I always have to wonder how people watching one season affects what happens in the next season. This is perhaps particularly true when someone has lived it.
For example, everyone was praising Brian. I think it was more for Rafe's benefit than for Brian's. During the last season, when they did the double elimination, the sit-in got to give the imunity to one of the players on the other team. In that season, they decided to give it to someone that everyone seemed to want to vote off, just to shake things up a bit.
This season, by buttering up Brian, I have to wonder how much of that was to make Rafe think that giving immunity to Brian would be a waste of effort. In other words, "no way Brian's going, so don't bother".
I'm not sure what would have happened had Brian been given the immunity. I have to think that Bobby John would have been eliminated based solely on Brian's vote against him.
Last week, in fact, the look on Rafe's face when he saw that it was Brian voted off was actually quite interesting. I think he realized that he had been thrown. Regardless, I'm not really sure why he gave immunity to Gary.
I won't give away what happened last week so that you can watch it, but the one "twist" they had that might be important if you end up skipping and watching this week is that at the end of tribal cousil, Jeff sent them off to the other tribe with buffs so they could tell everyone else that the merge had happened.