As it happens, my daughter (who is just back home from her freshman year in college) could testify that I told her at the start of the finale that, if Michele makes it to the finale (as was rumored), if the vote-off-a-juror twist really happened, and if Michele was smart enough to vote off Neal, then Michele would win the finale 5-2 over Aubry, with Tai getting nothing. And that's just what happened. So I don't see any of this as a mystery or even a surprise.

Before the season started, I thought Annie would win. But she got pinned down by the tribal switch, which Julia was barely able to survive in the next vote. At that point, I was hoping for Julia to win, but I knew she had no chance, because Aubry, who had three loyal acolytes in Neal, Joe and Tai, would target her. Annie, Julia and Michele had also formed an extremely tight alliance. but now she'd be outside the dominant alliance. To overcome that, she had little choice but to build the links with Scot and Jason and hope that they could build a link with Tai (although we saw how well that worked out).

Everybody knew that Michele had been little more than a loyal follower as the third member of the Beauty women's alliance. But Michele gave herself some ammunition when she won three of the final four immunity challenges (counting the eliminate-a-juror as an IC), and then made the right decision by voting off Aubry's strongest ally. And to her good fortune, Neal's mouthy exit showed the other jurors that she made the right choice.

I assume Julia was very helpful to Michele among the jury, but I thought Julia did a great job of selling Michele during the jury questioning. Coming right after Debbie, who was clearly 100% Team Aubry, I felt like she was tailoring her question to address Scot and Jason's objections to voting for Michele. She acknowledged Michele's follower gameplay right off the bat (which I assume was Jason's main objection to voting for her) and played up her gameplay in voting off herself and in surviving after her exit.

Judging from the show, I think Scot and Jason had felt that Cydney and Aubry were the main alliance opposed to them, but when Aubry and Tai targeted Cydney in the F4 vote, it was obvious that Tai and Aubry were the real alliance, and they realized that they were suckers. But I think Jason's jury question was an attempt to confirm this. If that was true, although the editing hid it, then it wasn't Aubry's brilliant strategy that had bested them, it was Tai's duplicity and playacting. And it seemed to me that Tai's lame answer that he was worried about the Scot-Jason bond only confirmed that, while Michele easily deflected Jason's question about whether she was playing a similar duplicitous role prior to the Scot vote. Yet, as Scot pointed out, it was clearly Aubry who was calling the shots, because Tai couldn't even get her to side with him when he wanted to vote out Michele.

At the same time, Cydney learned that she was #4 in the five-person alliance, behind both Joe and Tai. She wouldn't have known that had Michele not won immunity.

The only one of the five votes that was kind of a surprise to me was Nick, because I never thought Nick and Annie or Julia had any kind of a bond. But that may just have been that "Beauty tribe rules", or whatever stray thoughts may have crossed Nick's mind. But the other four votes seemed both solid and expected. This wasn't a case of Tammy and her psycho hotheads voting for Vecepia because they were so pissed at Neleh and Pappy having switched sides and voted them off (Survivor 4). Instead, it was more an example of Julia and Michele framing Michele's gameplay in the right way to appeal to them.

I also wasn't baffled by Survivor Amazon, because I would've voted for Jenna over Matthew as well (once Cesternino was voted out; his consecutive double crosses to eliminate Alex, Christy and Heidi were classic). Again, Jenna won the last two immunity challenges with her survival on the line, even though she'd been ready to quit at F5. Rob's choice to target Heidi first backfired on both himself and Matthew.