The Winter 'Love Island' Power Ranking: Week Four

I complained last week that Winter Love Island was getting boring and, in fairness, the Islanders have since delivered increased action and more excitement. By which I mean: the bit when Leanne went “I don’t like you” to Mike (this, by the way, shoots straight to the top of the Love Island dumpings chart, bested only by “I was coming here to tell you that I loved you”), plus Nas finally coupling up with someone just as likeable as him, has made for much better viewing.

It’s also been a week of many departures, as we have said goodbye to Connor, Sophie, Leanne and Wallace (unfortunately doomed to be one of those lads who went on Love Island and got no screentime and about 10k rapidly dwindling followers, like Marvin before him) in order to make room for the 12 (!) new Islanders about to arrive for Casa Amor, causing the paranoia and devastation from which we, the Love Island viewership, take our lifeforce.

As we know, Casa Amor is frequently seismic, and with the games of Musical Couples that have been going on this season so far, I predict a total overhaul of the villa population. So it is important that we remember this moment of relative calm, and take stock before chaos reigns. The Power, Ranked:

Love Island, like life, is cyclical. The way the normal world has days, weeks, months, seasons of Love Island have The Food Spitting Challenge, The Sex Position Game, Casa Amor, and then that weirdly puritanical prom thing they make them do at the end. We have come to the Casa Amor portion of Winter Love Island which is always a laugh – last year, blessedly, it gave us Ovie – though I do sort of wish the producers would change things up a bit, so that the show isn’t as grindingly predictable as to remind me that with each new Casa Amor – with each cocksure walk back into the main villa with a new partner – I am getting older and more haggard. Bearing in mind the show’s supremacy, it is easy to imagine a climate change-ravaged world where there are just constant cycles of Love Island, Casa Amor after Casa Amor, always different but always fundamentally the same, until we all go to our own Other Villa; the great Casa Amor in the sky.

Finally Nas – the lawful good of the season – got what he has long deserved in the form of short queen Demi. I might have judged Demi as "too sweet to be wholesome" if her interactions with Nas were not so genuinely and painfully similar to the ones I had with boys I fancied as a teenager (mainly just giggling a lot and going “Yeah” delightedly.) Calling it now: they might win because Paige and Finn are frankly too boring!

In a recent VICE interview with the Love Island narrator Iain Stirling, he observed that Shaughna would be the everywoman of the season. There have been hints of this throughout – her insecurity about her coupling with Callum; her refusal to let Sophie away with shithousing when she was trying to avoid being eliminated (true friendship, of course, is telling your mates things they do not always want to hear!), but it was when she pulled a secret chocolate bar out from between her tits the other night that the prophecy finally came properly true. Put her on Celebrity Come Dine with Me and let her thrive.

If this is how we treat our German neighbours then we honestly deserve everything we get.

On one hand, Siânnise has been about 40 percent less annoying since she coupled up with Luke T but on the other, in about two years they are definitely going to get married in front of Instagram Live and 600 guests dressed in all white (with anyone wearing "cream" personally denied entry by Siânnise, who will be wearing a headset and saying “I’m not being funny but you knew the rules”), aren’t they? And they’re going to earnestly sing “A Whole New World” to each other instead of reciting vows, aren’t they?

Dear lord Jane.

Mike has survived this week by the skin of his teeth via a genuinely astonishing display which I can only describe as the Uncut Gems of flirting, in that every time you thought he was not going to approach Jess in a new and even more ballsy way, he simply did it ("sexy side dish"). Cut to Mike with his arm around Jess mouthing “This is how I win” at a glowering Luke M.

Poor old Dustin Beaver has been sadly tossed aside by Jess, which leaves him at the bottom of this week’s pile. Don’t count him out, though: I think that if he doesn’t find anyone during Casa Amor, he’s going to pair up with Rebecca to form a sort of north east Team Rocket, gaining revenge on everyone in the villa who has wronged them.

@hiyalauren