Previously on Big Brother: bad. Just...bad. Tattoos, knee socks, phlegm, eyebrows, screaming, whining, crying, pouting, yelling, threatening, bullying, spitting, smoking, swearing, and pretending you and your dad didn't know you were going to be on the same TV show all summer when in reality you did. Like I said: bad. Dick, Daniele, and Zach are your final three.
The Julie Chen bobblehead (seriously, when her hair's all teased out like that I have no idea how her body supports it) welcomes us to the live show, marking Day 76 of this season-long prison experiment. Day 76. I just...wow. How the fuck do you live feed people do it? Watching Dick for 76 days? Your ulcers must have ulcers. Julie's scripted spiel is so full of references to Dick and Daniele the unbeatable father/daughter team that overcame estrangement and the Communists to win us the war that I'm surprised she doesn't start throwing garbage whenever Zach's face sneaks onto her little TV screen.
We return to the first round of the final HOH competition, where, you'll recall, the Final Three had to stand on fake tree stumps, hold onto their fake key, and occasionally hop over a rotating bar with a fake bunny tied to it. Daniele makes her first hop and smirks at the bar, all "Nice try, steel bar." The bar thinks she's a total bitch, you can tell. The show then begins to spray cold water onto the three of them, which triggers the expected whiny complaining DR from Daniele about how cooooold the water was. At the two hour mark, Daniele starts seriously shivering, like, convulsive shivering which: A) that's what you get for being skinnier than the bar you're trying to hop over, and B) she's totally playing it up for sympathy. In order to warm up her mean little heart, Daniele then instructs her dad to start bullying Zach, which, if there was ever any doubt that Daniele supports, benefits from, and encourages her dad's awful behavior, that kind of kills it. So off Dick goes, with Daniele smirking and giggling behind Zach's back. It's kind of a dog's breakfast of randomly thrown insults as presented here, and Zach does a really great job of ignoring Dick completely. It really bothers Dick, this silence. You can tell because he calls Zach a pussy for not responding. Daniele starts convulsing again, which distracts Dick way more than Dick's insults have distracted Zach, and that's when the rotating bar starts slowing down. Dick hops the slow bar, as does Zach, but when it comes to Daniele, rather than simply stepping over it (which she has ample time to do), she just lets it back her off the stump until she falls. Stellar performance there, challenge demon. Dick? Is PISSED. Then the greatest thing happens, as Daniele goes inside, wraps herself in about a dozen towels as she walks to the bathroom, and starts freak-out crying. It's awesome to see. Boo hoo hoo hee hee.
Then the second-greatest thing happens. With no more rotating bar to jump, Zach is finally able to free up his concentration enough to respond to Dick. And he does so by laughing his ass off at what a buffoon Dick is. He starts imitating Dick's whoops and cursing and saying stuff like, "I've got 40 tattoos 'cause it makes me mean!" And he actually manages to shut Dick up for a moment. Zach really has proven to be the one person best equipped to deal with Dick's hurricane of bullshit. Ignore it, wait for your moment, and then laugh your ass off. I enjoyed the hell out of that. So anyway, the game keeps going to the point where Dick is the one shivering and looking miserable. Daniele keeps telling him that Zach is on the verge of falling, but those are dirty lies, and eventually, Dick relinquishes the grip on his key. That's when the knock-off Field of Dreams music kicks in -- with some rat-tat-tat military drum action to boot, because Dick truly is the Greatest American Hero -- and we're all made to observe the fallen warrior that is Dick Donato. Seriously, there are long, lingering shots of Dick alone on his battlefield, while the music -- which is actually Field of Dreams meets The Natural, because Dick is a heroic, god-like figure like Roy Hobbs but also a great dad like Kevin Costner -- mourns his loss. It's really something. Zach, the guy who actually won, is reduced to patting Dick on the back and saying how awesome he is. That's what I keep hearing, in between the verbal harassment and threats of violence.
Daniele tries to comfort a frozen and shivering Dick, while Zach DRs that despite all the threats and harassment tossed his way, he was actually able to "break Dick." Well, you and hypothermia, but the end result is the same wonderful thing. If you're waiting for me to say I feel guilty for taking such delight in the drastic and dangerous lowering of Dick's and Daniele's body temperatures, you may be here for a bit.
When we return, Julie tells us it's time for the second round of the HOH. Only this one is Dick versus Daniele, and since it doesn't matter one little bit who wins, I'll only say that the competition involves diving into a tank of water and solving a puzzle, and Dick wins. By a wide margin. It should be noted, for the historical record, that Daniele the amazing challenge-winning pixie lost a competition where holding your breath was a major component, to a man with the lung capacity of an asthmatic gerbil.
Zach DRs that he's already beaten Dick in the "physical" task, now he'd love to beat him in the "mental" task, provided your definition of "mental" involves knowing how Amber or Jen would answer random questions. ...Actually, that sounds like a fine definition of "mental." Meanwhile, Daniele's pouting in her room, because she hasn't done that yet today. She's embarrassed at getting smoked in the competition by her crap-ass dad and...wait for it...she wants to go home. Dick, as always, cheers her up by calling her the prettiest little princess in the land. I'm not even exaggerating; he promises her a "fairytale ending." Sometimes it seems like the idea of this show ending is a fairy tale. A wonderful, impossible fairy tale.
Julie Chat. She asks Daniele a father/daughter question and she smirks and smiles and generally pretends nobody found out that they both applied to be on The Amazing Race together and admitted on the feeds this week that they knew each other was going to be in the Big Brother house before they entered. She asks Zach how he was able to tune Dick out and he attributes it to his brain being frozen, which I think is actually selling himself short, but as we'll sadly learn later, Zach isn't really in the mood to do much besides prop up the Donatos tonight.
Jury House. The totally not fabricated jury house where the jurors are totally actually staying and totally not getting driven there for the two and a half hours it takes to film these filler segments and then driven back to their hotel rooms. Things we're expected to believe are happening spontaneously despite the fact that there appears to be a camera mere inches from these people's faces: Eric and Jessica flirt by the pool (number of times Jessica looks Eric in the face: zero), Amber and Dustin gossip about Jessica and Amber, and the five current jurors sit around their fire pit and await the arrival of Juror #6, who of course is Jameka, looking fab as usual despite being covered head to toe in denim like she's Robin Sparkles. There's the usual "happy to see you/sad to see you" conflicting emotions, and then Dustin intimates that he can hear Jessica and Eric doing it at night from the room door, because Jessica's bored indifference must really carry in the jury house, I guess. The jury watches highlights from the past week, and it's clear that Zach would win a jury vote easily, given the Donato hatred. Of course, even here Eric looks uncomfortable and unwilling to say anything against Dick because he knows America is going to tell him to vote for Dick to win the money. Nobody's going to actually beat you up for badmouthing Dick, you little weasel.
As in years, the final stage of the final HOH competition involves a jury member being asked a question, and the two contestants having to answer what they think that jurors answer was. This competition gets very boring very early because it's ultimately decided by the very first question: "Amber said the moment in the house that irritated her the most was A) when Jen cried about her picture, or B) being handcuffed to Kail?" Zach immediately chooses "B" and does so with such confidence that I figure Amber must've told him something about really hating Kail, because on the surface the answer is obviously "A," so why else would Zach so confidently choose otherwise? We'll never know, but he's totally wrong; Dick gets it right, and for the other five questions he answers exactly the same as Zach does, which means he keeps that one point advantage throughout and he wins. I have seen contests to count the number of jellybeans in a jar that were more compelling than that.
So Dick and Daniele start freaking the hell out, yelling and screaming and hugging and...well, kind of humping each other I'm sorry but they just are. Dick keeps screaming about how it's all over now, they've already won the game no matter how it turns out. So...tune in for the finale on Tuesday, America! It couldn't matter less!
After the break, Julie ludicrously makes Zach and Daniele go through the motions of begging the HOH for votes, which is already the most pointless part of eviction nights even when the lone vote doesn't belong to the father of one of the possible evictees. Dick eliminates Zach with his usual utter lack of class, basically telling him to get the fuck out and not looking him in the eye and brushing off Zach's (admittedly pathetic) attempts to kiss their asses. Once Zach walks out, Dick continues kicking garbage cans and screaming about how it doesn't even matter what the jury does on Tuesday. "Who cares!" he screams. Again, way to painstakingly engineer that final two, Grodner and Co.! They're really doing a bang-up job promoting your season finale.
Julie spends most of Zach's Chenterview doing the following: implying that he never employed any strategy during the game (as Dick alleged), getting Zach to admit that Dick and Daniele aren't horrible people in real life (they are), and telling Zach it was stupid to nominate D&D together at Top 4 (Zach says not nominating Jameka was a play for jury votes, which sounds believable enough to me). Zach's good-bye videos include Daniele disgustingly saying that Zach said some hurtful things to her this week that she really hopes he'll apologize for, because then they can be friends! She really is the fairy princess of her own universe, is she not? Dick is like, "You're totally lame but I guess I don't hate you." Zach, who is at root an insecure turd of the sort who joins a frat in college because he thinks it'll cure him of his high school dweebery, accepts these like they're genuine compliments and is grinning like a moron and almost crying because he thinks they want to be his friend. This is a sad end for Zach, I will say. All the goodwill built up by laughing Dick down from his pedestal is almost completely gone.
As expected, the final America's Player task is for Eric to not only vote for who we want to win, but also to campaign for that person during jury deliberations. Seeing Eric campaign for Dick to win against Zach would have been gross and annoying, but now that it's between Skinny and Sack-Face, I totally don't care. Knock yourself out, Eyebrows. Literally.
Aaaaaaand that's all. Sunday's an un-recapped clip show, and Wing Chun's got the finale covered on Tuesday. I'm done. Here's the thing: this show hasn't produced a satisfying winner since Dr. Will in Season 2. Lisa and Jun were cop-out choices because Danielle Reyes and Allison Irwin were mean bitches. Drew and Maggie were what remained after all the interesting people eliminated each other. Mike Boogie was...utterly disgusting, granted, but you got the feeling he and Erika ended up Final 2 by accident when it was supposed to be Will and Janelle. But this season had settled upon the two most vile people this show's ever seen. By design. Slow clap for that one, CBS. Sloooooow clap.