Mingling

It seems like in more recent seasons of Survivor, there have been twists where people interact with contestants from other tribes in ways that they never have before. We have the summit. But the part of Survivor where tribes have mingled in some way before the merge have been introduced as part of the show early on with different versions of this happening for quite a while.

 

The earliest way that people on different tribes have been interacted was the tribe swap. While this is different than some of what we would see later and have now, it did allow the members of each tribe to mingle differently than before by changing up the tribes themselves.

 

Then we had kidnappings. Early on, this wasn’t used as much and allowed people to miss tribal council at times while learning about the other tribe. It wasn’t until China in which it became a season long twist that had one person always interacting with the other tribe for a while. Samoa then flipped that twist on its head by having an observer, which was like a privilege given to whoever observed.

 

There were some other seasons when there weren’t tribes starting out until they were divided at one point later into the early game. Another season had both tribes on the same beach throughout most of the premerge game until a tribe switch banished one tribe to a new beach.

 

Another way that mingling happened was when two people, one from each tribe, were sent to Exile Island where they could talk to each other and potentially learn about the other tribe a whole lot. It was not always used during these seasons, but were used a whole lot when it was used.

 

With the summit already covered in this blog, then I might as well end this post here since there is not too much else worth saying. I do like the summit as it gives more of a chance and a twist to interact with more of a purpose to this sort of thing than you’d get from something like Exile Island. We’ll see what other ways they will have to mingle the contestants before the merge throughout the future of this show. For now, this is Adam Decker, signing off.