Survivor Ghost Island episode 9 sneak peek: Simple challenge

Usually, the scope of Individual Immunity Challenges is small in Survivor, but Ghost Island episode 9’s Reward Challenge is perhaps the smallest ever.

I’ve been on a real Survivor kick lately. In preparation for my edgic piece about the Survivor Ghost Island merge, I went back and looked at Millennials vs. Gen X’s run through the merge to see how Adam’s story was shaped until then. Besides the point that it was a visible (but rough) edit, I got to see a ton of challenges utilizing the Fijian landscape that acted as feats of strength, intelligence and endurance.

Fast forward to Survivor Ghost Island episode 9, and we have what might be the most basic challenge I’ve seen that tried. I’m not counting Heroes vs. Healers vs. Hustlers’ “draw a rock from a bag” Loved Ones challenge, as everyone can agree that it’s the worst thing to happen to modern Survivor. No, the CBS preview video for the next episode of the season shows a team-based reward challenge that’s fairly straightforward.

Two teams of six will start on a platform in the water and run across it to a slingshot on the beach. From there, they will need to hit five targets with sandbags to win reward. That’s it; that’s all the production team could come up with in this challenge! The winning six will get tacos, burritos, quesadillas and margaritas at the “Survivor Taco Hut,” and also get to send someone to Ghost Island.

Even though Probst has been doing this show for years, it’s still fun to see him get wiggy with his standard job, including teasing “margaritas” like he’s a “Cool Dad” that spent a month in Spain when he was younger and can’t stop slipping words like mañana into his vocabulary. As for the challenge itself, the platform run is so arbitrary that this feels like half the challenge was scrapped.

Next: Survivor: Ranking all 35 seasons

There’s also a ten-second promo for Survivor Ghost Island episode 9 out in the wild, but that was covered in the “Next Time On” preview at the end of the last episode. The episode name being “The Sea Slug Slugger” indicates someone is mowing them down like a champ, so at least we get to go back to the show’s humble roots. Will there be someone who does worse than Gervase his first time?