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Probst “tallies” the votes, and it is “Dawn, Eddie, Eddie, Eddie." Dawn thanks Cochran. “What a game, guys!” says Eddie. Probst tells the remaining three that “you have gone as far as you can go in this game. Tomorrow night the power shifts to the jury." Take the night off!

Eddie’s final words are that Sherri has zero chance of winning, and if he was going to the end “first place would have been mine for the taking”. I would love to hear Eddie’s rationalization of that. He continues that as it sucks to be going he is happy with how he played the game. “I made it to fourth, that speaks a large volume about how I played." I’m sorry, but Eddie thinks he was playing?

Back at camp after the commercial, Sherri asks Cochran for his definition of “pawn”. Cochran says that pawns are worthless. “You’re willing to throw them out, they’re no strategic threat, no real strengths and expendable." “My husband’s going to be so proud of me,” says Sherri, pawn.

After the Day 39 breakfast fry-up, Sherri continues with her “I’m going to win” argument. “I came into this as a fan, I came in as an underdog, I... didn’t know how to survive, I was adaptable, I was flexible, and I had an alliance, which is why I’m still sitting here." I agree all of this is true and Sherri has played the game to get where she is, but it is eerily similar to what Michael Skupin said last year. And he only won one vote. From the Eddie-equivalent of that season. While Sherri has played an under-rated game, the people she will be arguing this to are not an objective group, but the people who under-rated her in the first place.

Dawn is running through her arguments, too. She says her alliance in the game was with Cochran, but her real alliance was her family at home. “I am changed. I accomplished the goal of getting to the end of this game, something that was a dream.” She says she has learned she can play the game well, with no one to make decisions for her. So Dawn wins this season's Lisa Welchel award. Dawn and Cochran are on the beach. “We couldn’t have gotten this far without each other,” says Dawn. Cochran says, “we called every single shot." Dawn feels that she and Cochran at the final is a “storybook ending." She is confident she can beat Cochran and Sherri.

Cochran’s turn. We get an endless series of shots of him looking contemplative, including a hilarious one where the camera does a 360 degree pan while Cochran sits there with a “thinking hard” look on his face. He says that he wrote a prize-winning paper on the Survivor jury system, but there’s a big difference between paper and practice. After sarcastically thanking Harvard for not teaching him how to address a jury, he shares his self-doubts about being still the awkward geek who hasn’t done anything, and he has to remind himself to be confident in himself and in how he played the game.

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