Welcome to Give Me Five! Each week, Brent Sullivan will look at the top five impactful moments from the latest episode that could influence the rest of the season.
Each week, when I watch the show, I take notes on what is going on. After the vote-out, I scratch out my notes that have to do with the individual that was eliminated, since they more or less can’t make any more of an impact moving forward. It’s not an exact science, but it works for me. After watching this week’s episode, half of my notes were scratched off. I should have known better since Jeremy ate up most of the screen time on the Goliath tribe. But lucky for you, I always watch it twice, so I still have plenty to talk about.
1. Gabby takes the blame. Wow… poor Gabby. She got thrown under the bus hard here. Now, I am not saying that she didn’t have anything to do with Jessica getting voted out, but she was in no way public enemy number one here either. The “Mason-Dixon” alliance got their way and was able to get break up the Bi/Jessica/Carl three-way before it became an issue to them, and Nick instantly started throwing Gabby’s name out there to the other’s left on that side. I am curious how that is going to play out since Gabby and Christian appear to be extremely close and Nick and Christian are close as well. Will Christian have to pick a side this early or will they be broken up during a tribe swap and then forced to work together on a new tribe? I think that it is safe to say that Christian will be the driving force between the three of them. The other thing to look at is how Nick is also starting to talk strategy with Bi and Davie. He may just be playing both sides, but with him campaigning against Gabby so hard, I am not sure how this is going to play out.
2. Carl has a breakdown. People have breakdowns on this show all of the time, heck I can’t think of the last time that I watched an episode of Survivor without someone shedding a tear. The reason that I point this out was the amount of time that they seemed to spend on Carl. They even showed him, went away and then came back to him again. I never use the words winner’s edit or anything like that, but usually when this sort of thing happens, the person either goes home the following episode, or they go far into the game. With an apparent swap coming up next, I don’t know what tribe he will be on or who he will be with, but I can’t see him going home next.
3. Dan’s idol is no longer a secret. The one thing that Jeremy was successful at this season (besides bossing Mike around) was ruining Dan’s hidden immunity idol secret. We saw earlier that Jeremy already knew about the idol when he searched through Dan’s coat, but this week he actually spread the word around after they lost the challenge and a few people started scrambling to make a move. Mike said it best that knowledge of the idol may be more powerful than the idol itself. Idols almost always make some sort of impact on the game – I am just curious if the new twist of the idol nullifier could play a part here since so many people already know about it. It may all depend on who’s tribe he is on next week and where the numbers fall.
4. Bi’s knee. This is a no-brainer. There is no way that an injury of this magnitude isn’t going to impact the game. I don’t think that it is bad enough for her to get evacuated, and I don’t believe that she would ever quit over it, but it could very easily lead to her being voted out for being a liability in challenges. She may get lucky and be on a tribe that has a numbers advantage and could be the one that gets to sit out of the challenge, but that could only last her so long. Seeing her talk about her recent knee injury and having her limp around, isn’t good. I don’t think we will see much more of Bi unless her knee makes a massive improvement really quick. That would be another tough break for the original David tribe who has already lost Pat due to an unfortunate accident.
5. Angelina is a driving force. I found this incredibly fascinating. There is absolutely no reason that Natalie shouldn’t have been voted out. In any other season, someone like her would have pushed too many buttons to allow it not to happen. But Angelina put on clinic explaining why it should be Jeremy over Natalie. Even though a few of her tribemates, like Natalia and Mike, seemed locked in with a Natalie vote, everyone voted for Jeremy and he went home 9-1. At least from what we saw, I can’t believe that one person was able to pull over that many people to the other side and that a few people didn’t even stick to their guns and vote for Natalie anyway. This show of gameplay elevated Angelina in my opinion to one of the top players of the season so far. It was even more fun to watch the second time around because I knew what the end result was going to be and yet I was still enjoying watching her work. Angelina, you have definitely made an impact on this early season!
There you go. What moments from this week’s episode do you think made an impact?
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Well, just for this episode specifically, I was absolutely LOVING all the Jeremy/Natalie moments. Those were golden! I will definitely miss Jeremy on the show, I wish they both could’ve lasted ’till the end.