Blessed with a particularly charismatic cast that produced some sparkling romantic chemistry, Love Island season 6 represented the apex of the U.S. version and perhaps even the entire Love Island franchise itself. That batch of islanders proved to be so popular that Peacock commissioned a Love Island: Beyond the Villa spinoff to follow fan favorites JaNa Craig, Aaron Evans, Miguel Harichi, Leah Kateb, Kaylor Martin, Connor Newsum, Serena Page, Kenny Rodriguez, Olivia “Liv” Walker, and Kendall Washington. Additionally, fellow season 6 star Rob Rausch joined the cast of The Traitors season 4, also on Peacock.
The success of season 6 created a challenging scenario for Love Island season 7. How can a mostly unstructured show guarantee another hit when so much of its success comes down to the unscientific art of casting? Well it turns out Love Island season 7 had a fairly elegant solution to this. It opted just to cheat.
To be clear, there isn’t actually any cheating in a legal sense on Love Island season 7. Though the object of the show is to find love, that love also comes along with a payday ($100,000, split two-ways), which means the series and its contestants are subject to the United States’ surprisingly-thorough game show legal code. Love Island season 7 is not actively sabotaging relationships or fabricating voting results. It is, however, putting its usual lack of structure to good use.
The “rules” of Love Island, such as they are, have always been amorphous. Recouplings occur on Sunday episodes … unless they don’t. Becoming single makes an islander eligible to be booted from the island … unless it doesn’t. The viewing public’s votes on the Love Island app are largely symbolic and don’t lead to dismissals … unless they do. There are no immunity idols for islanders to collect and there is no coherent strategy to be gleaned from previous seasons.
The only constant that remains between seasons is that there will be four couples by the final week for America to choose from. Everything that happens before that is largely up in the air. Love Island‘s contestants are at the mercy of the show’s ever-shifting regulatory landscape, trapped in a Skinner box for our amusement. Case in point is season 7 episode 12, which just like season 6’s 12th episode, throws its poor islanders for one hell of a loop.
Like most Sunday episodes, episode 12 features a recoupling in which the islanders are shuffled into new groupings. Unlike most recouplings, however, this decision is made by we, the American voter, and not the islanders themselves. Anyone who knows anything about the American voter knows that they will opt for the most chaotic choice possible. Sure enough: voters decided to split up power couple Jeremiah and Huda to every islander’s complete astonishment.
