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.
This was by far the craziest episode of the season. A lot happened and it definitely deserved a re-watch before I wrote this to make sure that I caught everything.
1. Lauren finds the hidden advantage. Last week we saw the moment when the camera flashed onto a note hidden in the nails. It sits there unfound for a few days until Lauren happens upon it. There was a brief moment when I thought that Ryan was going to see it, but Lauren gets it and finds out that it is an advantage where she gets to secretly forfeit her vote at the next tribal and save it up for a later time where she would then get two votes. Of course, this happens when they are planning on splitting the vote. Lauren decides to tell Ben about this advantage and that it may affect the vote split. She successfully pulls this off, even succeeding in not voting again during the re-vote after the tie. Lauren now holds an extra vote that she can use later in the game. This is set up to make a pretty big impact later, let’s just hope that she is able to use it right and that Ben keeps quiet about it.
2. Ryan finds an idol. The whole story leading up to Ryan finding the idol is just fantastic TV! Joe wins the “lottery” and gets to pick the order that he and the members of the reward winning team get to eat. They are all sharing a big bowl of spaghetti along with bread and salad, but the spaghetti is the important part. Devon and JP eat first and find nothing. Cole goes third and sees that there is a clue on the bottom of the plate to the whereabouts of an idol and then makes a feeble attempt to hide it. At least he tried, but both Chrissy and Ryan also find it. Ryan has the right mind to hide the plate and prevent Joe from discovering it. When they make it back to camp, Ryan sneaks off and finds the idol almost instantly, and then all hell breaks loose with Chrissy, Cole, Ben, and Joe all trying to dig for the idol. The two significant impacts here are Ryan comes away with an idol that no one knows he has (apart from maybe Chrissy but it’s unclear if she actually heard Ryan when he told her he got it). Plus the tribe thinks that Cole has it. There are now two idols in the game again, with ten people left, which means that we will hopefully get some more good idol play. Also, because everyone thinks that Cole has one, he may actually be safe for a while if people are too scared to try and flush his idol out.
3. Ben and Joe fight. Joe certainly knows how to push the right buttons, and he picked the right ones again after Ben caught him trying to put his name out for the possible vote off. Ben confronted him, and they had a verbal disagreement that the whole camp heard. I think that most people didn’t think twice about Joe’s behavior, but I think that this was a bad look for Ben. He did apologize during tribal, but most people are used to a more laid-back Ben and seeing him lose his cool may work against him in the future. We will see how he bounces back after this, but with him seemingly in the middle every vote, he better watch his back.
4. Mike and Cole flip? I am very curious about this one because we didn’t really get to see what fully transpired here. We see Ben and Mike talking and then immediately after we see Mike telling Cole. Did Mike plan to flip all along and he just got Cole to join in or did Ben convince Mike to come over to his side, but if that is the case, then why did he tell Cole? I have a lot of questions about this, and this will hopefully be explained in the next episode or two.
5. Tie vote at tribal. This sort of ties in with Lauren’s advantage, but I needed it to have its own point because no one appeared to notice that the wrong number of votes were cast. There are enough smart people on this season that someone like Chrissy, Ryan, or Mike should have been able to figure out that something wasn’t right with the numbers. So, I think that one of two things will happen in the next episode. The first thing is that it is possible that nobody really knows what happened. Everyone is tired and hungry from 21 days of playing and having the ten votes spread across four people might have been just the right amount of cover that it will slip right through. The second thing that may happen is that someone did notice, but didn’t say anything. They are waiting to get back at camp to talk about it later. Either way, this is bound to have some sort of an impact, especially if people start accusing each other.
There you go. What moments from this week’s episode do you think made an impact?
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I have a comment on 2. While I wish you are right I don’t think the thinking Cole has an idol thing will keep him safe for long. Cause Ryan knows he doesn’t have it, Probably Chrissy And didn’t he tell Joe?
Number 4 I completely agree also curious why Cole flipped