The average age of the women in this cast is 35, and the average age of the men is 40. That's insane.

That strategy quite excites me actually – imagine a group of players all good at strategy, all good at challenges, all trying to outmaneuver each other in the endgame. What would jury management look like with no goats left? How do you calculate who to keep and who to vote out? It could get really interesting.

Oh don't worry, Abi-Maria and Kass are still on the show. Maybe what I mean is the men will be on their best behaviour because they don't want to get Danned.

Quite likely, yes – but she's still going to be one of the strongest of what looks like an average field, so I don't think it's going to matter that much. My point stands that I don't think Shirin will be noticeably worse than anyone else.

If Rodney was in the final, I hope Jenn's jury speech would be announcing that she was voting for whoever gave the best impression of Probst or something.

I think he was a good in-game narrator? They always need those to tell the story of what's going on for the audience. Sometimes it must be like pulling teeth to try to get decent footage, so you can understand why the producers would adore someone who could sum everything up concisely and articulately.

I have some faith that (almost) everyone will be on their best behaviour – they've all seen the backlash to this season.

All I can think of is the other players are presumably pleased, as it gives them at least one pawn to work with.

"Who on the jury deserves to be in the final 3" is one of them. "Who do you most regret voting out" is another. The answer is always supposed to be "You".

Where was Shirin a liability in challenges? She wasn't great on the puzzle in episode 1, but they all agreed that it was definitely the wrong puzzle to pick. Her tribe didn't lose another challenge until the tribe swap, and she seemed like a pretty strong swimmer. I don't think we've seen any evidence that Shirin is a…

Thinking about it, it's probably for the best for Carolyn (assuming she gets another shot) that she missed out on this season. She's just come off a season where she was shown flipping on her initial alliance, discarding an ally and refusing to work with them ever again, dropping her new allies as soon as alternative…

Joe's logical route (tribe dynamics allowing) is to partner up with Spencer and possibly Stephen. He can't afford another season of 'let's get rid of the threats', so he's going to have to sell the idea of a physically+strategically strong alliance and work on removing all the goats first. He'd have a shot at it,…

I disagree. Rookie players vote off people who are annoying. Second timers should really be thinking more strategically. Strategically, there's no reason to get rid of Shirin prior to a merge. She'll be a loyal alliance member and she won't be too difficult to get rid of later if you need to.

I agree. I hope that this is largely going to be a crowd with respect for the game. Shirin isn't in either the major threat or the unpredictable player category, so if she manages to curb her annoying streak a bit I think she'll do ok.

I'm not ruling out an alliance of the alpha males this time around (after a season of the threats being taken out one by one, I wonder if they'll agree that the best thing to do is stick together, take out enough of the goats, and then duke it out). But yes, I'd guess the first boot will be either whoever is a threat…

Jeff thanking everyone for keeping watching despite how awful this season turned out to be was up there as well.

There'd been at least three endurance challenges already this season, so it's not that surprising that there wasn't another. They seem to be trending more towards athleticism+puzzle for final immunity in recent seasons – I guess it gives them the results that they're hoping for more frequently?

I think the difference is that Dan is awful, but not malevolently awful – he's just too self-absorbed to think about the implications of anything he's saying. But Will ACTUALLY BELIEVES that Shirin is evil, and God is on his side, and it's ok to be actively cruel to other people just so long as according to your…

That moment when, instead of properly apologising to Shirin, Will decided instead to direct the bulk of his apology to Shirin's abusive family…wow.

The main thing on my mind after this episode was: to what extent does Survivor have a duty of care to its players? Like a company (at least in the UK) is obliged to protect its staff from harassment/abuse in the workplace, is there a limit to the behaviour (physical violence aside) that one player can inflict upon…