Survivor Micronesia: In which Jeff Probst is a good host

Jeff Probst has some truly good moments of being the host of Survivor. The seventh episode of Survivor: Micronesia has one of them.

Survivor: Micronesia became sad again in episode 7, “Like a Wide-Eyed Kid in a Candy Store,” despite the generally cheery title. Let’s dive in … and yes, even get to talk about Jeff Probst as a Survivor host.

The reward challenge mixed together a blindfold challenge with an obstacle course that involved rolling a money stone and then solving a puzzle (of course). Malakal took the reward of the opportunity to wash up and get clean. Unfortunately, Tracey had to go to Exile Island with Jason.

So here’s Survivor following up on two points it had already made in the episode:

• Tracy and Ozzy were at odds already, and he asked her to “take one for the team.”
• Airai had had a camp scene talking about the “funk” of sleeping in a cave, and they also had to follow up with a scene of eating a raw clam. Meanwhile, Malakal had all kinds of food and got cookies with their reward.

All of this started to wear on Kathy, and in came the boat with Jeff Probst himself. Now Probst can be a snarky host, and he has a very interesting perspective on what qualifies as a good game, yes. But this scene … it’s a good Jeff Probst scene. He explicitly said he didn’t intend to convince her to stay, and he let her talk it out and seemed genuinely interested in hearing what she wanted to say. He informed the rest of the tribe that “the game continues,” and then he rode off with Kathy.

Meanwhile, if you’ll recall that we’ve talked already about the seeds of the Black Widow alliance. Amanda, Cirie, and later Ami had a conversation about Ozzy’s personality and starting to even turn on him and Erik a little bit. Consider this a little black widow sprout, even though some other people were on the other tribe.

For immunity, runners had to go clip on to puzzle pieces and then get pulled back through the water by means of a big winch and the rest of the tribe. Airai made it all up in the puzzle and won immunity.

However, Ami hatched a plan to get rid of Ozzy, counting on Erik’s vote to handle it with Tracy and selling Cirie and Amanda on a separate plan to vote Erik out. Ergo, things were more than a little complicated as Malakal went to Tribal Council, and the L word came up in conjunction with Ozzy: leader. Tracy made her last-ditch pitch.

It did not pay off: Tracy went home with five votes to Ozzy’s one.

Quick notes (just one this episode):

• Ozzy had another person enamored with him: Erik. Yes, everyone noticed. Ozzy also named the episode in relation to Erik going on reward.

Next: Survivor: Ranking the different locations in the game

The next episode brings us more rumblings of women banding together in the game.