Our challenge beast continues on
Welcome back to our weekly Survivor recap series on Eva Erickson, GT 2022 grad. In case you missed it last week, we’ll be covering her gameplay each episode she’s in during season 48 of Survivor. You can find last week’s recap of the season 48 premiere here.
This was another good week for Eva, so let’s get into it.
SPOILERS FOR SURVIVOR SEASON 48 EPISODE 2 AHEAD
After a great premiere episode where Eva dominated physically and was a productive member around camp, episode two is where we generally start seeing the real relationships and alliances start to form. Eva did make a solid connection with Joe last wek, which proved to be a massive boon to her game this week.
Our first look of Eva this week comes in a conversation she’s helping lead about future challenge strategy. With her tribe, Lagi, having won their last immunity challenge, they have an extra tribe member and will have to sit someone on the bench in this week’s immunity challenge. As she’s thinking strategy aloud to the group, she determines (in a very matter of fact way) that Star is the one who naturally should sit out.
Star in her confessional afterwards reveals she felt offended by that since Eva singled her out pretty directly. From what we saw, it didn’t seem like anyone thought all that much of it since it wasn’t a conversation about who to potentially vote out. Eva did mention before the game that she can be overly direct, and this definitely seemed like one of those moments where she innocently put someone in an uncomfortable position. Eva does go on to mention that Star is the one person on Lagi that she hasn’t been able to truly bond with yet, which certainly didn’t help in this situation.
Even so, Star I think is not wrong to at least take action on this. Having your name floating out there on its own in Survivor is rarely a good thing. We immediately start seeing her idol hunt where she gets the beware advantage and enlists Joe and Shauhin to help solve it. Star eventually tells everyone in the tribe about the beware advantage except Eva as she now is targeting her after getting singled out.
While trying to deciper the word that will release the immunity idol, all of Thomas, Shauhin, and Joe see a potential advantage at play: Star loses her vote until she solves the idol puzzle, and she’s essentially handed solving the puzzle off to the rest of her alliance (at least as she perceives it). If she doesn’t have it solved by the time they go to tribal council, she won’t have a vote and would be an easy vote off. Thomas went as far as to suggest the key to the puzzle could just…disappear (there might be some Survivor rules we aren’t aware of that could prevent this).
With all of this information, this puts Joe in a tight situation. He’s got his relationship with Eva where he knows he’s her #1 ally, but now he’s entrusted in a majority alliance as well that for now has only brought up one name: Eva. He decides to tell Eva about Star’s advantage and that for now, she’s Star’s top target to vote out.
For Eva, this obviously isn’t a great spot to be in. There is someone out there who actively would seek to put votes on her. This early in the game, it can be very precarious. She has a level of sheilding around her though. She’s been a challenge beast. Her relationship with Joe clearly still holds a lot of power when it comes to information sharing.
This situation doesn’t come to a head this episode as 1: Star never finds the idol, and 2: thankfully Lagi cruises to an immunity challenge win as Vula tribe was TERRIBLE and never had a shot at winning.
So, Eva is guaranteed at least one more week in the game. Star likely finding the idol won’t be ideal as her #1 opponent within her tribe will have added power that she doesn’t have. If Lagi’s challenge success continues, it will keep Eva in a good spot, for now. It will be critical that she keep improving her relationships with all of her tribemates to create as big of a shield around her as he can. We pray there’s no early tribe shuffle that exposes her while Lagi is in a power position.