Couch Potato Chronicles: Battle for Dream Island, "TPOT 16"

by Fearghus McVeigh

On February 25th, 2025, the newest episode of Battle for Dream Island's fifth season, “The Power of Two”, released at 9:00pm. That being episode 16, called “The Power of Four”. And as a fan of BFDI myself, I felt I just had to talk about it.

Coming straight off the heels of BFDI's fifteen-year anniversary special, “Seasonal Shift”, “The Power of Four” manages to be an incredible follow-up. So I'll be going over the different arcs of the major characters in this episode and break them down to show what I like so much about them. But first, I'd like to discuss this episode's elimination.

Elimination

The characters who would be eliminated this episode were Pin and Ice Cube. Lots of BFDI fans saw Ice Cube's elimination coming, but we were all shocked to see Pin go when Tree seemed like a goner for sure. Honestly, I'm perfectly fine with this because with Pin's elimination, they finally did something interesting with Tree, as Pin would give her token to him. Although I'm not sure how I feel about Death P.A.C.T. Yet Again being composed of only Death P.A.C.T. Again members now.

As for Ice Cube's elimination, eh? It was sad to see her go. But honestly, Ice Cube felt underutilized this season and I don't entirely miss her. I wish we could've seen more of her and Fanny trying to figure out what One's deal is. But, oh well.

Now, to discuss all the characters I thought were noteworthy this episode

Pen

In this episode, Pen figures out that Pencil sabotaged Eraser's team a few episodes back, inadvertently causing him to be eliminated. This information strongly angers Pen, but he chooses not to act on his anger at first.

Later in the episode, he has a heart-to-heart with Liy while hiding.... in Roboty's waterfall place. (I’m not sure what else to call it). Liy tells Pen all about the importance of controlling your anger but still letting it out anyway. It's a really emotional and impactful scene, and I really felt for Pen here.

When he gets a chance to sabotage Pencil and her team, he takes it at first, but when he realizes Pencil is scared of Four, he ends up helping her out instead and gets congratulated by Liy for taking her advice. I'm really eager to see where this arc ends up going in the future.

Pencil

Then there's the other main conflict this episode. Ever since she escaped from the Eternal Algebra Class With Four, Pencil's gotten insanely aggressive and selfish. To the point where she almost ended up destroying the fabric of reality itself thanks to her own selfishness. Throughout the episode, Golf Ball and Donut get increasingly fed up with Pencil constantly abandoning their other teammates until it's just the three of them left. On one hand, after everything Pencil's been through, you can understand her line of logic to some degree in the previous episode. However, in this episode, her actions don’t have that same excuse. Of course, Pencil's pride and childishness lead to CloudYAY being the only team being put up for elimination this episode, and even having to lose two members instead of one due to not having any other team to share the loss with. Nothing like this has ever happened before either.

I think this clashes perfectly with Pen's arc this episode. As both of them have been going through withdrawal after being separated from so many of their friends, or even in Pencil's case, the friends she hasn't been separated from want nothing to do with her. Which also makes the key difference between Pencil and Pen. Pen still has people he can talk to like Liy, Bottle, and Tennis Ball. Pencil, on the other hand, while there are people like Golf Ball and Donut who do genuinely care about her, she's too wrapped up in her own ego to see that and genuinely believes she's alone. And the fact that one of these arcs is directly tied to the other also really helps push this forward.

In short, this episode helped give a lot of depth to Pencil and Pen and tied their character arcs together in a way I didn't expect. And I'm super excited to see where Jacknjellify takes this plotline in future episodes of “TPOT”. I'll give this newest episode a solid 9/10. While it's definitely not as good as “Seasonal Shift” in my opinion, it's absolutely up there with some of the best in the series, and I don't regret staying up late last night to watch it.

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