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.
The loved ones visit is always an emotional episode where all the remaining players and get their own moment with their family members after seeing them for the first time in over 30 days. What it doesn’t do is allow for a lot of camp life, where most of the strategic gameplay happens. Good thing there was a lot going on this week:
1. Sebastian makes odd choices. Like I mentioned above, this was the loved ones visit, so whoever won the reward challenge was going to get to spend time with their family member. Of course, that winner almost always has to choose a few people to go with them. So when Sebastian won the challenge, he naturally had some tough choices to make. So many times, we see the person with that choice make some pretty questionable moves and Sebastian more than held up his end of the bargain on that. Not only did he not choose any of the women that he had been aligned with, but he also left them all alone back at camp. I know that we hadn’t really seen him play much of a strategic game, but this took it up a notch. The moment that the original Naviti girls and Laurel got back to camp, they immediately began plotting the downfall of the boys. The biggest issue that I had with this was that we hadn’t seen Sebastian have any sort of a strategic game, so there was really no reason that he picked the people that he did. To have all girls sitting together in one place and all of the boys in another may come back to haunt him.
2. Wendell makes a great choice. I think that Wendell made the correct choice after the reward challenge. In fact, they all should have raised their hand and volunteered. I know that it is nice to see your loved ones, but this is a game (for a million dollars), and Wendell did what we had to. This, unfortunately, puts more of a target on his back for having another advantage, but with only eight people left, you sometimes have to make that choice. He ended up getting an advantage to help him in the next immunity challenge. It didn’t work out for him, but at least he went for it. Both he and Domenick have a real solid chance to win this whole thing, and every little bit can make a huge difference.
3. Domenick makes a vow. During the reward challenge feast, Domenick looked at both Donathan (and his aunt) and Sebastian (and his sister) and said that they had a good thing going along with Wendell and that he wanted to make a vow right then for all of them to work together to go to the end. People always talk like this at rewards and it doesn’t necessarily mean that those four are going to be the last four. It is really Domenick and Wendell’s decision on who they want to sit with them at the end. Personally, I think that they sit there with Laurel. So, what is the point of all of this? This shows that Domenick is willing to “work” with people to further his game, no matter if it’s someone that he hasn’t even spoken much with in the past.
4. Laurel and Donathan are in the middle… again. This seems to be a recurring theme of the season. How many times have we seen these two sitting right smack down in the middle of where everyone else is voting? It also seems to be the same scenario every time too. They are either going to vote with Domenick and Wendell or they are going to vote with someone else, whether it be the original Malolo or the Naviti girls this week. Regardless of how it is split up, the same thing plays out almost every time. Laurel and Donathan talk about where they want to put their votes, and then Donathan talks about how he wants to make a big move, then Laurel gets a confessional where she talks about being loyal to Dom and Wendell and she doesn’t know what to do. At this point in the game, there is very little time left to make a move on the two big men, but they do have two more votes left before the final five (which is the last time an idol can be played). Let’s see how they end up going next week at the final seven when it would be easy to get the numbers in their favor.
5. Wendell doesn’t play his idol. I usually spend time talking about how someone played an idol and now they don’t have anything left in the game to keep them safe, but this time I am going to discuss the opposite. Either Wendell already knew for sure that he wasn’t going home, or someone dropped him a hint during tribal, because otherwise, I can’t think of a single reason why he shouldn’t have played his idol. Now he is sitting in an even better position. He is in the final seven with an idol still in his possession, plus a tight bond with someone else who also has an idol. Him not playing it opens up a huge door for both him and Domenick to continue working their way through this game. I am curious to see if either of the two idols get played in the next episode or if they will both hold them until the final moment to play them? With only one more episode to talk about before the finale, things should continue to be fun.
There you go. What moments from this week’s episode do you think made an impact?
Written by
And yet again Donathan/Laurel make the dumb choice