Eggman

Indeed. At first I thought, Tony, you idiot. But no, Tony was going to blindside Woo (he said so in a talking head), and it's very possible he was also planning to blindside Trish. He wants people at FTC he can make an argument against. Tony may not have explicitly presented his "this is good to F4" lie about the super-idol, and it's possible that when he does someone who is left will know better. Then, if he doesn't win IC, he's in trouble, regardless. Spencer has been doing a great job of banging the "Tony is gonna win this game" drum every chance he's gotten. Assuming it was done before FTC they might have targeted Tony and then had to scramble when he pulled out the super-idol, but that goes against his plan to try to ride the super-idol all the way to F3. I'm coming around to the opinion that someone else floated that all this drama between Tony and Kass is manufactured by those two in order to hide their real strategic goal of taking each other to the end. Good luck with that. The jury does not vote for people they hate, unless there's someone that is hated even more. Tony doesn't qualify in that regard.

Bleh. I'll watch, because I watch, but if I what I saw in the preview was them skydiving in LV, I would be fine with all three team's parachutes failing to open. The amazing splat.

what would be awesome would be that at a critical juncture, Kass decides that because SHE doesn't like Spencer, (she talks so much crap about him), she'll throw her lot in with him to get him to F3. Unlikely though. They had a plan and they followed it. I think Tony got to Woo, and all the "I'm in" stuff from Woo was coached by Tony and we didn't see the coaching to preserve the suspense. TC suspense is everything to the editors. I would imagine Spencer and Kass go next, in either order. Trish will get a few votes, but I don't see any Tony hate from the players, just frustration.

How would they know that? There are many stretches of the race where they don't see the other teams at all. The girls had no way of knowing where Brendan and whiney-butt were. It was the last u-turn, and they slapped the picture up just to be safe.

I'll miss the cowboys, but it's nice to see other teams play smart. Right now I"ll be happy to see either of the two non-crying teams win.

The thing about the super idol is that you don't have to play it until you KNOW that you have been voted out. Unless you are giving it to someone you know is the target of the vote, there is no way to play it unnecessarily.

Or... she knew exactly what Tony was doing and was trying to get him to break his $500, so someone else could get the advantage.

I would like to see what would happen with an immunity idol you can't use if you're the finder. :)

Puzzles and balancing / endurance challenges keep the season from being a full on beefcake fest. People still assume that a Big Strong Guy is an immunity threat, but the wimpification of challenges has made that not the case for years.

So, I take my accusations back. From an interview with Jeremy... Other interesting interview links at the bottom of that one.

I believe Jefra thinks she's four and kass is 5, especially based on the conversation Tony had with Kass, even though it was out of Jefra's earshot (she was on reward), where Tony tells Kass that "we four" have promised to stick together, and we'll extend that to you (Kass). Another thing I believe is that Tony found his special idol before the previous week's TC. That would explain the "bag-o-tricks" that he bought to the LJ vote. I think that the "finding it" scenes were carefully spliced into this episodes timeline. And I don't call BS on the idol find. If you've ever tried to hide something in the woods for someone else to find you find out pretty quickly that you need to hide it relative to some sort of landmark that can be described in a clue. Without the landmark, you would just be saying "dig somewhere in this large open area." Knowing that a landmark is necessary means that anyone that is on the ball can just look and dig around everything that looks like a landmark. One of Russell's idols was hidden underneath a small 4-foot long footpath bridge. Russell just looked around everything that stood out even if in a small way - every bush, every tree trunk. The real surprise is that the other people don't do this, or at least that we're not shown that. Why did they not go out unless there was a printed clue sitting right in their face? Does the great mass of people really lack that much initiative?

Note that two women in Tony 's alliance consider Tony to be the goat.

I've often said that wanting to have someone to root for in Survivor, or someone winning who is likable, is actually a liability for following Survivor as a show. IMO, the show is easier to appreciate if you just take everyone as they are and don't consider them as people you do or don't like. After all, most of them are edited to a type, or shown only in unflattering interactions, or had their faults disguised, or even unfairly edited right off the show. They are all individuals. All I do is find my zen place and just watch.

It's bad enough to have one paranoid person in camp without making everybody else paranoid as well. Trish wanted the 6 to stay together - raising doubts with LJ about something Trish didn't think Tony would go through with wouldn't help towards that goal.

Woo isn't likely to get hurt as long as he doesn't land on his head, break it and let all the air out. If he does have to go, that isolates Tony. Tony and Woo were the ones who joined the former NewBrains to vote out LJ. That means Trish/Jefra/Kass were not in on it. Even without an injury that leaves Tony & Woo with some explaining to do. Without Woo, Tony would have to do all that explaining himself. All in all I think they have to stick with Tony for a vote or two yet. Tony answered the 'construction' question that Jeff asked. Peachy was pretending he doesn't know about the Police Officer reveal.

I just rewatched the episode, and in the initial night shots Kass clearly says she was in the bottom of her new alliance, so it must have been more obvious than anything we were shown, especially since revealing that would have made the flip less of a reveal at the end of the last episode. She also said that Tony's alliance hadn't really reached out to her in any formal way even after the flip. She certainly doesn't look like a threat at this point, and it might be enough if she can somehow just fade into the background while other sub-groups turn on each other. She really is "playing her own game" which, you know, might even work for her .

But she made the merge - I thought that was the criteria for if you are boyfriend-worthy or not. Stop stealing my lines, woman!

-- both! Unless Kass is really stupid, she's probably thinking that all she needs to do is to get in front of the jury and her mad lawyer skills will win the game for her. As she goes along putting people on the jury who are upset with her she will look more and more like a goat, especially with Spencer loudly arguing that she can't win the game now. My feeling is that she's a supercilious bitch who browbeats people into doing what she wants. Me? I'm praying she gets to the end so we can see the jury roast her alive.

Sarah's problem with Tony wasn't really lying so much as it was waffling. When she saw that she was in a swing position the thing she should have done is to come down hard on one side or the other. For Tony, Sarah's refusal to commit was worse than just saying 'no' - it meant she was trying to play him, and that put a target on her back even before Trish talked to Kass, whose alianation was a different issue. Of course, this doesn't directly have anything to do with Ponderosa. What's in the videos?

My guess is that we'll see Kass' former alliance-mates trickle into Ponderosa over the next few weeks.

I think that Cochran did the right thing, not just for himself but for the game as a whole. People who play poorly - who treat a person on the outside of their core alliance badly - should suffer the consequences. In that regard it's possible to interpret Kass' move as being a similar one. For whatever reason, she was feeling marginalized, and she flipped. In survivor, when someone feels marginalized, the onus falls on both sides, regardless.

Oh my. From http://robhasawebsite.com/survivor-cagayan-2014-exit-interview-sarah-lacina-voted-out-merge/ "The first day that I was with her [Kass], after the tribe swap, one of her comments to me was 'you better hope we win, because if you don't you're going home'." "you just couldn't say anything right to her." I'll be very interested in seeing Kass' edit going forward.

I don't know how PTV feels about offsite interviews (forgive me if I sin) but here's one that suggests that Kass felt threatened by Sarah's social game, such as it may have been. http://xfinity.comcast.net/blogs/tv/2014/04/03/survivor-castaway-sarah-kass-was-wreaking-havoc-around-camp/ "Spencer, Jeremiah, and I were very close out there. And we said we’d take it to the final six as a group. Then as a threesome, we had discussed getting Kass out earlier because she was causing so many problems around camp. And not just with me, she was just wreaking havoc around camp. I knew it was not going to end up good the way it was going." It's a double-edged sword. You have to spend time with people and enjoy their company to bond with them to the point where they are part of your game. It's hard to do what without other players getting a feeling for what is going on. "I've been replaced" might have felt more real to Kass than we know. That, and Kass might be the more difficult person to be with on the beach. Of course, these interviews tend to be self-serving. It's a data point though.

The most common "special power" doled out at this point in the game is challenge advantage. Another possibility could be "pre-vote" immunity, rather than "pre-reveal" immunity which we now have. I sure would have to have a "post-reveal" idol in the game, but they might do that too. Plenty of men have done things just as stupid as what Kass did last night and been denounced. Playing the gender card is unwarrented. ETA: one thing that would change my mind, as suggested, is if Kass somehow successfully pairs with Trisha and takes that pair deeper into the game. I don't think that's a jury-winning strategy, but it could take her further.

Well, this wasn't just poorly played by Kass, it was terribly played by Sarah. Rather than make a quick decision and then work from that, she waffled when dealing with the team of 5 and played too hard relative to the team of 6. If she had just lied outright to Tony he would not have targeted her, and if she had held back and not given the appearence of protecting certain members of the opposing team then her team would have held together around her. Instead, she let her mouth run her right out of the game. That said, what Kass did was epic stupid. As a lawyer she is most likely very used to being in control and driving her agenda forward. In this case she should have just kept quiet and let the other players work the levers for awhile. Instead, she let her own mouth - and ego - run her out of the game. "Long way to go" indeed.