Shamar one of the WOAT, but he's not really playing Survivor so whatever. Clueless and attention whore is a boring combination to me.

overall I think the fans' play has seemed very very poor. Many of them have made huge strategic blunders that we probably haven't seen in 10+ seasons. Creating a minority alliance and then alienating themselves from the majority is just ridiculous. They completely butchered the splitting of the votes, with some idiocy by Shamar on top of it. All while not getting rid of the idol.

Then again the favorites considered splitting the votes in the first tribal so they're no better.

Basically every episode a group of people have gotten together to do something stupid and try to sabotage their own game.

Probably and that would be a good move, but Eddie or Hope, either one voted being out should have been acceptable.

I don't understand how Laura felt she may be in trouble in the 3/3 split didn't go down as planned.

Honest question: Say you're on Survivor and you're the biggest asset on a tribe that is down in numbers but still has time to win challenges and catch up. Someone who is not one of your strongest allies (and more importantly outed you at the last tribal) comes up to you and tells you that you need to play your idol at the next vote. Are you going to be more or less likely to play your idol? For me, the answer is fairly obvious.


What's the plan if Reynold doesn't use his idol, Hope votes for him and you lose the biggest asset on your team?

Well considering the alliance spoke on how they couldn't afford to lose Reynold or Eddie, I don't think they viewed both scenarios as "acceptable".


Who knows if it would have worked (or if he even tried), but I think Reynold missed an opportunity to work on Laura a bit. After her abysmal showing in the challenge, she's gotta know she's low on the totem pole of valuable assets. Reynold should have capitalized on that to question Laura on what she thinks will happen in 1 or 2 tribals if the fans keep losing and there are no more girls from the cool kids to boot.

See above for Shamar's loose lips.

Agree concerning the "cool-kid" alliance and isolating themselves from the rest but consider the sources and situation concerning splitting the votes.

On the Favs tribe, it was Franchesqueszka, and never happened.

On the Fans tribe, everyone wants to keep Reynolds around for the challenges, so there's no sense targeting him now, plus he's not that bad a guy, but they split the vote between the other two just in case it got played.

They can just as easily force the idol later, at the swap or at the merge.

Laura lying to shamar probably did prevent any one from the reynold/hope/eddy alliance from voting for anyone but shamar. But it also gave reynold the idea that he was safe. do you agree that he did not play the idol because of the conversation laura had with him? if this is true, then i am not entirely sure why laura wouldve done this. I guess she was nervous about her name potentially being written down by those three because her swimming failure. Her convo helped the vote stay 3-3-3 but it also prevented the idol from being flushed out.

She mustve really wanted hope out instead of eddy.

I think everyone is massively overrating challenges here. There's a very likely tribe swap coming within the next two votes, so even if you drop Reynold the worst case scenario is you lose two more challenges and drop off the remainder of the minority alliance.

The play was 3 to Hope, 3 to Reynold. Hope Reynold (?) plays his idol, otherwise vote him out with it in his pocket and accept that you're more likely to lose challenges and vote out Eddie/Hope, who are probably going to flip at the swap anyway.

An alternative would be to bring Reynold back into the fold, which could probably be accomplished by voting out Shamar (although if Shamar gets blindsided he probably destroys the entire tribal council set in his rage).

Rooster alliance from like 2 seasons ago. Dumb people will always be dumb.

Also B Rob split the first vote iirc in Redemption Island. Since Phillip and Andrea are both very obviously aping Rob, it shouldn't have been a surprise that they'd consider splitting.


Unrelated. Shamar has to be one of the worst casting jobs imaginable. Take a guy with no knowledge of or apparent interest in the game, zero charisma or humor, who is prone to rage (likely has PTSD as well) and make him the focal point of your show for as long as he's on the island, which has the potential to be all season since he is the most obvious goat ever.

It's sad when Shamar is coming up with good strategic ideas for the other side (ex. Hope voting for Eddie), and they're too dumb to even realize it.

Hope: if you think the vote is going to be 5-4 Shamar (with you, Eddie, Reynold, Laura, and Julia voting for him), you can still vote for Eddie to make it 4-4-1, then vote for Shamar on the re-vote if necessary. The upside there is that, when everyone else is lying to you, and it's going to be a 3-3-3 tie (which is exactly what happened), Eddie goes home 4-3-2 because you voted for him and saved your own hot ass. The downside is...wait, no, there is no downside because you can just pin the Eddie vote on Julia/Laura. GJGE.

I gotta say, as much as I hate the Eddie/Reynold combo, I was really hoping the vote was going to be (assumed to be) 5-4 Shamar so Reynold could have pulled out a bizarre blindside. I'm not advocating this strategy, and it's an absurd case of FPS, but it ran threw my mind before the vote: Laura and Julia freak out and swap their votes from Hope to Shamar (as they seemed to be entertaining). The vote is now 5 Shamar, 3 Eddie, 1 Hope. However, Hope/Reynold/Eddie now decide to switch their votes off Shamar and onto Sherri, so it's 3 Eddie, 3 Sherri, 2 Shamar, 1 Hope. Reynold gives Eddie his idol, and Sherri goes home. Like I said, this is way too FPS-y, especially when a switch is probably coming very soon, but that would have been great TV a la the Cirie blindside in HvsV.

Sherri is awesome. I love her and hope she does well (and plays again). She's the whole package.

I have no clue what Andrea is doing. I think she's freaked out about being too passive last time, so she's now overcompensating by being super-aggro in spots where she shouldn't be doing much of anything. Trying to knife Corinne this early is really bad, especially when you're seemingly on shaky ground already. And then telling Brandon this when you're not even going to TC? Ugh. I'm not liking this at all.

Malc gonna Malc. Shep gonna bore. Hantz gonna piss. Weird episode for the favorites.

yes great idea, the fans should definitely be doing everything possible to make sure they go into the swap with the greatest likelihood of being at a numerical disadvantage in both swapped tribes.

Has blaming someone else for a vote ever worked before in Survivor?

2 quickies:

- I think it's pretty obvious now that when Sherri said Shamar was her Phillip, she was likening herself to Boston Rob (in a strategic way, not an arrogant one).

- Wife and I are pretty convinced that Shamar is a really damaged person who's crying for help in the wake of his service time. We both feel sorry for him, but not in the way he'd want us to. Far more pity than he'd like.

I'd agree he's messed up, but I think it might just be the way he is and have nothing to do with the time he was in Iraq.

Is it just me?

Whenever Michael has a confessional, I just want him to say "Malkovich Malkovich. Malkovich."

lol perfect gif for that idea.

I Agree with all of this.

The Bolded: This would have been the correct play for Sherri's alliance.
They have to assume a swap is coming up. As it stands Reynold and Eddie are completely alienated from the tribe and instinctively they will likely look to abandon their former tribe members at the earliest opportunity.

Had Sherri thrown Reynold a bone and voted out Shamar, she could keep her numbers advantage while upsetting nobody and uniting the fans in anticipation for the upcoming swap. On top of that, Reynold can be used as an idol carrying figurehead for the fans tribe at the swap, drawing a lot of attention away from Sherri.

Andrea's play was so bad last night too. Right now the alliance of 6 is three different pairs, Andrea/Phillip, Dawn/Cochrane and Malcolm/Corrine. If you swap Corrine out for Brandon then suddenly its a 3/2/1 split with South Pacific in charge. And telling Brandon about this plan when there wasn't even a tribal coming up is just idiotic.

It was pretty interesting how quiet this thread was during the episode. I think the editing didn't give away too much who's going home. Eddie 40%, Shamar 30%, Hope 25%, Reynold 5% would've been my guess right before tribal.

Shamar clearly should not have passed the psyche evaluation. The most interesting thing about Shamar is Sherri trying to use him and to trick or influence him to do what suits her game.

I actually liked that they didn't give "Purple Kelly Hope" any additional screen time for adding exactly nothing to this show apart from being above average pretty.

Corinne might be in a bad spot now. This felt like foreshadowing that she might be in trouble in the next two episodes. I've got a bad bad feeling about this.

I was hoping to finally see or hear a bit more of NASCARlia. Edit-wise it doesn't look to pretty for her IMO.

Laura is lucky that she's in the majority alliance. She's really no help in any physical competition. Maybe that could help her post-merge or even shortly before the merge because they start eliminating the physical threads earlier than usual.
Anyway, she's on the right track for having serious back-pain and physical therapy in about 5-10 years with her flawed posture. I feel bad for her, with the American health system the way it is, she's in trouble

They obviously made sure that there's zero point zero chance for the idols to remain "hidden".
But I loved how Corinne jumped Mal when he found it, probably will make a good avatar.

Can anyone make me a Shamar/ Michael avatar?

There is so much craziness going on here that I couldn't help but just start laughing as I was reading it. It does seem way over the top FPS and wouldnt have even crossed Reynold's mind probably given his hatred for Shamar.

You may be watching survivor wrong...

hope even got the full screen body shots during the challenge

was pretty obvious

Slanche, that is the best avatar ever.

LOL that is amazing indeed