Survivor Micronesia: The worst fake immunity idol (part one)

Survivor: Micronesia has a lot of great payoffs down the road, and Ozzy’s trip to Exile Island eventually turned into one of them.

One has to wonder how exactly Survivor: Micronesia ended up being so strangely good despite starting with a concept that basically set half of its players up for a bumpy ride at the hands of players they’d come to idolize. The fourth episode, “That’s Baked, Barbecued, and Fried!”, certainly helped explain why.

Airai’s first scene of the episode focused on a few quick things:

• Airai trying to figure out who Malakal sent home.
• Jason and Erik catching an eel.
• Natalie finally showing up to talk about Chet not working, backed up by Mikey B.

The reward gave Eliza a chance to prove herself after being sick and Ozzy a chance to think up a way to break the challenge by moving Malakal’s letters to make them easier to get, although Airai picked up on the strategy and copied it, though it was too late to matter. James actually unscrambled the word — triumphant — and naturally cracked a joke about it. The favorites took chickens home.

Kathy’s Exile buddy was Ozzy this time, and he went idol hunting under the guise of looking for food. As the clues required a lot of swimming, is it really any surprise that he found the idol?

But, in what is quickly becoming a thing for Micronesia, Ozzy also did something that won’t fully come into play for a while yet. We’ll dig into this more eventually, but Ozzy also made the decision to leave something behind in the place where he found the idol, namechecking Yau-Man to do it. “Igor the fake immunity idol” then went under the rock where Ozzy had found the real one.

Of course, Ozzy’s fake was nowhere near as good as Bob’s fake idol from Survivor: Gabon; he just whittled a piece of wood and wrapped it in the fabric he’d found the real idol in. “Semi-professional,” his word of choice, did not even begin to describe it. It is probably the worst fake immunity idol ever, although he didn’t quite plan to make it or hoard things like Bob did.

The immunity challenge involved what Jeff Probst dubbed a “hub” that each tribe had to unlock, turning this into a variant of the jungle obstacle course, although the “hub” itself was the actual obstacle on what Probst did explicitly call a “course.” Eliza and Cirie solved the puzzle quickly for Malakal.

At Airai, Tracy started appealing to Joel to take out Mikey B, pointing out that he was letting Mike control the fans’ game. Tribal Council had Chet trying to defend himself and Tracy swooping in to help build that case up to Joel without explicitly mentioning Joel’s name (though production helpfully added in shots of Joel’s reactions). Jason briefly interrupted Probst before the vote, but Chet made it through another Tribal with just three votes to Mikey B’s six.

Next: Surviving Tribal's ranking of the first 33 seasons

For our next dive into Survivor: Micronesia, we’ll talk about tribal shuffles and medical issues.