A great fire-making challenge, and what I thought was a bit of a surprise ending too! Let's get to the pool points:
- Erika finds the final advantage in the trees - 3 points for her.
- The advantage gives Erika a huge head start in all stages of the first immunity challenge. She ends up beating Ricard who was right there. 5 points for her.
- At tribal council, everyone votes out Ricard. 2 points for Deshawn, Erika, Heather, and Xander for voting him out, and also 12 points each to them for making it through the 12th tribal council.
- At the next immunity challenge, Xander wins a very difficult one, but makes it look easy. 5 points for him.
- Xander decides to take Erika to the end and pits Deshawn and Heather against each other at the fire-making challenge. Deshawn wins in a huge comeback and burns through the string just a few seconds before Heather. 13 points each to Deshawn, Erika, and Xander for making through the 13th tribal council.
- At the final tribal council, after the final 3 pled their cases to the jury, Erica wins in a landslide, getting 7 out of 8 votes. She earns 14 points for winning the final tribal council and extra 7 bonus points for each winning vote.
- Erika earned a whopping 56 points in this final episode, with Xander coming in second with 32.
In the pool, here are the prize winners:
- 1st place, $470: Jswizzle, who stayed at the top for many weeks having picked almost all of the final 8 contestants.
- 2nd place, $290: massey, who climbed up at spot from 3rd last week and had all final 5 contestants as picks
- 3rd place, $180: case, who came all the way up from 8th last week
- 4th place, $120: Rachel L, who held on to 2nd place for quite a while but dropped for not having Erika
- 5th place, $60: Sara D, who really came out of nowhere, all the way up from 13th!
- 62nd place consolation, $30: Gargantujuan, who now won't feel bad for dropping huge from 34th last week
- Last place consolation, $30: Mitch, who stayed last long enough early on to keep the prize despite having Xander.
- All prize winners: please confirm that I can e-transfer the winnings to the email addresses I am using for these results.
- All prizes will be paid out by Monday morning, after giving everyone a chance to check their results.
Next season: looks like more of the same, no? Hopefully the tweaks they put in make the game better and give the players a bit more control of their own fate.
My episode observations:
- I was surprised Xander didn't get any votes. I think he could have got at least a couple votes if he talked up his game more. He was without a vote and vulnerable for such a long time - but yet didn't get voted out; and every time he didn't play his idol, he knew enough of what was going on and made enough connections to know that he didn't have to play it. I thought he was a more capable player than he was perceived as by the jury.
- Xander will probably regret not making fire against Erika forever.
- Who voted for Deshawn? Danny?
- Erika: the first female winner in many seasons, the first Canadian and Filipino winner also!
- The reunion on-set right after the game ended was interesting. But I think I like the studio version better because they actually discuss the big show points that production emphasizes during the season, like the Shan and Ricard partnership. Didn't get to talk about that, or even just more about what Shan did. Also, none of the pre-merge players were there. JD, Sydney, Brad and Voce are some players I would have liked Jeff to talk to.
Thanks for playing everyone! Have a great Christmas holidays and we'll see you next season!
Jay
