Previously: Nick was booted, which set off a round of ridiculous keening and gnashing of teeth over his departure, leading America to ask, "Wait, Nick was the ex-football guy with the porny moustache, right? Am I thinking of the wrong guy?" Those meddling kids and their blasted dog flew a banner over the house during the live HoH competition telling the houseguests that Eric and Amber were liars, but since the banner-flyers wasted parts of their space on "We [heart] Nick" and ancient "Nerd Herd" references that it appeared no one even got (nobody has any respect for history anymore), the banner lost much of its impact. Amber cried about evictions, nominations, the banner, her daughter, her dog, Dick, flyaway hair, bad breath, smudgy windows, crooked curtains, and the tendency of supermodels and rock stars to eventually get divorced. And also maybe some other things, but it was hard to hear all of them through the sobbing. Daniele got to thinking, and she wound up thinking all the right things for all the wrong reasons, basically knowing Eric was shifty in some way but still crawling all the way out on the crazy tree and suspecting him of secretly aligning with Kail, among other things. Jessica got wind of Daniele's wrath and tattled to Eric about the plot against him. Eric was quaking in his little boots, but he wound up not nominated, although Daniele assured us that the nominations of Kail and Jen were merely a smokescreen for her incredibly tricky plan to get Eric booted, which she's doing a great job of keeping secret so far, since she keeps telling everyone.
Credits. Beeeeeerrrrnnnn! I love a guitar. Nothing says "we made this seven years ago" like that particular guitar.
We blue-and-white to the most recent nomination ceremony, where Daniele smugly announces her reasoning, telling Kail that she's a threat and telling Jen that Jen wanted to be nominated after all. But as we know, it's all about avenging Nick. I can't imagine anything that would be more fun for Daniele's at-home live-in boyfriend than watching her make out with another guy, unless it's watching her throw a mental rod under the hood of her paranoid patoot over the other guy being evicted. It's like now, her anger is making out with Nick. (That sounds...fun, actually.) Slide to color, and Kail tells us that she's been promised that she's not going home, while Jen tells us that she could give a damn about being nominated, since it hasn't hurt her so far. Dick is still living up to his name as he jumps right back into trying to torment Jen, and she cares as little as always, and it burns him as much as always. Jen goes directly to the obvious subtext for once, asking him if he stares at her because she's so hot. Well, really. This is like the crazypants version of pigtail-pulling, and it's not like Dick's weird obsession with getting a rise out of her doesn't suggest something lustful. Of course, he scoffs at the notion, telling her that he stares at her "idiocy." I really recommend that the time you're in court for peeping in somebody's windows: "I was there to look at her idiocy, your honor." When Jen doesn't really react to this either, given that it's about half a conversational level above "nanny nanny boo boo," Dick returns to his regular theme, which is getting up in her face and announcing, "Everyone hates you, Jen." Dick is bona fide unwell, y'all. Normal adults do not have enough rage in their bodies to seethe like this. Maybe he got an expired tat.
Eric tells us that Dick and Daniele clearly are after him at this point, and he tells us he will need to muster some votes if he's going to stay, because he's more than a little hip to the back-dooring plan that Daniele thinks is her "it's in the vault" secret. We now enter my absolute least favorite kind of sequence on this show, which is a series of whispered conversations about strategy that you know mean nothing, because similar conversations will continue until Thursday, so none of this has any meaning at all, what with the tendency of opinions to shift from day to day. Like, they're showing people talking about who's getting the boot, but they could just as easily have them discuss a Mets game, because it will mean just as much to the outcome. In round one, we watch Eric and Jessica approach Amber and Dustin about the backdoor business (dirty!), and it appears that Dustin and Amber are not down with Dick and Daniele making a new plan that doesn't involve getting rid of Jen or Kail. Jessica, who's sort of the double agent in this group since Dick and Daniele are also talking to her, asks what the Amber/Dustin/Eric trio wants her to do. Dustin and Eric tell her to just play along with Dick and Daniele. Dustin and Amber thank Jessica for ratting out the father and daughter, who are rapidly becoming the creepiest people on this season, and possibly the creepiest people, when considered together, in the history of Big Brother.
Now, Eric approaches Jameka and tells her about the plan to backdoor him over the Nick issue. At first, she seems disbelieving, but he explains it more, and she makes a lot of "mm" noises, as she is wont to do. That's how she understands stuff. Later, Amber and Jameka talk, trying to figure out whether the plan to abandon the booting of Jen and Kail is a sensible one to support. There is much unrest. And whispering.
Zach chats with Daniele about the game in her HoH room, and he complains that all his friends are gone, though he acknowledges that Daniele herself is "pretty decent." I don't know how she doesn't just fall right into his arms at that moment. Daniele complains back that all the other terrible guys made her vote Nick out, and she was really sad about it, too. Zach thinks Nick was "shafted," and now they're bonding over how they've both been mourning Nick's death. Oh, you didn't hear? Nick is totally dead. He is lying moustache-up in a purple coffin that he thinks is pimp, and he doesn't care if you think he's gay. Zach promises that he'll do whatever Daniele wants with the veto if he wins it, and he generally offers to work with her. She merrily DRs that she's excited about using Zach because of their "Nick bond."
Dustin, Jessica, and Eric have a talk in which they agree that they have the votes to keep Eric. Eric gets all ragey, building up to his comments that Dick and Daniele can have their family reunion in the grave that they're digging for themselves. Nothing like picturing a couple of members of a family mouldering in the grave together as punishment for their game play. I mean, on the one hand, yes, and on the other hand...you're not supposed to be America's Psycho, there, so slow down a little, Mohawk Sally.
After commercials, Daniele chirps that it's time for the veto competition. She will play, the two nominees will play, and three people chosen at random will play. Although Eric tells us that he wants his ball to be chosen, Daniele picks Zach, Jen picks Dustin, and Kail picks "Houseguest's Choice," and she chooses Jameka. Amber is appointed host, which I'm sure is a real honor for her, considering that she can barely host her own trips to the bathroom without crying.
In the backyard, it turns out that the veto competition involves "sticky situations." I'm thinking there's going to be honey and Scotch tape involved, but no. These are just bad situations. Oh, boy. Amber is a really bad host. You think you know how had she'd be, and then she's...so much worse than that. The way this works, you bid on a series of unpleasant tasks. If you bid high, you have to do it. If you bid low, you're out of the competition. "How far are you willing to go to assure you win the veto?" Amber reads. The first item is called "Show Me The Bunny," and it involves bidding the number of hours you're willing to wear a bunny suit in the house. Seriously. Zero to 120 is the range of choices. Dustin bids 100, Jameka bids 110, and everybody else bids 120, requiring them to wear bunny suits for 120 hours. As Jameka notes, this worked out well for her. No elimination; no bunny suit. Strategy! Bidding strategy!
The second item: how many times are you willing to have a disgusting mixture dumped on your head in the 24 hours? Everyone goes over to smell it first. Daniele thinks it's manure. Kail agrees that it's got a Port-a-Potty scent to it. Your choices are zero to 24 times. Everyone bids 24, meaning that everyone "wins." Daniele tells us she didn't want to do it, but she haaaaad to. For Nick! Take the poo-head for Nick! Nick wants you to have poo-head!
The item has you write a number from 0 to 10,000. Whoever writes the highest number gets $10,000, but is eliminated. Eric reminds us that he's counting on Jameka at this point. Everybody writes zero, so there's no money. Zach says he thought maybe this would make people like him better if he didn't take the money. I'm sure that ought to do it. That and BEING LESS WEIRD.
item asks you how many hours you'll eat just slop over the 30 days. You can bid anything up to 720 hours. Daniele tells us that her body can't take the slop, and she might die. Daniele dies easily, in case you've noticed. It's good that Nick left when he did, or she might have wound up split right down the middle. Anyway, she writes down 710, successfully sliding her bid between Jen and Kail, who both said 720, and Jameka, who said 480, and Zach, who said 250. So Zach is out, and Kail and Jen have 720 hours of slop.
: "Power Shortage." This means that you bid how many HoH competitions, of the five, you're willing to sit out. Kail says five. Jen says four. Daniele says three. And Jameka says five, so clever Daniele who thinks she's so cool winds up getting tossed from the competition, while Jameka and Kail have to sit out five HoH contests. Jen thinks this was stupid of Jameka in particular. Daniele goes off behind a plant to cry until Dick comes and tells her it's all right. Sadly, the plant is forced to observe the conversation. Poor plant.
Finally, one last item to decide the winner. We are reminded that the prize at the end is $500,000. How much of the prize money will you give up to win veto here? You're just giving up some of the prize if you win; as Jen has clarified, you don't pay if you don't win. You can write anything between zero and $250,000. Highest bet gets HoH. When the answers are revealed, Jameka has said $10,000. Kail has gone with $248,999. Jen has, just as you'd think if you'd been watching, taken all $250,000. It strikes me as really stupid that Kail tried to save herself...what, $1001 by being all sneaky? Way to go, genius. Veto wasn't worth an extra thousand bucks? Anyway, Jen is at the top of the ladder, so if she wins, she only gets half the prize that everyone else would get. But at least she has the veto. Jameka tells us that she wasn't about to give up a quarter of a million bucks just to get veto. You'd think that reasoning might have kicked in a little sooner, because I have no idea at all what possessed Jameka to go all-out to get a power she really doesn't need when she seems ambivalent about the eviction anyway. Dick assures us everything that's going on is exactly what he wanted to see happen. Because he's like that.
When we come back from commercials, everyone is putting on their bunny suits and looking down the barrel of everything they gave up -- especially Kail, who took practically every hit full-on up until the very end and didn't even win anything. Meanwhile, Jameka is all weepy over..something. It's hard to believe, but apparently, she's sobbing over the HoH thing, and the fact that without being HoH, she can't get pictures from home. Amber, who is a wonderful emotional consultant to rely on, provided you want the answer to everything to be "WAAAAAH!", tells her not to worry -- her friends in the house will look out for her. Amber also assures Jameka that she's good with God. And then Dick comes over, and Jameka walks off, which would be exactly my reaction, except I'd poke him in the eye first. Jameka goes off and starts praying for forgiveness. Like, actual forgiveness for the veto competition. As in, "God, please forgive me for agreeing to have pretend manure poured on my head." [God: "Yeah, I...don't really get into that."] By far the best part is where Jen strolls out in front of the camera in her bunny suit while the camera is trying to watch Jameka on her knees having a prayer/meltdown. "Now I'll hide the eggs!" Jen says as the organ music comes up in the background. You can tell that they were thinking they were using the camera a certain way, and Jen actually got in the way of the shot (which I imagine happens quite a lot), and then when they saw it, the editors were like, "Gold, is what that is." And that's what saves this show every summer -- the people in the back room eating Cheetos, despising the assholes on the show, cutting accidentally hilarious crap into intentionally hilarious sequences, and then laughing at each other's brilliance.
Anyway, all these people in bunny suits hugging a seriously weeping Jameka...it's funny, though it's more than a little weird. Daniele is getting lots of hugging and "so sorry"-ing in, but Jameka tells us she doesn't think Daniele is really sorry about anything -- "She is her father's child." Yow. On the one hand: low blow. On the other hand: true fact. Jameka adds that "crap is crap," in case you thought maybe she meant Daniele is as awesome as Dick is.
Meanwhile, Jen unexpectedly announces that she's interested in putting together some kind of working relationship with Daniele, and she runs up to the HoH room for a chat. Daniele somehow tries to bargain with Jen, trying to make Jen promise to vote for whoever she puts up other than Kail. I'm not sure what leverage Daniele thinks she has here, since Jen's already got the veto. Seems to me Jen can vote for whomever she wants and do whatever she wants, but Jen's a game girl, so once Daniele spills the beans about the plot against Eric, Jen agrees to vote him out.
Dick, who cannot leave Jen alone for any period of time, confronts her yet again and tells her that he'll be nicer to her if Jen stops fighting with Daniele. This would be a much more effective threat if Jen didn't obviously care so little about how nice to her Dick is or isn't. He promises to "stop picking on" her, and he offers her maybe the least sincere apology I've ever seen. She's her usual uninterested self when it comes to his shenanigans, but he reveals to us that he's sure that he's getting Jen "on [his] side." Apparently, he figures Jen got here somehow, and a turnip truck is as likely an explanation for that as anything. Up in the HoH room, Dick and Jen continue their conversation, and Dick goes on another anti-Eric rant about how Eric is behind everything, Eric is the crazy genius, Eric is responsible for people being at each other, and Eric "set Nick up from the very beginning," which is hilarious, because...what? Jen tells us that strategically, working with Dick is probably the way to go, but she doesn't know if she has the stomach for it.
Fortunately, it turns out that the rules allow you to take off your bunny suit before you pour vile muck on yourself, but they still do not enjoy the vile muck. Well, except for Jen, who smiles through the whole thing. She's probably psychotic, and I don't think she should be allowed to carry a concealed weapon, but I increasingly like her.
Dick comes to Jessica for another rant about how everything is Eric's fault, and she's like, "Uh-huuuuuh." Dick prattles on about how this all "clicked" for him, and Jessica couldn't care less. She then runs off to talk to Jen about Dick's rampage, which doesn't surprise Jen very much. Jen tells Jessica that she does think Eric is manipulative and tricky. And now, Jen jumps in to announce to Jessica that Eric has been playing her (Jessica, not Jen) and that he told her (Jen, not Jessica) all about it, including saying lots of rude things about Jessica. Is Jessica buying this? It appears that she is, although there is so much cryptic whispering that it's kind of hard to tell. Jessica runs to Jameka to tell her about all this, and announces that she's keeping her options open for the moment. Jessica DRs that she's kind of hurt that Eric, whom she feels close to, might be off telling people that he thinks she's dumb, which seems to be the gist of what Jen was whispering. Jen, of course, knew how much that very thing would bother Jessica, and that it would isolate Eric, which...you would think Jessica might figure out, you know? I mean, maybe this is all true, but Jen's motive for revealing it isn't that it's true.
After commercials, Eric gets a new order, which is to convince Jessica that he's going to take her to the final two. He tells us he'd love to be against her in F2, so this is fine. I wish it had been Dick -- that would have been fascinating to watch. But when he approaches Jessica, she confronts him about the shit-talking that Jen told her about, all of which Eric denies. Jessica really doesn't have the hang of how you're supposed to suppress things and let them fester instead of actually saying what's on your mind. Eric tells her that Jen has lots of reasons to want to splinter the group and divide people. And then...he convinces her that they're going to F2 together, and he gets the ding that means "Task Completed." He says he was "absolutely thrilled" that this was his task. Can I return My Player and get a new one?
Zach, in his bunny suit, reminds us that he (and others) had to get out of bed every hour to the sound of a buzzer and dump manure on themselves. Jen gives a great DR in which she says it wasn't really that bad, it just smelled like manure. Then she adds, "I guess that is bad." There's a lot of crazy in this house.
Dick comes out to the pool and accuses Eric of starting shit, and I have no idea why this isn't the same conversation they had about three days ago. Eric tells Dick, finally, that he's had about enough, and Dick can go off and make his case to everyone and see what happens. But Dick isn't happy unless he's yelling at someone, so he unloads on Eric all about his (Dick's) brilliance and how he knows exactly what Eric has been up to, which is great if you hate Dick, because he's making himself look completely ridiculous, more so by the minute. When this is over, Dustin finally confronts Daniele about this absurd, weirdly violent, obviously unbalanced behavior in which her father has repeatedly engaged, asking her whether she might consider putting him up just to get him out of everyone's faces. Daniele, displaying the all-too-common behavior of a poorly treated child defending a lousy parent against truth-telling from outsiders because it makes her feel close to him like nothing else can, bitches about how Dick's behavior isn't her fault. Of course it's not -- she's missing Dustin's point. He's not saying it's her responsibility to deal with him because he's her dad. He's saying it's her responsibility to deal with him because she's HoH and he's acting scary, and it's time for it to stop. She, of course, is so full of herself at this point that she has her own blonde hair oozing from her ears, and she preens in the DR that maybe she'll just put Dustin up for having the gall to point out to her, among other things, that she's supposed to be HoH, and she's letting her dad trample all over her. No kid is ever happy with the person who steps up to say, "Your dad sucks," even though Dustin is, in this particular case, doing her a favor.
Bunny Jen prepares for the veto ceremony by talking about how much she loves seeing people who hate her not getting their way. To the show's credit, they don't try to build a lot of suspense over whether she's going to veto herself or not. She calls the meeting together, and when everyone is there, Jen lets Kail speak for herself, and Kail says she wouldn't ask Jen to sacrifice herself, since she earned the veto. Jen happily vetoes herself again, and she throws it to Daniele to nominate someone else. To absolutely no one's surprise, Daniele nominates Eric, accusing him of "setting up" Nick, which never happened, and I'd love to see her face and Dick's when they find out that they made this whole thing up and spent the week congratulating themselves for "figuring it out." The meeting is adjourned. Eric says they're all just jealous because he's a threat, and he swears that Dick and Daniele are dead, while Kail frets and Dick yells and hollers in the DR about how awesome it all is. How long is this season again? Jessica says that she thinks she's going to get her ass kissed a lot this week, because she would appear to be the swing vote. Indeed: Dick, Jen, and Zach will vote to keep Kail; Dustin, Amber, and Jameka will vote to keep Eric. What will Jessica do?