Welcome to Give Me Five! Each week, Brent Sullivan will look at the top five moments from the latest episode that could influence the rest of the season.
1. Can Debbie keep her secret? Debbie comes back from Exile, which was amazing and filled with food and advantages. She says that she’s going to keep the information to herself, but you have to wonder if she will be able to. As soon as she gets extra hungry or angry at someone, will she let it slip out about where she really was? I can see her getting mad at Brad Culpepper and saying something about how she and Cochran talked about him at Exile. I could be wrong, and she might be able to keep it a secret, but with Debbie, you never know.
2. Brad breaks down and gains allies. Brad Culpepper continues to play a fantastic game. Apparently, he can keep playing great even when he isn’t trying. We get a nice touching moment when all (mostly since Michaela appears to be a robot here) start talking about the game and how hard it is. Brad’s is especially touching when he starts to talk about his wife Monica making it to day 39 and how much more respect he has for the game that she played now. Then he starts to tear up and walks away – whether that was planned or not worked out extremely well in his favor. Within a short amount of TV time, we see both Aubry and Cirie approach him with offers of working with him. This is obviously nothing but good news for him as this gives him potentially two more people to work with down the line. What sort of long-term impact can this have?
3. The target on Ozzy grows bigger. With a lot of the other big names out of the way, Ozzy’s name continues to come up when talking about who to vote out. He has been dodging the bullet so far, but his days seem numbered as each episode passes. He is once again targeted in this episode by Varner, and for a bit, it looked like a few people might have been onboard with it. He survived another one, but how much longer will it be?
4. Varner goes too far. Here is where the episode takes a turn down a path that the show has never quite taken before. After a bit of back and forth about trust and secrets, Varner opens up his mouth and drops the bombshell straight onto Zeke. After a few seconds of pause, the entire tribe (and Probst) turn on him and instantly call him out on his actions. He very quickly saw the huge error that he had made and after a bit more talking about what had happened, Varner gets sent packing in a unanimous verbal vote. That means another original Mana member goes home, leaving just Aubry, Michaela, Hali, and Troyzan. Will we see a Pagonging of Mana by the original Nuku after the merge or can some of them right the ship and make it to the end?
5. Zeke stays calm. Okay, I am here only to talk about the impact things in the game will have moving forward. Despite all of the other ramifications that this may end up having in real life, in the game you have to look at is how will this impact Zeke? At the moment, I will assume that he is in pretty good shape. Everyone on his tribe felt bad for him and was sticking up for him against Varner. This will have to help his position in the game at least for an episode or two. There is no way that he gets voted out next after what happened. The fact that he stayed so calm and cool throughout the whole ordeal is also another good sign for him. How much time did this buy him? Once a few weeks go by, will the effect of what just happened start to wear off?
There you go. What moments from this week do you think made an impact?
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