"I’d be curious to know how much of his loyalty to Dawn is
personal and how much comes from seeing her as being beatable
in the end? Is he right? That is the only question left."

Yes, thanks Michel, for taking the time to do this every week - certainly adds an extra layer to watching the show for me too

While I'm enjoying the season, I'm kind of bummed that out of the 6 remaining players, there is an obvious winner and really only one other candidate. For me, you hit the nail on the head, with the above question in your assessment of Cochran and Dawn. This is the only question left - and for me that makes for poor editing. Or is it that those of us contributing here simply too good at determining winners edits from non-winning edits?

While I don't want to insult the editors, as I imagine their jobs are very challenging, could there have been any way to have given better edits to Brenda, Erik, Eddie, and Sherri. I mean, with approx. 3 hours of episodes left, does anyone really think any of these 4 has a shot of winning? Like you mentioned, they may try to misdirect with Erik, but who would actually fall for that. He's gotten no credit for anything of the 'strategy' that he thinks he's been using to be so pivotal in this game. If he had a chance (or even made it to FTC) his edit would've been manipulated more to show that he was actually strategizing some more (even if it wasn't actually true). These poorly edited endgame players have really thrown a wrench in enjoying any amount of suspense or mystery as to who the winner could be.

Going into this episode, I wasn't fully sure Andrea was going to be the next of the favorites to go, although there had been hints along the way that she would not make it to the end. Then it was pretty clear throughout the episode that Andrea would get the "blindside" (how the editors love their irony). For the life of me though, I do not know why they couldn't have made it more suspenseful - that it might actually be Brenda that was going home. The editors knew that there would be this key moment at final 7 when the 'alliance of 6' were going to vote out one of their own. And that it would come down to Andrea and Brenda (with Eddie as another red herring side twist). We got to witness a showdown between Brenda and Andrea during the IC (and they were also the last 2 in the IC that Brenda won a few episodes back) I really feel like they could have made this episode spectacular if they would've given Brenda some more 'meat' to her edit. They missed a great opportunity to have the viewers really go into the TC with cases for and against Brenda & Andrea as being the one to going home. I think it would've been incredible to have seen it play out differently. It was still a good episode, but it could've been great.

Likely in typical Survivor fashion, the editors lost sight of the opportunity as they were too busy looking through the lens of certain key characters like Cochran, and give him the key confessionals as to how it is affecting his game. Granted, Andrea did get a nice amount of attention this season (and deservedly so), but 4 of the remaining 6 players have not. Why not have taken 4-5 confessionals from each of Reynold and Phillip (there was definitely enough redundancy with each of them) and give at least Erik and Brenda a fighting chance for a solid story. No, instead we are left with the remaining time to be about Cochran's final moves to the finish, and whether or not he was correct that Dawn will no longer be a threat. The crazy thing is that I would love to see either Cochran or Dawn, but to feel like they have no opposition getting there is making this last act of the season rather lackluster.

-- aaron