Previously on No Time (Like The Present) For Losers: Kathy couldn’t face the world without Jonathan and his Leg Hole Of Nobility, and she shuffled right off the island before she started setting her surroundings on fire. Hey, I know just how she feels. Ozzy found the hidden idol and put a stick in the hiding place, hoping that maybe, if he got very lucky, someone would actually be enough of a buffoon to think that maybe the idol was just a stick this year. Meanwhile, back at camp, two rocks clunked together in Jason’s head and made a noise that sounded like, “Maybe the idol is just a stick this year,” and when he found the stick, he put two and two together and got a boiled potato for a brain, so he’s now walking around with a stick shoved down his pants that he thinks will protect him from harm. I think I saw that on House. Write “hallucinations” down on the white board next to “shelter-hoarding”! We carefully followed The Secret Love Of Erik And Ozzy, also known as The Love That Probably Could Not Spell Its Name. Ami tried to get something going with the fans to get out Ozzy, but it fell apart for reasons that were not shared with the stupid, nosy audience, and Tracy was sent home. Erik is the only Malakal fan person! Do you suppose it means anything that nowhere in the credits did anyone explain anything about the dynamics over at the other tribe? Nah.

And now: this week.

Poor Erik The Ice-Cream Scooper sits around after tribal council lamenting his position as a totally outnumbered fan person. I’m looking at his hair, and I’m thinking…ice-cream scooper? Really? Is that hair up to code? I can’t imagine him scooping anywhere except maybe the Last Supper. The best part of the post-tribal-council sequence, of course, is Ozzy explaining that he is not either the leader — it’s not his fault that he has “good opinions”! This sort of “I cannot help it if I am the coolest one!” attitude is sure to reassure people who might wonder if carrying Ozzy deep into the game might not be their best move. If it’s only because his opinions are so good, then you probably don’t have to worry about losing to him.

I really miss the part of the credits where I got to remind myself of all the people who used to be on the show who aren’t on anymore. It would be like week ten, and I’d be like, “‘Megan’? Who was Megan? Was she a beach volleyball player? Was someone? Am I thinking of last season?”

I’m glad we got to see every second of The Blair Crab-Catching Project, but what is this really telling me? Sometimes, when experienced locals show you a crustacean-outsmarting method, it works? I actually already thought Joe and Edwin knew more about catching crabs than Cirie and Ami.

Ozzy decides that the key to getting over that “leader” problem is to start whining about it, so while he hacks up some coconuts, he complains to Ami about how he’s not the leader. Ami tells him she was approached by Tracy and says she was neeever going to vote him out. Never! Ozzy thinks there is too much protesting from the lady. What’s great is that he whines and whines about tribal council and the target on his back, and then when Ami’s like, “Shut up; you’re not getting voted out” — which as far as we know is true — Ozzy’s all, “AHA!” If he didn’t want so much protesting, maybe he could bring it up a little less.

Airai! Hey, remember them? They have it really easy. Hey, I think that’s Natalie who says she was dreaming about nachos. Of course, I wouldn’t know, since until now, Natalie has been demonstrable but unseen, like a quark. Top, Charm, blah blah, Natalie. And then, of course, Jason catches a rat, and the show returns to rat-eating for the first time since the first season. Way to blow one of the main arguments I make when I defend reality shows, Jason, which is that Survivor isn’t really about eating rats. What I find particularly impressive is that Jason is just as happy about whomping a rat with a paddle as Tom Westman was about killing a shark with his bare hands. It’s all about the battle, I suppose. As Jason points out, there’s no meat on the rat anyway, so it’s like he clubbed a rat with a paddle just to get bragging rights. Not exactly the best bragging rights I’ve ever heard of. I killed a mouse in my apartment with the bathroom door — you don’t see me throwing myself a parade, do you?

I would find it a lot more impressive to hear Parvati call Jason a “loser” if she hadn’t cuddled up with Cook Islands Adam, who had to be the easiest dental patient ever, since his mouth was almost always hanging open for breathing purposes anyway. I am, on the other hand, highly amused by James’s rant about how much he hates the choppy water at Airai, including his references to Popeye, Jacques Cousteau, and the fact that you can look right out and see California. When he’s not busy inflating his head to the size of a beach ball, there are some endearing things about that dude.

It seems sort of fitting that Parvati would invite Alexis and Natalie into her “block,” because at least that way, there’s nobody with any obvious ability to outthink her. What I do find weird is that Natalie kind of leaps on this plan despite the fact that there’s nothing in it for her, particularly — unless the team starts losing immunity, it doesn’t matter, and the odds are that Jason would go before she would anyway. I think it’s easy to overestimate Parvati’s skills here — her mixed-up tribe has yet to go to tribal council, and two people who would be natural enemies of hers have been removed for reasons having nothing to do with her. At this point, she’s doing a fairly obvious thing. She’s certainly not going to align with Eliza, who was in an opposing alliance early on and is MUCH smarter than Parvati. She’s not going to align with Jason, because she’ll want to get him out. This is a fairly obvious play, all things considered.

And what does Natalie think happens at the merge? She becomes part of a seven-person alliance involving two couples, Cirie, and herself and Alexis? How’s that going to work out for her, do you suppose? Parvati is making this sound very well thought out, as far as going into the merge keeping the “big guys,” but in reality, she has nothing to do with the fact that Ozzy will still be there, and she has little to do with the fact that James is still there, since the team hasn’t gone to tribal council in weeks. She hasn’t really done anything yet — not since the tribe switch.

Anyway, after the commercials, it’s time for treemail, which suggests an immunity challenge and requires the teams to pick somebody from the opposing team to sit out the challenge and wind up immune from the vote later. I understand the part where Airai sits out Ozzy, but why did Malakal sit Alexis, of all people? Try Eliza, numbnuts — she kicks your asses at almost every challenge. I mean, I’m assuming they didn’t know that it might be a good idea to sit out Jason, what with the fact that he’s a gymnastics coach and it’s a balancing challenge. This is his area of strength. Balance and rat-eating; that’s on his CV.

Seriously, if Ozzy doesn’t stop wearing that idiotic fifty-gallon hat, I’m going to grab it off his head and make soup in it.

So the story of the challenge is that Erik tries his hardest, but one or two face-plants into the platform seem to stun him a little bit and force him to go back, while Jason is born for this, since he’s a gymnastics coach. The other story, unsurprisingly, is that once again, Eliza proves helpful in a challenge, being the only person other than Jason who does anything significant in Airai’s victory. As usual, she does it partly with smarts when she smacks the barrel before Erik can get to it, ensuring that she can cross first. She’s not a master of challenges, certainly, but she has a very interesting ability to contribute something every single time, much the same way Cirie has a way of never, ever contributing anything to any challenge, no matter what it is. Eliza and Cirie have challenge mojo that points to opposite mojo-netic poles.

Lovely how Jason couldn’t even be bothered to give Eliza a hug at the end. I do not like that kid one bit.

You can tell Ami is in trouble when she begins eulogizing Erik so early. “He was a lovely person, and I truly hope he goes with God” is almost always smug-contestant for “Soon, I will be taking a shower, eating a burger, and asking myself what happened.”

As was pointed out to me via text during this episode, the “pizza party” reward is the lamest reward I’ve ever seen, and it definitely advances the theory that but for the Jonathan/Kathy exits, this should have been a double-elimination episode where both teams went to tribal council but the winners at least got to eat while there. Bare, unadorned pizzas on the beach? That’s right up there with Pringles on my list of Rewards Not As Good As What I Had For Lunch. My favorite part of the back-at-Airai sequence is where Jason confidently voices over that he has the immunity idol, which I sure wish they’d shown back when I was being lectured right and left about what a moron I was for not realizing that Jason obviously didn’t really believe that the stick he found was the real idol. People will never stop underestimating the likelihood that whatever the stupidest thing you can imagine believing at any given moment is, that’s what somebody on this show is always thinking.

Furthermore, those pizzas look a little…low-rent to me. And James opening beer bottles with his teeth? That’s just upsetting. James is going to wind up cracking a tooth and having…a root canal! Theme of the week!

Meanwhile on Exile Island, Ozzy is convinced that the fact that someone took his stick means that he is really, really crafty. Of course, it doesn’t really mean what Ozzy did was all that smart. What it really means is that you could strand Jason in the produce section at Pathmark and ask him to make his way to the eggs, and he’d be in the bakery aisle an hour later trying to remember whether you said “eggs” or “legs,” because he hasn’t been able to find any legs yet so he thought maybe he’d just stare at the English muffins for a while.

“Who is going to be tricked by Ozzy?” Ozzy asks, overestimating his own cunning and referring to himself in the third person while asking the camera rhetorical questions. That is three strikes, sir. You and your hat are out. You will now be scooped up by a giant horned owl and removed to the first all-organic Hooters, where you will belong just as soon as they invent it.

Back at Malakal, Home Of Losers, Cirie and Amanda are commiserating as Erik loses his coconuts to the tide. And that is no kind of euphemism. Of course, with nothing left, Erik just comes and tells Cirie and Amanda that Ami was plotting against them. Doesn’t the fact that Ami is not part of their alliance mean that it would be logical that Ami might have been plotting against them? Don’t Amanda and Cirie both know that their alliance is the couples-plus-Cirie thing? I mean, this tribe only has five people left. There’s just Cirie, Amanda, Ozzy, Erik, and Ami. Obviously, Ami can’t do anything to a THREE-PERSON ALLIANCE before the merge, and presumably, once the merge comes, they’re not counting on either Erik OR Ami being with them, so what difference does it make? Ami isn’t a post-merge threat unless she gets together with a bunch of fans, which presumably Erik might be inclined to do also. This, again, feels like panic for the sake of panic, just getting pissed off and freaking out over the fact that people you don’t need and aren’t counting on have tried to make moves against you.

Of course, Ami tries to say she’s not plotting against them, of course they don’t believe her, and of course, nobody has the brains to talk concretely about what this means or to make a rational argument. Ami does try to explain herself by pointing out that they didn’t really invite her to play with them at the beginning, which is true but totally irrelevant. For some reason, this becomes this really personal, moist, gross-out, freshman-dorm conversation about how Ami feels left out and not “part of” anything, which…that is so icky. For somebody who championed women playing intelligently as a group (misguided as her brand of “feminism” was), she’s collapsing into quite the bullshit stereotype here by making this about her feelings instead of about explaining how she can help the group advance in the game. Nobody’s ever saved herself from the vote with a rousing chorus of “Hug Me, I Need Shallow Representations Of Social Contact.”

But nothing in this episode is weirder — nothing — than Ami’s approach to Erik in which she thanks him for ratting her out and ultimately causing her to bond with Cirie and Amanda. I can’t tell whether this is spectacularly clueless (okay, it’s at least that), breathtakingly passive-aggressive, weirdly sincere, or just the result of too much spoiled coconut. Erik is pretty much of a flake, I think, but the way he looks at her and says “no problem” after this really crazy-ass apology kind of made me think he’s not the worst ice-cream scooper ever, anyway.

Naturally, as soon as Ozzy comes back, Erik spills his guts about Ami, and this plays into Ozzy’s whole “how dare anyone try to reassure me after I beg for reassurance” thing, so now Ozzy wants Ami out for sure, and he goes and makes this argument to Amanda. What I don’t understand is why Amanda doesn’t have the common sense to say, “Well, yes, of course you are comfortable with Erik; Erik has your picture up in his locker and brushes his hair a hundred times a day in the hopes that you might stroke it lovingly or maybe let him wear that asshole hat, but that doesn’t mean that Erik has any loyalty to us as a group, or to me, or to Cirie.” Ozzy is obviously not situated the same way Cirie and Amanda are with respect to Erik, and if Amanda and Cirie didn’t point that out to him, they’re not as crafty as I thought. Moreover, if Amanda and Cirie — like Parvati — see the endgame here in getting rid of Ozzy and James after the merge but before the end, they’d logically keep Ami around for that, not Erik, who would vote out Ozzy only if Ozzy got him pregnant and then refused to marry him.

So tribal council includes the predictable Jeff Probst hectoring about what a terrible tribe they are, and Jeff’s insistence that it’s still fans against favorites. But then it turns into this weepy thing where once again, Ami is all upset that Ozzy doesn’t trust her and that he’s mad at her, and I cannot understand why she’s so emotional. I mean, she’s been prepared to go against Ozzy for weeks; why is this such a big deal? She’s so personally upset by the idea of not being believed by people she has already talked about getting rid of. My favorite part is where Jeff asks Erik why they should believe what he tells them, and Erik points out that his back was against the wall and he had no other options. So, having been asked why they should believe him, Erik chose to answer the closely related but quite different question of why they should not believe him. Close, but no rum raisin, pumpkin.

In the end, Ami has a very embarrassing, weird exit here, and I think her “I even want to keep Eliza” is gratuitous and makes her sound petty. Her weepiness is uncalled for and the guilt is misplaced. I don’t particularly like the Amanda/Ozzy/Cirie group very much, but I totally understood how, at that point, they’d be like, “Ooookay, then it’s Ami, I guess.” Like, before she starts hugging people and talking about rainbows and how we all are one, and then all of a sudden it’s a birthday party celebrating the rebirth of your closeness to each other and there’s just one candle and it’s so awkward, so she should leave now.

How did Erik vote for Ami and write her name in, like, calligraphy? What the hell? Did he make pirate maps before this? Does he do the chalkboard signs outside the ice cream shop OH MY GOD I BET THAT’S WHAT IT IS!

And in the previews for next week, Eliza’s transition to bad-ass-osity continues as she looks at Jason and says, “That can’t be the idol! That’s just a stick!” Thank you, Eliza. You are officially my favorite person of the season.