[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for the Survivor Season 48 finale.]
Kyle Fraser knew he had to reveal his successful plan to vote out Shauhin Davari during his jury pitch in the Survivor Season 48 finale. Contrary to what viewers might think, he wasn’t dragging his feet about when to bring it up. He made a calculated move to wait for the most opportune moment, a moment he had faith would come thanks to his closest ally, Kamilla Karthigesu, who became his strongest soldier on the Survivor 48 jury. Thanks to Kyle’s careful planning, the timing of his Shauhin move reveal made its highest possible impact. It was this exact decision that won him the game. Here, Kyle explains to TV Insider why he waited.
Survivor 48’s final four was made up of the season’s strongest alliances: Joe Hunter and Eva Erickson, the public alliance, and Kyle Fraser and Kamilla Karthigesu, the secret one. Kyle and Kamilla rode the middle all season long and came up from behind when Kyle concocted a plan to lie about a hidden immunity idol to frame Shauhin and get him voted out. Kyle’s idea for the big lie was made successful with help from Kamilla, who played along with the scheme in carefully curated conversations with select players. This elimination kneecapped Joe and Eva’s majority alliance and knocked out one of the season’s big threats in one fell swoop. And despite Joe’s suspicions about whether they were lied to or not, he and Eva never caught wind.
The season came full circle for Eva, the show’s first openly autistic player, who said in Episode 1 that she’s not good at telling when people were lying to her. Joe was worried that Kyle lied to them, but she’s the one who assured him that he wasn’t. That was the nail in her coffin.
There was a question earlier on in the jury pitches asking the players to lay out their big strategic moves and what made them a strong contestant. This was the moment you’d think Kyle would tell all about the Shauhin scheme. Fans online were questioning why he didn’t hype up this move sooner, since it was the move that could make his resume look better than Joe and Eva’s. But Kyle bided his time until the perfect opportunity arose. When Eva and Joe took credit for the Shauhin vote, Kamilla (who had a brutal loss to Eva in the fire-making challenge) asked Kyle to share his perspective on that elimination. That’s when Kyle told all. The looks of despondent shock on Joe and Eva’s faces made it clear that they knew they had just lost the game.
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Kyle, a lawyer, tells TV Insider how his law school training prepared him for this moment.
“I am an attorney in real life. I’d argue the jury trial in law school, and I won. I know what juries are receptive to in a lot of ways. And just from a speaking perspective, you want to be organic. You want to be natural,” Kyle explains. “You don’t want to look like you’re shoehorning things in because I think that scares people and that makes people start to question. But when you have a chance to organically fit something in, you go for it.”
This was his chance to prove that he and Kamilla were the season’s strongest pair, not Joe and Eva like the jury believed up until this point.
“While I could have sort of shoehorned the Shauhin vote into an earlier question, I felt as if it was perfect, especially the way it was presented in terms of duos, because Eva and Joe, yes, very scary duo, but I thought Kamilla and I were scary in a different way,” Kyle says. “And so I’m really glad that I was able to tie those things in together because I think that it would’ve been one thing for me to be like, ‘Me and Kamilla have a secret alliance, and nobody knew about it.’ But it was another thing for me to say, ‘Me and Kamilla have this alliance and look what we did.’”
Look what they did, indeed. Kyle shares how it felt to hear Kamilla come in with that perfect assist for his game-winning layup.
“That was indicative of our entire relationship. I said it before, I’ll say it again, Kamilla was an incredibly dangerous player, but we trusted each other and I knew that she would go out there and advocate for me on the jury,” Kyle says. “And I hope she knows that I would’ve done the same for her.”
Survivor, Seasons 1-48 Available Now, Paramount+, Season 49 Premiere, Fall 2025, CBS