I Think I Know What Survivor 50’s Merge Twist Is, And I’m Already Mad

This week’s Survivor 50 episode is heavily teasing a merge, which is quite a surprise given there are still seventeen people from the epic cast left in the game. That’s one less than most modern seasons start with and feels like way too many players to bring together. Clearly some kind of shenanigans are about to go down.

Is it a fake out? Is it some kind of One World thing? Is it a real merge with a ridiculous number of players? I don’t know. I suspect we won’t know for sure until the episode airs. Many former players and hardcore Survivor fans including myself, however, are coalescing around the same theory, and if it’s accurate, I’m already mad about it.

Instead of fully merging the tribes, I suspect Jeff Probst is going to bring everyone together onto one beach and then re-split them all into three different groups. Since Kyle was unfortunately removed from the game because of injury, we have seventeen instead of eighteen, which doesn’t divide by three. So, I think we’ll ship two people off to Exile Island and the remaining fifteen will be sorted into three tribes. I think each one of those tribes will compete in an immunity challenge amongst themselves, with the winner being personally safe. Then every new group will go to Tribal Council and vote someone off.

Having three tribal councils next week would explain why the episode is two hours long, and it would solve a numbers problem. There are simply too many people remaining for the number of days left in Fiji to chop one at a time. We need at least a few more double boots. A surprise triple boot would ease the elimination crunch even more and give the players a little bit of space. Afterwards, it would also leave the game with fourteen players remaining, which would be a far more reasonable number to actually merge with. In fact, it’s possible everyone from that point forward would even make the jury.

So, yeah, from a production schedule standpoint, this would make a lot of sense, but from a fairness in the game standpoint, this would suck. There’s an incredible amount of randomness that comes with drawing buffs to get sorted into five person tribes. Good players are going to get swap screwed, and there’s a non-zero chance that a beloved player is going to go home because they randomly got sorted onto a tribe that includes three or four players with close preexisting relationships.

If Cirie goes home at some point in the game because she got out-maneuvered, I’m totally fine with that, but if she goes home because she draws a buff and randomly ends up with Coach, Jonathan, Colby and Joe, I’m going to be so mad. Likewise, if Coach goes home because he ends up on a tribe with a locked in Rizo, Dee and Cirie, I’m going to be so mad too. There’s just too much randomness involved here.

There are some Survivor fans who believe the players who are going to get swap screwed are the players who have been under-edited like Tiffany and Chrissy. Perhaps the show didn’t give them many confessionals or moments of personal content because they didn’t want fans to revolt because they got screwed here. Then again, there are other fans who feel it’s the opposite. They think we might lose someone like Christian here, which would explain why the show gave him so much content. I have no idea.

You can catch new episodes of Survivor 50 on CBS on Wednesday evenings, or you can stream them on Paramount+.