of the central themes of the show that I recommend to anyone who theorycrafted and watercoolered in the later Bush years. Moxon provides a very useful scaffolding for examining a show that, even at its best, suffered from shaky pacing and inconsistent mystery management. One hanging thread is The Numbers, six integer values that I still look for in fortune cookies, whose presence in the show are all-encompassing but whose ultimate purpose is never explicitly revealed. I like Moxon’s theory, based on vibes but as good as any, that the central game between the entities known as Jacob and the Man in Black has spanned billions of parallel or sequential universes, and that the Numbers act as a “dimensional constant” anchoring the universe we are witnessing to its iteration number: 4,815,162,342.
On the other show where an omnipotent entity, at turns benefic and malign, manipulates a chosen set of candidates to either reach their ultimate potential or perish in the process, we are on iteration 48. Prior to a retooling of the show in 2020, each season was referred to by a name, either the filming location (Borneo, Guatemala, the hilariously vague “Africa”) or to some gimmick that shook up team composition (Brain vs Brawn vs Beauty, Millenials vs Gen X) or game mechanics (Exile Island, Redemption Island). As the show settled in Fiji as a permanent home in 2016, it entered its “Oops All Gimmicks” era, where each season upped the ante in an attempt to game viewership through Twitter virality. The New Era reboot was a big reset in game design, but maybe the most obvious change was in the nomenclature. Each season is now referred to solely by its season number, a mark of confidence that no additional hook is needed to get viewers to tune in. We know what kind of social experiment is being run, let’s put the cheese in the maze and get to work.
No matter what the rest of the game looks like, as previously stated, a season of Survivor lives or dies by its cast. It is clear that incredible care is put into choosing exactly the right people to play a good game, and we got some incredible personalities this time around. I was immediately taken with David, a gigantic stuntman with an abiding love of chocolate milk and a sort of clueless pathos about him, like a really jacked Tim Robinson character. Another early-season standout was a guy who worked for a pizza shop in Boston, who compared any gameplay moment he experienced to his work in said pizza shop, and who wore a t-shirt that simply said “Pizza” on it. His name is unimportant; we just called him Pizza.
Unlike many shows in the Reality genre, and unlike its own early seasons, Survivor loves its players. These people have a deep respect for one another, and the production team does not shy away from capturing their foibles but also makes every effort to celebrate moments of brilliance. In what I believe to be a series first, there were not one but two moments of contestants providing their own diegetic music, not unlike Hurley’s Discman sequences. When sales guru Star starts freestyle rapping about her precarious position in the game, she earned a full-on musical number. Not to be one-upped, mercurial debate professor Shauhin lays down a tribal chant during a challenge, and the composers and editors take the cue and blow it up into a transcendent smack-talk montage sequence. Survivor’s production team works very hard to remain unseen, but I’m glad that they had some fun here.
The solid cast, along with Shauhin’s chanting, would have made this a standout season for me. But going back to the very beginning, the group dynamics are where the magic happens. 16-20 people in various stages of tribal warfare can form an infinite number of structures, like how the simple rules of Conway’s Game of Life can create surprisingly complex emergent behavior (Kamilla, a software engineer, can probably tell you more). And despite there being alliances and voting groups and betrayals and the usual Survivor fare in 48, ultimately this season was a study of that most basic social building block: the Power Couple. When the dust settled, this season ended up being the story of two pairs, one overt and heartwrenching, and the other stealthy and calculating. Obvious and occluded. Two couples. Two strategies. One is light, and one is dark.
The Overt Dyad is Joe and Eva, an extremely intense fire chief and an athletic PhD student, who join forces early on and become the collective beating heart of the season. Eva is the first contestant who is openly on the Autism spectrum, and joins the game knowing that her neuroatypicality will attract unique challenges, specifically around reading intention and regulating strong emotion. She needs to find someone who she can put her back to, and she finds Joe, who instantly sees his children in her and swears without a second thought to protect her as one of his own, which made warm stuff come out of my eyes. An early tribe switch leaves Eva without her support system, and in one of the most emotionally intense moments of the entire series, she is forced into a challenge scenario that overwhelms her. She heroically overcomes her extreme distress and beats the table challenge from Hell, but now she is so worked up from the challenge that she can’t regulate herself. Joe is given permission to cross tribe lines and give her the touch and words she needs to come back to herself, leaving everyone, including our stoic host, overcome with love and awe for getting to see something so beautiful. Eva and Joe really made something special together.
Of course, an overt power couple is a pretty large target for elimination in a merged tribe, but Joe especially played extremely cannily in the late game, running a Boston Rob-slash-Tony-styled play from the top strategy that demanded loyalty and kept him and his ward in the pole position. It’s an extremely tricky feat, but he was helped by David’s appetite for an alliance of beefcakes, and even though David himself was an early casualty of infighting, the Stronk Alliance (including Shauhin and Kyle, who wasn’t on the flight manifest) was the dominant faction to the very end. Against the odds, Joe and Eva made the final 3 together, and Joe in particular was on track for a well-deserved victory.
But they were all of them deceived.
The Occulted Dyad of Kamilla and Kyle, you see, were actually running the show the whole time. Early on they instantly bonded over their shared Guyanese ancestry, and when they were shuffled into a minority position during a tribe swap, they pulled off something truly incredible: they somehow convinced the majority faction that they weren’t close, that each would be thrilled to see the other gone, and that they would be a number to make that happen. This required absolute trust and very efficient information exchange when they got a second to touch base. In the end, they correctly sniffed out the larger group’s intention and hid an idol long enough (surviving even a bag search!) to turn the tables and yeet one of their assailants instead.
This was an amazing heist, and it served as a microcosm for the rest of their game; Kyle was drafted into the Alliance of Beef People, and Kamilla was on the outs with the reject group. While Eva and Joe formed the heart of the season, Kamilla and Kyle were the nerve center, able to combine their intel in the brief moments they had together into the most complete picture anyone had of the state of play. Kyle grated a bit while he deliberated over the right timing for them to use their collective advantage, but when the time came, it was a clean kill shot: an idol rumor, a rock solid shared story, and a little fanning of paranoia was all it took to get Joe to do the dirty work of getting rid of Shauhin, and no one saw the assassins in the shadows.
But the endgame was the most impressive feat of all. Eva and Joe were loyal to each other, so of course they wanted to take each other to the very end. Kamilla and Kyle one-upped them, though: each recognized that the chances of either of them winning diminished if they were both there, so they turned on each other at the final challenge, and when Kyle won immunity and Kamilla lost the fire contest, it was down to one. But unlike other secret power couples (Maria and Charlie from 46 spring immediately to mind), these two continued to play a shared game. Kamilla ventured into the underworld to preach the Good News to the jury, and even teed Kyle up during final tribal when he whiffed his first chance to lay out the extent of their master plan.
In any other season, Joe or Eva would have been a satisfying winner, but the Jury gave it to Kyle. If you want to know what I think, the vote was just as much for Kamilla as it was for her partner, and for the exemplary skill and novel play that they brought to their game. I hope that he buys her a few beers.