Survivor: Guatemala – Who Will Go and Who Will Win in the Finale?

Last season, my picks for the final four were perfect. I picked Jenn to go fourth, Ian to go third, Katie to go second, and Tom to win. I even picked the 6-1 vote with which Tom won. That ended my season at a record of 9-6 (after coming into the mix several episodes in).

This season I have been doing such a poor job at predicting that I stopped keeping track of my correct predictions. Suffice it to say it’s somewhere around three or four correct and the rest wrong. So even if I get the final four right, I’ll end up with a losing record. Oh, well. I suppose predictions are like male/female winners of Survivor. Ultimately they all always even out: five men and five women at present.

So in the spirit of staying on the wrong track, I have decided to do this final article backwards from this point forward. We’ll start with the final tally and continue on until we discuss my initial impressions of the final four and my daughter’s picks. (If reading backwards isn’t your thing, and you’d like to read the article in a forward linear progression, I suggest skipping ahead to the last page and starting there.)

Stayed tuned with me this Sunday evening to find out the exciting results on Survivor: Guatemala!

So my pick for winner of Survivor: Guatemala, with a 4-3 vote, is Danni Boatwright, the 30-year-old radio talk show host from Tonganoxie, Kansas!

I think if Danni plays her final Tribal Council cards right and focuses on Rafe’s untrustworthiness to his alliance partners, then Jamie will be swayed to vote him off and Danni will receive the million.

So Jamie will be the Survivor left to decide the winner. We all know that Jamie is one Fruity Pebble short of a balanced breakfast, but is he also going to hold a grudge against Rafe (who technically never promised him the final three, but did lie about taking him to final six)? Or will he respect Rafe’s gameplay (in that creepy, that’s-how-you-vote-someone-off! sort of way) and award him the million?

Between a final two of Danni and Rafe, I think the vote will be very tight. Danni should have two solid votes from Gary and Bobby Jon. And Rafe should have two solid votes from Lydia and Stephenie (who, despite being voted off by him, will respect both his gameplay and their long-standing pseudo-alliance). Cindy and Judd might both feel betrayed by Rafe, but I think Cindy will let it go and vote for Rafe anyway. Judd, on the other hand, still holds a grudge against his alliance (as we all know, if we’ve paid any attention to his recent interviews). He’ll act all self-important and say some tripe about not lying. Then he’ll give his vote to Danni (who never lied to him).

If Rafe wins, he will also likely take Lydia, since he’s made no final two promises on his end with Danni. But let’s not overlook the underdog, Danni. Indeed, if Underdog and Mighty Mouse got into a fight, I’d place my bets on Underdog. If Danni wins, then she’ll stay true to her promise and take Rafe with her to the finals. And that’s the way I see it going down, with Danni and Rafe in the finals and Lydia sitting in third place.

The Survivor that comes in third will depend largely on who wins the final immunity. Given that the final immunity always involves some type of endurance challenge, it would appear that Lydia is in trouble, since she’s never been much of a contender in any challenge. But we have only to look back to Pearl Island’s Lill and Africa’s Kim to know that sometimes the least athletic player has a particular knack for endurance. So we can’t count Mighty Mouse out yet. If Lydia wins immunity, she’ll probably take longtime ally Rafe to the final two and leave Danni out cold in third place.

Stephenie’s lack of a strong alliance goes back to the aforementioned (or is it yet-to-be-mentioned? This backwards thing is making me loopy) point I made that both Rafe and Danni have made promises to each other for final two and three. Stephenie and Lydia, however, have not. For those two reasons I think that Rafe and Danni will ally first to get rid of their next biggest threat, Steph.

In my opinion, Stephenie will once again head to the Survivor jury. She may have had two consecutive chances to get it right, but will end up with three people ahead of her (reminds me of another ultra-popular Survivor named Rupert). Stephenie’s biggest problems at this stage revolve around two things - threat level and lack of a strong alliance. She’s a dangerous threat at both challenges and the final two, as a friend to many a jury member. (And to those that think Judd would jump on her for turning on him, I think he was under the impression at the time that Stephenie was the one that voted with him, not Cindy.)

So who’s the next to go? CBS gave us a clue at the end of last episode when they gave us the promo for the final show. Apparently they forgot that showing Tribal Council would give us a clear view of the immunity winner. So I can tell you who isn’t going to be voted off. But if you’re the kind of person that doesn’t like even unintentional spoilers, I’ll simply leave that bit of information available for those who recorded Thursday’s show.