Plotting Who Is Good and Who Is Evil in This Year's 'Love Island'

Love Island is an ITV2 show where somewhere between 12 and 100 intimately waxed singles compete to see who can fall in love the most, the hardest. It is the greatest show on TV this year by a long, long margin, and that fact is not up for discussion today.

Weirdly though??? Despite Love Island inarguably being the best show on TV??? There is a void in the market for deep and professional Love Island analysis and criticism??? So what the fuck???

Well, friends:

Caveats before we begin: obviously this entire list is subject to change at any time because, as aforementioned, producers have decided to hijack my summer entirely and add 11 more people to the Love Island mix, and bearing in mind it was hard enough for me anyway because I suffer from what scientists call "Blonde Blindness" – where I very legitimately could not tell the difference between Olivia and Chloe for up to two weeks, and the UN actually classes this deficiency in me as technically a form of racism – but anyway, yes: this list will change and need restructuring literally tomorrow; additionally, the entire list is subject to the fly-by-night whims of every person in the house, because the only constant in the Love Island universe is the pure beacon of light and hope that is Camilla; she and she alone is the only immovable and rigidly moral person in there, and you can argue that it is to do with her background – private schools, enunciation lessons, frottaging w/ Prince Harry – but I think it is actually the inverse, and that all the people in the Love Island villa are fundamentally good and moral people, they have just been driven to the cusp of insanity with sheer horniness; there is absolutely no way anyone in there is operating with more than 10 percent of their normal day-to-day brains, because the gears of their minds are absolutely gummed up with unresolved sexual tension – Give A Man A Fish And He Will Eat For A Day, Make A Man Deliriously Horny For Four Consecutive Weeks And He Will Just Descend Into Sheer Madness – and that is fundamentally colouring and influencing their behaviours, and though we cannot attack this (people being so horny they are insane is a – in fact, the – primary mechanic of the show) it does rather steer the list; this is all based off some ancient D&D ranking of good vs. evil, because that is how we differentiate people now.

OK:

Camilla is, as discussed, the one true and immovable force for good in the entire Love Island house, but I am also starting to think she is the one true and immovable force for good in the entire actual world. Watch as Camilla very politely gets dumped by Jonny, and think, 'This show is too savage. The edges are too harsh for her.' Watch her elegantly cry in the dressing room and think, 'Why is nobody intervening? This cannot be allowed to happen. She is a delicate swan.' But that is just your dumb human brain trying to understand a being too pure for you. To think of the Love Island villa as too hard for Camilla is to miss the point of Camilla; out in the real world, she defuses bombs for a laugh. She probably fucked a Prince once. She just doesn't like hugging boys with misaligned jaws who don't understand what feminism is.

I don't know what postal error or series of administrative boo-boos ended up with a being as angel-like and pure as Camilla being in Love Island this year (was she trying to re-subscribe to Tatler and just filled in the wrong form? Did she get lost on the way to Pippa Middleton's wedding and end up, baffled and alone, in Mallorca?), but we must thank the mechanics of the universe that allowed it to happen. She has taught this country it is OK to be Good again.

Kem from Love Island is just a delightful puppy transmogrified into the body of a small Essex man who loves cutting hair and getting blowjobs. He is the island's most un-evil male.

All Montana from Love Island does is eat snacks and be a good person, and she still keeps getting dicked over, which makes me think that Love Island itself is evil and the people inside it are good, and anyone who is twisted and contorted into evil behaviours are done so by the very machinations of the house, villa and format itself, i.e. they cannot be held accountable, the blame lies with the bricks and the mortar, and the true paragons of health, goodness and wellness in the house (Montana, Camilla, Marcel) do so despite this, making them some sort of higher beings, blithely floating up above the evil scum (Jonny).

Statesman, diplomat, teacher, soother of souls, mender of fences: Marcel from Blazin' Squad is many things to many people in the Love Island house, on the side of both all the boys and the girls, making him entirely neutral in the context of the good/evil spectrum (he is fundamentally one of the most capital-g Good people in there, but because he is all things to all people he is sort of a good-evil centrist, because We Need Marcel, Marcel Cannot Be Either Good Nor Bad). When he leaves the house I want him to make a run for PM with Gabby as his sort of chirpy first lady, and I think, finally, peace and tranquillity could be bought to this torn nation with Marcel at its head. Hark, how he shepherds a house full of almost illegally horny people through the struggles of being on holiday for six weeks. Tell me that man can't smoothly negotiate Brexit.

Tyla from Love Island isn't overtly, outwardly evil – she is just a small mega-tanned 23-year-old with a Live.Laugh.Love tattoo and the shiny well-kept hair of a fine thoroughbred horse – but because her sheer presence in the house has driven so many of the men in there to acts of depraved horny-induced mania, i.e. because of the chaos that has been wrought in her wake, we must err her on the sharp side of the Love Island good/evil spectrum, because the villa is a fundamentally more malicious place thanks to her being in it.

So many of the men in Love Island this year have the faces of beautiful drag queens – tell me you can't see Sam Gowland, dramatically contoured, three-inch nails, singing "I Feel Love" to a room full of lads in cowboy hats – and Chris is no different. I don't know if this is a trend among proper "post-a-photo-of-my-Protein-World-order-on-Instagram" muscle lads, but someone seems to have told them all in the last year-and-a-half that the path to true hench enlightenment is to wax your eyebrows into high, dangerous arches, and Chris has taken it to the most logical conclusion, creating a plump, beautiful, woman's face over the top of his own. He is an idiot, though, and his love with Olivia is deeply doomed, so. So we're putting him on the evil side of the fence.

To understand Olivia, we must also understand Dom. Dom's driving urges can be mapped out as thus:

• Being very, very horny;
• Getting a decent modelling contract and never having to do work that doesn't involve posing rigid-faced on Instagram holding some detox tea ever, ever again;

Dom is in a curious case, where his two desires have sort of crashed in the middle and cancelled each other out, leaving him in horny purgatory: first he couples with Montana, but then he binned her off after 24 hours for Jess (The Horny Dom Principle). After a blissful couple of weeks with Jess, which included full and televised intercourse, they were split up by a voting mechanism, at which point The H.D.P. should have seen him leave the villa to be with her. But then his second fundamental motive kicked in, and that was maximum TV exposure over the course of one summer leading to a certain level of sub-fame that can, once he leaves the Island, be turned alchemy-like into money. Dom knows that to achieve motive ii. he must over-rule motive i., i.e. to get money he must suppress his natural horniness, play the long game and lie around on the Island sun bed not saying very much, and instead just think constantly about Jess allegedly shagging Mike all over the place. You see how Dom, robbed of a horniness outlet, is no longer a viable human male: he is essentially a hibernating bear who occasionally entirely relays private conversations he's had to the whole house, stirring shit up, because his mind is so horn-crazed he doesn't know that that is wrong.

So in the same way Dom's horniness motive has led to his state of sort of sub-sexual stasis, so Olivia's driving factor – fancying every man alive – has shaped her journey. First she was coupled up with Marcel, a convenience thing that soon ceded to her getting off with Sam now and then on a sofa; then Chris came in, and she binned Sam off for him and there was almost sort of not really but sort of a fight over the fire pit; then Mike came in – Mike from Love Island being arguably the most attractive man ever to live, a sort of deep-eyed, no-brained Greek statue with a middling-to-shit football career, but an, I imagine, professional-to-the-point-of-endorsement fingering girls in nightclubs career, like I would not be surprised if the next Lucozade advert is just Mike, in a TV set loud-quiet nightclub, immaculately lit but sweating from every pore, both hands out of shot but the arms undulating wildly and the sound of giggling in the distance, and Mike says something written and re-written by a number of ad execs: "In my line of work, you lose a lot of body salts," and then he takes one swig of Lucozade and says, "And that's why, when I'm out fingering, I drink Lucozade Sport" – but then he left so she got back into the habit of arguing with Chris again. At each stage, her decisions have been made by one overriding factor – dick – and each time they have led to chaos in the villa. So Olivia isn't an evil person (she is, tied with Montana, the funniest person in there), but she does leave chaos in her wake. And six more dudes are about to go in the villa. So she's not done causing havoc yet.

We've already discussed Dom, but there's no other place for it, and I've figured out who he looks like, with those eyebrows, those horrible evil eyebrows curling inwards:

Dom looks like Jim Carrey in The Mask if the mask were flesh-coloured.

On one hand I have a lot of time for Jonny from Love Island because he's repping the soft-round-the-edges big-boys-afraid-to-take-their-shirt-off-in-public crew, the only Island male to very consistently cover up his flumpy bits with a vest, and that makes me warm to him. His sweetly dumbheaded attempts to woo Camilla were, also, heartening to watch, because it was like two species trying to interconnect – like trying to watch a dog understand an elephant, or a seal trying to mate with a bird – trying to find a lingua franca between their two fractured cultures and fuck in the gap in between. But then he followed his dick after Tyla because "100 percent on paper she's my type" and "bubbly" and whatever, full-on getting off with her while Camilla delicately sobbed to her mates, so now I'm a bit over Jonny. Fundamentally, deep to his core, Jonny is not evil; but he was given an opportunity to exhibit evil behaviour as per the context of the house, and he took that opportunity with two hands, then put his tongue in the face of that opportunity, for a really, really long time.

If you have ever seen the tiny machinations and impulses a snake wriggles its body into before it strikes, you will understand Amber from Love Island's approach to human relationships: animals, like us, have certain set behaviours, little routines, erratic tics. Watch an alligator slowly eye its prey before it strikes at it, teeth-first. Watch a shark circle in water before pulling a seal apart into blood. Watch Amber from Love Island's eyes as a new boy enters the villa and she thinks about ruining his life. Watch Amber toy with Kem like a cat with a dying mouse. Watch the fire in her eyes flare out when Montana tells her Simon said she said she wanted to rip his clothes off and she full on yells at Montana about it while she's crying. There is no purer evil than Amber from the Love Island house. That said, I sort of want her to get back together with Kem just to see what happens.

There is no moral.

This is not important and is based entirely on gut instinct, but:

Thanks.

@joelgolby