Welcome to Give Me Five! Each week, Brent Sullivan will look at the top five moments from the latest episode that could impact the rest of the season.
What a great episode! Tribe swaps always make it fun and chaotic. I could almost do my entire list based on just the swap, but I will condense it down since there are obvious other things to talk about as well.
1. The tribes swap. The three tribes get swapped into three new tribes with five people each. It was quite the big mix-up. Let’s start with all of the couples. Chrissy and Ben got split up, as did Ryan and Devon and Ashley and JP. Jessica and Cole are the only pair that ended up staying together. There are also quite a few people who are stranded on a new tribe all by themselves. Ben, Lauren, Devon, and Roark are all in that boat. Ben and Lauren are at least in that boat together and appear to be working with each other at the moment. The swap also finished up with a standalone reward challenge with no immunity on the line. It was a winner-take-all match with no second-place prizes. The new Yawa tribe won and got a nice reward to help them in the immediate future. So many things happened during the swap, and any number of them can make a big impact. Let’s see how it all sorts itself out over the next few episodes.
2. Jessica finds an advantage. Before the reward challenge, I thought it was odd that Jeff made a point to say that they each got a single bag of chips. Now we know why! Jessica ends up being the lucky one and picks the right bag of chips and then gets lost in “Advantage Land” while staring lovingly into her bag. Thank goodness, she didn’t eat it. This is Survivor, so of course just finding an advantage isn’t enough. She has to tell both Cole and Mike about it, that was the first step in the dominos falling. Then Cole thinks it will be a good idea to get Ben and Lauren on his side, so he tells both of them about it. Lauren then feels that she could use that knowledge to get Mike on her and Ben’s side, so she tells Mike what she knows. Mike then practically runs right over to tell both Jessica and Cole what he just heard. At this point, Cole is caught red-handed and finally fesses up by saying he mentioned it to Ben after only moments before denying saying anything to Lauren. Whew! If you followed all of that, then the big take from this is that the Cole and Jessica relationship may be in trouble and I seriously doubt that Jessica is going to want to trust him anymore. Mike also played up well to both Lauren and Ben, so that may end up helping him get further along as well. In the end, Jessica plays the advantage (or disadvantage) on Devon since her tribe won and Devon got his vote blocked. Did it matter? Not sure, it appeared that he was leaning towards the Heroes, but we don’t really know since he couldn’t vote.
3. Ryan and Chrissy meet up. Way back in episode one, we saw that Ryan gave Chrissy a super idol to potentially save herself in the game. She ultimately didn’t use it, but as she mentioned back then, she may have a tool to use going forward. The Survivor Gods were in our favor this time as we get to have Ryan and Chrissy on the same tribe now. From the looks of the conversation, it seems as if we may have an instant bond between those two. Chrissy expressed her gratitude, and then we were treated to an awkward hug. The big impact that I think can happen here is if all of the pairs can make it to the merge, I can see Ryan and Chrissy teaming up with their old allies for a Chrissy-Ben-Ryan-Devon alliance post-merge. This is just my opinion, but I think that would make an awesome alliance to watch down the stretch. They may also be able to bring in people like Ali, Lauren, Ashley, and JP in the short term to take out the original Healers tribe.
4. Desi is thrown under the bus. This is a smaller moment in an episode packed with great moments, but I bring it up for two reasons. The first reason is that Desi has been non-existent in the first three episodes and then we get a whole bunch of her all at once here. That may not be a good sign for her based-on editing history. The other reason to mention this is because now Desi has had her name thrown out there as a possible target and Joe was even talking her up as a great player to keep around because she is so good at everything. Isn’t that why you don’t keep people around? I am curious to see how Desi handles herself over the next few episodes if she makes it.
5. Joe plays his idol. This last moment is an obvious one. Clearly, playing an idol impacts the immediate game, but let’s see what happens after. Joe plays it correctly on himself and the two votes for him don’t count, and Alan goes home. There could have been some crazy stuff happening had he played it on Desi and we ended in a tie. The immediate impact of this is that Joe is obviously idol-less now and a line has been drawn between the two sides. I have a feeling that they will not be going to tribal next week, so we will see how the drama plays out for this foursome going forward.
There you go. What moments from this week’s episode do you think made an impact?
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