Celebrity Treasure Island NZ recap (ep 7-9)

Welcome back to ZM's Recap of Celebrity Treasure Island 2026!

Celebrity Treasure Island 2026 is still going, and it's getting properly uncomfortable. If the first few episodes felt like chaotic celebrity summer camp, Episodes 7–9 are where the season shifts into something much heavier. Alliances are gone. Trust is a joke. And nobody on that island looks like they're having fun anymore.

Which means, naturally, it's incredible television.

And this week we've got a spoiler warning banner for the first time, which means we can finally stop being coy and get into the good stuff. If you're not caught up, you've been warned. For everyone else: buckle up, because this stretch of episodes has a lot going on.

You can watch Celebrity Treasure Island 2026 on TVNZ 2, or stream episodes anytime on TVNZ+.

Episode 7: The vibe shift nobody was ready for

The premise of this episode is simple: everything gets worse.

Simon Barnett leaves, the merge happens, and the island immediately becomes a colder, quieter, more suspicious place. It happens that fast.

Simon's exit hits harder than you'd expect, mostly because you realise how much work he was doing just by being there. Speaking after leaving, he admitted he hadn't even expected to enjoy it: "I sort of thought I'd be doing it under self-forcing almost." But then he got attached to everyone immediately, and watching him leave makes it obvious how much the dynamic depended on him.

Without him, everyone's a little more on edge.

Then the merge hits and tears apart whatever sense of stability people had managed to build. The Tākapu crew arrives into Kāhu's camp and, as Nix Adams puts it, absolutely will not stop asking questions. You can physically see the panic set in. Players who were confident a day ago suddenly look unsettled. People who had been coasting quietly in the background start recognising opportunities to reposition themselves. Everyone's smiling at each other while clearly doing maths in their heads at the same time.

It's a lot.

But because CTI loves emotional whiplash, the cooking challenge lands right in the middle of all that tension, and it is genuinely one of the funniest things the season has produced. Sleep-deprived celebrities attempting to cook for charity, operating on minimal food and maximum stress, with meals that look like a series of decisions people will regret. Complete disaster energy from start to finish. And yet somehow Te Ao holds it together enough to win $5,000 for UNICEF, giving the episode one brief warm moment before the chaos resumes.

The immunity challenge is where things unravel again. Tākapu start strong in the rowing section and genuinely look like they've turned a corner, and then the puzzle section begins, and you can watch confidence drain out of them in real time. Kāhu quietly overtake them, win immunity, and suddenly Nix Adams is kaihautū, which shifts the entire social balance of the game.

And on top of all of that, Nix opens up in one of the most emotional conversations of the season, telling Simon before he leaves about losing her son Alaska at 16 months old. "The scariest moment of my entire life," she says. She speaks honestly about falling into addiction afterwards, and about how his memory is still with her every day. It's the kind of moment that makes CTI genuinely surprising... One minute people are deep in personal grief, the next they're whispering about voting each other out from behind a shelter wall.

Then comes the episode's biggest moment: Portia Woodman-Wickliffe is eliminated. The former Black Fern and Olympic medallist had been the runaway favourite to win this entire season: physically dominant, well-liked, the kind of competitor who makes everyone else quietly nervous. And she goes out in a puzzle challenge. Not a physical test. A puzzle, involving wooden rings on a stick, against TVNZ sports reporter Zion Dayal, who had barely registered as a threat all season. Portia cried. The remaining players cried. Everyone watching cried.

"I know I've made wāhine proud, I know I've made tangata Māori proud, and when I watch this back, I'm going to be so proud of myself," she said on the way out.

The tonal whiplash is part of why it works. And just like that, the whole shape of the game changes.

Episode 8: Everyone's being nice and nobody means it

If Episode 7 is where the vibe shifts, Episode 8 is where the mask fully comes off.

With Portia gone, the biggest shield in the game has disappeared and suddenly everyone is looking around at each other doing very obvious mental calculations about what that means for them. The seven remaining players are now well and truly on their own, with no tribe to hide behind and no physical powerhouse to distract attention from everyone else.

Georgia Lines wastes no time. She wins individual immunity (a big deal, because it's the first individual immunity challenge of the season) and immediately uses it to start putting her plan into motion. Earlier she'd laid out her strategy plainly: "We have to scheme quietly, make moves and get to the merge." The goal? Get as many women as possible to the final three. The execution? Nominate the two players she needs gone and let the elimination challenge do the rest.

What happens next is genuinely wild. Ria Vandervis, who had built an alliance with Ben Barrington, deliberately throws the immunity challenge to let Georgia win. The reasoning is clever... by letting Georgia take the win and the nomination power, Ria can support the women's alliance without having to openly break her bond with Ben. It's a cold, calculated move that most players at this stage of the game don't have the nerve to pull off.

But it works.

Te Ao o Hinepehinga is the one who goes home this episode, eliminated by Georgia in a fast, frantic round of the classic CTI "stack the boxes with your feet" challenge. Te Ao had been one of the most entertaining presences all season, loudly self-aware and completely chaotic in the best possible way. "I thought someone was going to vote me off on day three, because they realised I don't shut up," she'd said. She made it to day eight. What a run.

Her exit is emotional because she and Georgia were genuinely close, and you can see it cost Georgia something to be the one to end her game. But that's exactly where the show is now, people voting out their mates and feeling bad about it while also knowing it was the right move. Friendly on the surface, ruthless underneath.

Meanwhile, Ria also wins $5,000 for charity by sticking her nose into a mystery smelly tube. Pure CTI energy. Celebrities, never not smelling things.

The bigger story is what's happening underneath all of it. With the game down to seven players, every interaction now carries enormous weight. Conversations get shorter and more careful. People start every pitch with "I love them, but…" before calmly explaining exactly why that person needs to go. Louis Davis wins the first individual immunity challenge and earns the nickname The Godfather, which honestly tracks. And Zion Dayal (who was a near-invisible presence for the first half of the season) keeps getting mentioned as someone to watch, after last week's Portia elimination announced him as a genuine player.

Camp is deeply awkward in the best possible way. Everyone knows nobody trusts anyone. Nobody says it directly. And they all still have to eat breakfast together every morning.

Episode 9: Nobody feels safe, and everyone knows exactly who the easy names are

If you thought Episode 8 was cold, Episode 9 turns the temperature down further.

With seven players left and the numbers getting real, the game stops being about alliances and starts being about targets. The question on everyone's mind isn't "who can I trust?" anymore, it's "who looks more dangerous than me?" And the answer to that question is about to become very clear.

Ben Barrington had been the obvious physical threat since Portia left. Everyone could see it. Everyone had been saying it quietly. "I feel like Ben is the current biggest threat," Georgia Lines said before the challenge. Nix Adams doubled down: "If anyone could take out Ben, it's Zion." Liv Parker, Georgia and Nix had already quietly coordinated to make sure that's exactly what happened, engineer a Barrington vs Dayal face-off and let the elimination challenge solve the problem for them.

It works. And the elimination challenge itself is genuinely gripping television.

It's a tower-building contest; stack your pieces highest without it collapsing. Ben, the biggest physical presence left on the island, watched his structure fall apart in the final moments while Zion held his together. The Shortland Street actor had dominated challenge after challenge all season. He went out on a tower of blocks.

"Big Ben's coming down," Zion had predicted beforehand.

He was right.

Ben's exit is the most dramatic elimination of the season so far, not because it's ugly or messy, but because of how clearly everyone saw it coming and how little anyone could do to stop it. He'd been too strong for too long, and in this game, that's exactly what gets you voted out. Barrington joins Portia in what's becoming a growing list of big names gone far too early, and the island, already quieter after Simon and Te Ao left, suddenly feels very different without him.

For Zion Dayal, the story is almost unbelievable. The TVNZ sports reporter barely registered in the first half of the season: quiet, steady, not making waves. Then suddenly he's eliminated Vinnie Bennett, Portia Woodman-Wickliffe, and now Ben Barrington in back-to-back weeks. Three of the biggest physical threats in the competition, gone. Nobody is calling him under-the-radar anymore. The nickname has already stuck: The Giant Slayer.

The only moment Zion visibly flinched all episode was when host Bree Tomasel drank an entire bottle of raw pancake mix in front of him. Which is a very reasonable reaction.

With Ben gone and only six players left (Zion, Georgia, Nix, Ria, Liv, and Frank) the dynamics are shifting again. Georgia's women's alliance is quietly gaining shape. Frank Bunce, 60 and deeply unbothered, warned this week: "I'm the oldest one here. Underestimate at your peril." And Liv Parker survived by running an entire mental cinema in her head (reportedly a full screening of Twilight) to get through the physical challenges. Whatever works.

The further you get into the season, the more obvious it becomes: the original game is completely unrecognisable now. Wisdom vs Fury? Ancient history. This is six people, stripped of food and comfort, doing quiet maths about which one of them is safest to keep around one more day.

And by the end of Episode 9, one thing is painfully obvious: nobody on that island feels safe. Not even close.

Seven episodes in, and the original game doesn't exist anymore

What stands out most after this stretch of episodes is how completely the season has transformed.

The "Wisdom vs Fury" framing that drove the first few weeks? Basically, irrelevant now. The injury exits destabilised everyone emotionally, the merge destroyed certainty, and what's left is something rawer and more unpredictable. The players who are surviving aren't necessarily the strongest or the loudest, they're the ones who can rebuild trust quickly while avoiding becoming the name everyone agrees is easiest to cut.

The emotional side of the game is still there, but it's operating underneath everything now rather than on the surface. The grief and vulnerability that contestants share in quiet moments at camp, the genuine bonds that somehow form in the middle of a game designed to destroy them, that's still happening. It just coexists with a level of strategic coldness that wasn't present earlier in the season.

It's messy. It's tense. It's slightly brutal.

And with The Giant Slayer still standing and Georgia's plan quietly clicking into place, it's only going to get more interesting from here.

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