this season was genuinely awful. every contestant is fucked and retarded.
This season has been really great, it's just spiralled massively. I think the problem is that multiple contestants, both old and new,
aren't retarded. Sam and Jet like to think they're smarter than the Fish, and they usually are - Season 1 cast tended to be autistic and terminally online, Season 2 cast were all really young, Bloodgames was an AllStars LARPing season and Bitchtank was just toxic fans of the show. But put Sam and Jet up against normies and their poorly thought through plans fell apart.
Because Normies see Sam acting like a massive weirdo and telling them he's fucking with them, or "Sharks" going around fucking up the house, and they'll start relating it to their frame of reference - something like Eric Andre or Ashton Kutcher's Punk'd (on in the case of Binkx, Ice Poseidon's Hunger Games). They're not idiots. Turbo read the contract and was able to put together that the show is about fucking with people until they quit. Alyssa got they were being fucked with and decided to fuck with production back - and she's not someone like Alex B, she doesn't care that this is the "biggest thing she'll be a part of without selling her holes", she's not going to humiliate herself shaving her head for $500. Gianna straight up walked out, and Sam's attempts to fuck with her didn't really work that much because she didn't take him seriously.
She didn't care the OG fish had been there for four weeks because she'd been there for one day and wasn't really invested. They were trying to dab on her for basically being a dumb libtard, but she didn't care about their opinions so it didn't impact her. She didn't care that Ben described her favourite film, La La Land, as "Ryan Gosling dancing like a homo", because she has real life friends who also like it and knew these were a bunch of men trying to get a rise out of her. It didn't shake her confidence.
Star rapidly worked out she was being fucked with and didn't care, she was just along for the ride. Even Lily was pretty nonplussed about their piss poor attempts to manipulate her and flat out said she didn't care if she never saw Tony or Binx again because she wanted to compete on the show, their "ID scrambler" bit didn't work because it clearly made no sense to anyone with more than two braincells and in the end she had to be instructed to leave. Kevin spent his whole time on the show thinking it was weird and obviously knew there was no Mormon modelling agency. Sam would probably rationalise their piss poor kicking bit was supposed to be funny because it was transparently stupid, but I'm pretty sure they were going for a bit where they trick idiots into falling for something stupid (and they got good content out of bonafide idiots like Kawan).
As for the OG fish? They were told that none of the new fish could win the $50k unless they all got eliminated. The smartest strategy therefore was
not to work together to eliminate the new fish, which is what Sam/Jet wanted, but instead to get the other OG fish eliminated while blending in with the new fish. So Simbal predictably got eliminated, since they hadn't bothered to manipulate the voting with immunity. All that shit with Brandon didn't work because they'd established that Production and Sam continually lie to them to stir drama (and TTS saying no-no words established this was a chud show), so how did they really know they weren't getting a misrepresented version of reality?
And it seems like pretty much only Kevin believed that eliminations had finished, since how can they trust anything that production or Sam say? So they were still trying to play it safe because if they were too abrasive, the other contestants would just vote them off. So you get FriendTank, and Binx's victim ploys. Sam and Jet tried to kick people who "knew about Fishtank" because it'd spoil the dynamic of idiots taking it seriously, but you only needed to be of average intelligence to see some of Sam's bits and work out that you needed to play along, which then meant they were "in on the joke".