The best line of the whole show was when at the end Boston Rob says, “all that talking to vote Karishma out?” 
That made me LOL.
Sorry, that should have been DEAN wasn’t really going along with them.
I usually skip them all, except this time out of morbid curiosity I watched Karishma greet the husband she doesn’t love. Shaking, sobbing, he’s her world, her everything, blah blah blah. Sure, whatever you say, Karishma.
This whole season is a mess. Usually when I have no idea what’s going to happen, that’s a good thing. But this is just getting exhausting; there’s so much sloppy play and misdirected energy going on. Rob’s comment above was spot on.
Dean seems to want to be the “chaos” player, and that can be a valid tactic, but this wasn’t the right time for it. I don’t know what he hopes to accomplish here.
My only prediction is that the season will end soon, somebody will win, and then we’ll all try to forget this season ever happened.
Dean’s play at TC was totally unusual and worked out brilliantly. I thought it was pure stupidity when he first pulled it, but he successfully got Noura to flip out and torpedo herself.
Going forward, Dean has a new powerful ally in Tommy and Noura wasn’t trustworthy anyway. It was risky, but a good move.
The really odd play was Elaine playing her idol. She should have known she wasn’t in any danger.
I definitely agree with the thoughts re: the Loved Ones challenge (and challenges in general). Everything feels really watered down. There’s a lot of potential with the Loved Ones stuff in having people make some difficult decisions, but right now I’d guess that production is happy with using the challenge only to stir the pot between the Haves and Have Nots (hence why we probably did the LO challenge at 8, with 4 “winners” this time). And maybe they feel like its a good thing to offer players who are mentally/emotionally fatigued. But yeah, I would totally throw the challenge, never want to be the winner of that one.
Not much from our “Idols” but Rob’s comments at TC were gold.
I thought Dean’s play made total sense - Noura is just too nutty to be trusted, and her conversation with Dean prior to TC proved it. So getting ahead of her and throwing her under the bus made sense. I’m not sure why they felt the need to pull in a fifth - should’ve just gone ahead with a 4-4 tie and played Elaine’s idol (since the majority had told them who the target was, thinking it’d be an easy majority vote). Elaine made a bad play with her idol, it seemed pretty clear after all the discussion that the votes were going towards Noura or Karishma only.
This will probably be a somewhat underwhelming end since there’s no real standouts at this point - everyone is varying degrees of solid (except Crazy Noura, and possibly Dan depending on what the other players think of him at this point). Maybe things can get interesting now that the obvious vote (Karishma) is finally gone, but… I think what’ll probably happen is that the majority just takes out Noura/Dean/Elaine in some order, then probably something like Lauren losing the firemaking challenge and Tommy winning over Janet and a zero-vote Dan. Or maybe they’ll keep Noura around and vote out Janet earlier, but I’d be surprised by anything vastly different.
(One big hole: I have no idea who Dan is really aligned with or what his plan is, because he’s basically been ignored ever since the controversy. Not that I necessarily blame the editors for doing so, but it does make it a bit harder to suss out what’s going on)
I want to see the extended cut of Noura playing with leaves trying to figure out how the vote will go.
Dean’s really interesting. In some ways he’s not that good of a player (bad at challenges, can’t find idols, weak social game), but in other ways, he’s playing a perfect game for the situation he’s in. Normally, the strategy for everyone at this point is “take out the strong players.” But he knows that really his only path to the final three is taking out all the weak players who are going to get dragged along.
Yeah, I think Dean did it just about the best he could this episode. His best path to the end is to get in tighter with Tommy/Dan/Lauren (who I think are the tightest group right now) and be in the right place at the right time for when Tommy and Lauren go for each other. Then win a challenge (which would be a shock…) to get the other one out and hope that he can get a final with Dan and Janet (or maybe Noura, if they decide she’s just too good of a goat to dump). He just has to hope that they either target Elaine as a threat (challenges/social) or turn on each other before they target him. That would give him an opening to a winnable Final TC.
On another note, is this the oldest Final 7 we’ve had? I’m seeing ages of: 26, 28, 28, 36, 41, 48, 59. That seems rather different than the usual spread towards the end of a season. And Karishma is 37.
Finally, the minority has been really bad about using idols to turn the tables - so many wasted ones this season. This week would have been perfect to play it for Karishma and get out whomever, but it seems like minority players just want to save themselves and hope things change next TC.
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Yes, Noura is cuckoo, but Dean probably had a better shot aligning with the “low men on the totem pole” alliance than with the others who perform much better on the challenges.
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It’s seems that Karishma has had an epiphany re her husband, but to be honest, he didn’t seem all that into her. So glad to see her go, and not just because she’s a bloodsucking lawyer.
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Whatever they were attempting with Rob and Sandra as coaches seems to have fizzled. I mean, it’s hardly even worth their plane fare for the few tidbits of entertainment they provide.
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After complaints about the lopsidedness of HIIs being found by men, isn’t it odd that a record number have been found by women this season? Hmmm.
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I don’t mind the Loved Ones visit. At least we didn’t have to see them get all snotty reading letters from home.
Yes, exactly!
The foursome that was left out of the Loved Ones reward was in a position to seize control of the game. Dean would have emerged in a very strong position within a majority alliance.
But by throwing Noura under the bus, Dean hasn’t truly cracked his way into the current power alliance like he thinks he has. Dan, Lauren, Tommy, and Janet have the numbers; they don’t need him one bit. He’s still on the outside looking in.
I’m guessing he’s going to pitch a Big Move[sup]TM[/sup] to Tommy to blindside Dan or Lauren, but I don’t see anybody trusting him enough to make it happen after what he just did.
Wow. Better late than never, I guess. Good riddance, Creepy Dan.
Nothing else in the episode was particularly surprising, except maybe that Dean is making a better case for himself than I’d previously surmised.
One more to go, and I have no predictions.
Haha, fuck Dan.
It’ll be really interesting to see what details emerge. [url=People magazine is reporting there was an incident with a production member. I wonder if it was more inappropriate touching or something else. Kellee tweeted about it and made it sound like more touching, though I don’t know if she knows or is just guessing. I’m sure there’s probably all sorts of legal action going on behind the scenes.
And part of it certainly seems by design, since there was no one sent to IotI in 4 of the last 8 episodes. Eh, I’m okay with that, better to have it under-effect than over-effect I think (looking at you, Extinction Island).
Yeah, interesting to wonder why. One theory I saw (maybe even based on comments from actual players?) was that gender roles tend to be stereotypical on the island, with the men going out to hunt/fish/gather wood/gather coconuts, which gave them the chance to go out and look, whereas the women would tend to be in charge of the ‘domestic’ camp roles like tending the fire and cooking. It does seem they’ve definitely made the idols easier to find, at least.
Ugh. I really think the way the show has handled this awful man’s behaviour has been just terrible. If they’d acted swiftly and seriously after Kellee first asked Dan not to touch her, back on Day 1, we’d be having such a different conversation.
Believe women.
I rarely get spoiled, but I did read about another incident with Dan. I only watch the show a day delayed, but I came upon this news.
I’m surprised there are incidences off camera. I thought, other than going to the bathroom, that contestants are pretty much always on camera. I wonder what happened.
Report I read this morning stated that it was indeed another inappropriate touching occurrence, this one involving a female member of the production crew, as they were getting on a boat after leaving Tribal Council. (Guess they don’t walk the whole way?) There were no cameras rolling but the article stated that it was also witnessed by a contestant.
So, now you have to wonder which contestant saw it, and how it was handled if they were all heading back to camp at the same time. What we saw on TV was obviously the next morning, and Dan wasn’t there, so did they remove him immediately and then film the Probst reveal the next morning as a ‘scripted’ kind of thing??
Either way, he’s a lying predator and he should be arrested, let alone kicked off the show. I mean…he’s a Hollywood talent scout! You can’t help but think about how many other women/young girls he may have done this to given his profession!
But, but, Aaron has sisters! And a mother! How could this possibly have happened?
Seriously, I’m assuming this has to be a surprise to no one? The interesting thing is that when Elizabeth, Missy & Aaron (not to mention CBS itself) issued their statements and apologies a few weeks ago, they already knew that another incident had occurred and Dan had been pulled from the show. One wonders if they would have been so abjectly apologetic if that hadn’t occurred.
I can’t wait to see if there are lawsuits. I’m sure CBS itself is protected 6 ways from Sunday from suits by the players, and they do have Kellee on camera saying she doesn’t want to escalate things, but the crew member is a very different matter - she has the right to a safe workplace, and the producers had huge reason to know that Dan was a predator at that time - they goddamn well have an editor who picked out shots of him being wildly inappropriate. I honestly hope all the unused footage from the show becomes evidence in a trial. That or the crew member and Kellee each walk away with huge settlements.
Did anyone else notice that that there were shots of Noura spinning on the beach by herself? It’s almost as if she was practicing for the upcoming challenge. Curious.
I can’t wait for the cascade of lawsuits to come tumbling forth now that this has been made public. Screw that predatory fuck.
I do feel bad for his son though. It’s ruined what could have been a special memory for him. I can’t imagine he will fare very well at school now either.
Yea - I feel sorry for Dan’s family. What a creep.
I really can’t take much more of Noura. I feel she acts overly quirky and goofy just hoping that she’ll be labeled as this season’s standout contestant and be asked back to compete in a season with all the other goofball contestants from seasons past.
CBS has announced they’re pretaping the vote reveal/reunion show on the day of the finale, instead of airing it live right after the show. They’re saying it’s for “security concerns” and so the players can “feel as safe and comfortable as possible”. The cynical side of me thinks it’s so they can cut off/edit out discussions going where they don’t want them to - they really don’t want Kellee saying “Fuck you Elizabeth, Fuck you Missy, and a giant Fuck you with a barbed wire dildo to you, Jeff Probst” on live TV. No statement as to whether Dan will or will not be attending, but I’ve got to assume he won’t be.
I think there is a better chance of me winning the Powerball than Dan showing up for the finale. and I haven’t bought a ticket in over a year.
Yes, I wonder what kind of ‘apologies’ from Elizabeth, Missy and Tommy we would have got, if Dan was not pulled out of the game.
Since we are down to 5 players now, we missed the opportunity of Dean playing the Real Fake Legacy Advantage at the Final 6. Thanks Dan!