Mike N

Same, re: the sealing of the choice. If I wasn't convinced by her random moving of signs in Moltown or her haphazard "let's rope this tree and now this one and OH LOOK exactly the right amount" process, I was by the puzzle. To me, it was a classic case of "I know the answer but I'm going to pretend I don't". Stall long enough to not make it totally obvious but suddenly get a flash of insight once another person was solving it. Tangentially-related question: if Art ever decides to stop hosting, which former contestant should replace him? Choose one woman and one man.

OK. Just finished Episode 8. I'm going to get this out of the way right now: Diederik was in green during the exemption assignment. It was indeed hard to extract Mole information from the assignments. If I can grasp at a straw or two, Sanne was the one who was doing the most word association of the four during the picture assignment, in an "I'm trying to say things to confuse my partner" way. I agree that Diederik and Thomas were posturing/psyching each other out more than anything else. I'm sticking with my choice of Sanne as the Mole.

Hoo boy, OK. I'm not sure any of the assignments gave me any new insight, TBH. And yet again, the person who was eliminated wasn't on my Mole list. To get something out of my head: Let's say I think Diederik is the Mole. Am I putting too much stock in (a) the fact that he's wearing a shirt that says "6.023 x 10^23" in the original group shot and/or (b) the fact that he was the liar in the trial assignment (meaning the other two got to do the interesting things)?

I will be VERY interested to see how the group dynamic changes with Ellie gone. I mean, there are always some changes every week, but she was such a force in the group. I can't say that anything that happened today really affected who my top two Mole choices are (still Klaas and Rop). Both of them were suspiciously inconsequential in anything getting accomplished. Although, the puzzles seemed to get harder as the climbing challenge went along, so Tim volunteering to go first and then confounding the solution of the probability puzzle could have been his way of intentionally screwing up early, knowing they'd need to get more of the later puzzles correct. As far as the other topic is concerned (in no particular order): William S., Tim A., Tim H., Pieter D., Art, Patrick M., Dennis W., Dennis S., Coen, Taeke. These are mostly from memory, so I'm sure I've left someone out.

I'll third the notion that De Mol is a man. Right now, my top two choices are Klaas and Rop. Maybe we just haven't seen enough of the season to know better, but I'm liking the theory that "behind your back" is about the money. The previews of next week's episode show an assignment that involves the bills; perhaps that's the producers' way of slowly directing the candidates to look at the money. Also, the Tim/Taeke bromance is awesome.