Survivor Micronesia: Why did Parvati win the game?
Plenty of things broke in Parvati’s favor during the last few days of Survivor: Micronesia, and they contributed to her winning the game.
Luck matters in Survivor, and it mattered over the last three days of Micronesia. We’re not going to beat around the bush and act as if Parvati didn’t ultimately win the game. But a few things broke the way she needed them to for that million-dollar check to have her name on it.
The first thing was that at the final four, Natalie didn’t win immunity. Amanda did. This left the easy target, Natalie, open to being voted out. Granted, Natalie ran a final campaign as well as she could. However, her appeal wasn’t strong enough.
The second thing was that the final three didn’t sit at the Final Tribal Council together. Even during the Natalie vote, Parvati started talking about how Cirie could win the game. It’s impossible to know how the jury votes would have gone down if Amanda, Parvati, and Cirie had all had the chance to make their cases before the jury.
Parvati and Cirie likely would have split the votes more closely. In the season, Amanda garnered three votes to Parvati’s five. However, Cirie also had a big case to make — the one she’d started making at the final four Tribal about “being on the bottom of the alliance.” Taken that way, Cirie could have made quite the compelling argument that she had far less help than Parvati and Amanda had in making it to where she had. There were seven people on the jury with the final three, meaning there couldn’t have been a tie.
That final two ended up being in Parvati’s favor as well, as a result. So did Cirie losing that final balance-an-item challenge to Amanda, who took Parvati with her to the Final Tribal Council.
The Final Tribal had a mix of questions and statements from the jury members. However, Parvati owned her game and got her jabs in at Amanda. (She also fielded a question from Natalie about flirting and her love life that confused Probst.) It also didn’t help Amanda that she really didn’t handle Cirie’s question to her about why she’d chosen Parvati.
As the show went live, Probst got to read the votes and announced Parvati as the sixteenth winner of Survivor overall.
Quick notes:
- All four of the women had the chance to “Stir the Pot!” Parvati said it.
- Ozzy went last among the jurors, and he was clearly still upset at Parvati.
Next: Ranking Survivor's winners
There’s still time for some more retro analyses as we wait for season 35, Heroes vs. Healers vs. Hustlers. How does a look at Heroes vs. Villains sound?