While this is still my least fave South Africa season so far, I'm appreciating the merge as the battle between two tribes that are even in numbers and the fact that vote countback is the tiebreaking method. It feels like classic Survivor in the best sense and it's a nice reminder of what the show used to be.
The Hanna boot was sad because with a better edit she really could've been a fun MORP presence. A physical and mental threat who just barely lost the first individual IC and got sent home in a tiebreaker is the PERECT storyline for a merge boot, especially one who was targeted for being such a threat, but the show just kinda didn't really go there the way that they could have. She was tied with Louw and even though he had a a previous vote against him from before the merge, apparently in SA the countback resets at the merge so they were deadlocked and had to go to a sudden death elimination challenge which was...... counting to 30 and touching a skull
It was equally intense and bizarre and I can't believe that the fate of the season seemingly came down to a BBUS POV Comp.
But then the end result of the next episode ended up being even more hilarious. Izak, who REALLY should've had a CPM conflicted edit since the kidnapping or the merge episode, had a moral dilemma where he respected Okkert too much to vote him out with the rest of his alliance, so he tried to convince Okkert's allies to turn on him in order to save themselves. GiGi and Sade played along but didn't buy into it, Izak
thought they bought into it and thus threw his vote away Sean Kenniff/Kelly Wiglesworth style, and as a result it was a 4-4-1 tie and Louw got sent home over Okkert via countback
It felt like a fanfic gone wrong and I kinda love it, even though I appreciated Louw as a beta male constantly punching higher than his worth in trying to one-up Okkert as alpha male of the tribe.