Yeah but you have to make that decision in front of Eddie and Malcolm so they get to play with perfect information. Like the best move for Phillip tonight was obv to try to get SRUS to vote out Sherri and let Malcolm and Eddie keep the idols. What he did was straight suicide.

You're not in the same position at the next tribal because you can prepare. The problem tonight was that they had to announce whether they were staying the course or voting someone else out, so Malcolm and Eddie know whether to play or not. Next tribal it becomes a levelling war.

So good, glad to see this season has turned around.

Is there any way SRU could randomize their voting so that the guys have to play both idols and/or Sherri and/or Malcolm and/or Eddie still has a decent shot at going home? If Phillip publicly throws Sherri under the bus without a twist then the guys might not use their idols, or they could even gamble and give one to Sherri.

I wasn't a huge fan of the episode. The idol being put back into plays feels gimmicky, idols without clues feels gimmicky, and idols everywhere you look in recent seasons is definitely too gimmicky for me. Maybe I'm not enough of a gamebot (and I do recognize there is some fun debate to be had about how that situation should've been handled) but I prefer Survivor to be more straightforward than what we saw this week.

Few random thoughts based on thread and show; it sounds like Fishbach will provide some good clarity when I listen to RHAP:

-I half-expected them to say "okay, let's vote out Sherri, sorry Sherri," so maybe the fact that they didn't do that is a blow to whatever Malcolm's plan was/is.

-It does seem correct for the 7 to say "stick to the plan." It could've been any one of them that the three targeted. First instinct is that it was -EV to tell everyone Phillip was the target, and Phillip falling on his sword was certainly bad for the amigos.

-The moment Malcolm said Phillip's name I think Phillip should've blatantly tried to rally everyone behind voting Sherri. I mean, fk it, you're probably going home if you don't. I don't think it's easy for Phillip to see how screwed he is at that moment, since there's so much possible leveling going on. But it's just like in poker, yeah, there's always lots of possible leveling, but at the end of the day, there it is, people played it straightforward.

I feel like at the end of the day the amigos got no fireworks and no blatant splintering. The Andrea whispers never seemed to reach Andrea's ears. Sherri if anything should feel better about her position in SRUS.

I think if I were in Malcolm's shoes I would've saved the other idol for a rainy day and ensured I moved up one pay spot.

I think they could hide the idol's better but I'm guessing they wanna make sure people find them.

Meh, maybe it's better for Malcolm to use both idols here. He's trying to create a situation where the numbers make sense for certain people to flip the entire game. If he still has Eddie (and one less SRUS) he has more leverage and there's more of a chance for that to happen. The only time you would save one idol is if you thought there was virtually no chance for the game to be flipped in your favor, which I think is barely not the case here.

Andrea is a 9, borderline 10, out on the island. Then when she gets back to civilization she puts on a ton of makeup, pulls her hair into either a severe pony tail or some poofed up nonsense, and becomes a 7.

https://twitter.com/andreaboehlke/media/grid

Yup. All Malcolm had to say is one of you is going home. Without hurting Phillips feelings, Malcolm may have got Phillips vote at FTC if it comes down to it.

Yeah this is one of things I thought of after watching. After more thinking I reckon it would be better to have Reynold vote for eddie or malcolm and then have 1 vote each on Cochran or Dawn and Phillip or Andrea. That way the alliance truly has to split. If Dawn, Andrea and Phillip are up both Dawn and Andrea are fine with Phillip going home but if it is Coch/Dawn vs Andrea/Phillip the remaining member of the pair is going to be inclined to flip next round.

Other options for Malcolm and the one I think I would have chosen would be to tell Reynold that Eddie is going home tonight but we don't have to waste this idol and have both vote for Eddie. Thus he goes home 5-4-1 (assuming they can convince Eddy to vote elsewhere) and Malcolm still has two idols and his alliance partner is a huge challenge beast. Maybe a little riskier but having two hii's at final 9 is just fantastic because there is now no scenario where the alliance of 7 can stick together.

With how they did do it, I think they should have announced they were voting Phillip and then voted out Cochran. Firstly Dawn would be distraught and she was already on the verge of breaking and secondly whoever did go with their plan to vote Phillip is now on the outs (turns out it was only Eirk).

Basically it was a good move that could have been a lot better.

Idols aren't gimmicky, they're the one game element keeping the show from being predictable. It's a mistake to think that the show can evolve to where the people on the "bottom of the majority alliance" will try to rearrange the numbers to their advantage because 1) they'll still find themselves on the bottom of most reorganized alliances and 2) even if you have an alliance of all forward-thinking players, they'll just make fake sub alliances to make everyone feel secure so their placement in the alliance will be unclear and random. Idols are necessary and fair.

If anything, they should turn the necklace into a must-use idol.

Episode was great. Just like last week, it was a good move that could have been better.

Brenda could have made "biggest villain move of all time" by keeping Dawn's teeth. It's not like she needs or should want Dawn around anyway. Too bad.

Unfortunately someone spoiled this season to me so I don't really feel comfortable arguing scenarios or whatever for this season anymore. Oh well.

lots of great posts about this tribal, i really like this one. ****ing awesome ep, im glad I didn't hear any of the hype building up to it. the only thing that clued me into the awesomeness that was about to go down was the ****ing player of the week options. how have they not gotten rid of that or at least moved it till after the end of tribal.

that celebration tweet by malcolm makes me think he 100% didnt make it to final 3.

oh well


go COCHTRAIN

Well, it did seem like he was trying to go out with a boom (soon) with this ep.
Great move, too bad they had to use two idols to get rid of someone as useless as filliup (sic).
I need a high res image of brenda bent over at the beach when they are scheming.
It would have been nice if they said they were voting dawn, just to see her losing her **** once again. As a payback for when she told her alliance about malcolm's plans. They didn't even need to go through with it.

liked the ep, 2 good eps in a row.

I really wish Sprint POTW didn't completely spoil the episode before I started watching.. (cbs.com shortly after air).

Great episode though.

What did the sprint POTW do? Didn't watch live so I didn't see it.

Well, I go onto cbs.com to watch the episode and the POTW is between Malcolm, Eddie, and Reynold (and it's like on the survivor homepage, impossible to avoid).

Can we confirm that Dawn's husband knocked out her teeth because she cries too much?

Yes, she talked about it in a secret scene a few weeks ago.

I don't know what promos you saw and what deductions could be made from them but I'm glad I didn't get spoiled in any way.

The Dawn teeth-crybaby-story in the beginning was maybe a bit annoying but, in fact, it helped the overall edit of the episode. It was a great distraction for what was about to unfold in this episode.
I think I actually cheered out loud when Brenda got her first confessional in AGES.

For the most part I did not except a rather anticlimactic Phillip boot episode. I guess at the point when Malcolm announced that they're voting for the Specialist the cat was out of the bag. That statement combined with the clues given before, like the scene where Phil skips the shower or the confessionals from other players to him not participating in the challenge made in clear at that point.

Great episode for Cochran. He's getting the most positive edit I've seen in a while. Even when he's talking BS about Dawn he still comes across as likable. I'm not crowning him the winner, yet, but he could be the "I'd-rather-vote-for-Cochran-than-for-the-bros" winner.

I guess since I'm not a huge fan of the bro-liance and I personally wasn't as annoyed as some other people by the Specialist I wasn't a huge fan of the 2nd idol. That being said I'm probably being results-oriented. It did make for an exciting tribal council and I like the insta-scrambling, the whispering of names and Adrea's shocked face.

This season still has got some work to do to make up for the slow start but it really took a turn in the right direction.
The challenge selection has been decent, they re-used some of the more entertaining challenges.

Next weeks episode looks promising as well, food auctions are always entertaining to me.

Taking Phillip out creates the most opportunities for SRU to dissolve. It only existed because everyone was playing along with Phillip hoping to bring him along to FTC as a goat. Now they need to think about who they want to get to the end with and can beat. Is anyone disliked?

Among the players left I'd estimate that Erik and Sherri are the biggest goats.

Nah, she still looks very, very good in real life, it's just whoever is doing the makeup for those shoots needs to be fired and never be allowed to work again.

Source: I see her around my neighborhood all the time.

lol at Dawn at the start of the episode, you're yelling in front of a camera you lost your teeth and make a huge drama about it that "you don't want others to know". Yeah the whole world just saw it and they saw how you were a little whiny bitch about it, deff losing it.



I think Malcolm's plan was simple: be honest during the tribal council and vote out the guy nobody really likes anyway, but seems to have a lot of power for some reason. That way he creates chaos within the alliance and you can't exactly say the alliance has reason to be offended about how they played it, they were open about it and didn't take out someone who is liked a lot.

He created maximum likelihood to be able to flip people. And that has to be the plan since if they can't flip anyone it's still long way off to get any sort of power.