As you may recall, Thursday night's live show ended with the start of an endurance-based HoH competition, with nine of the ten remaining players hanging from a ledge on the side of a fake building, which kept tipping forward and trying to shake them off. I do have to make a correction: it was Ollie who told Jessie to take his shirt off, not Memphis. For what difference it makes. During a lull in the fake building's shaking, Jessie asks Renny who she'd nominate, and Renny acts like she wouldn't go after him. Jessie then takes a moment to lecture everyone on which of their muscle groups they're working.
Let's take a moment to review the results of the unanimous vote to evict Angie on Thursday: that was Keesha's decision, for her own petty reasons, but everyone went along. And Jessie says that with his alliance down to three members, it's do or die now.
Back at the HoH competition, Jessie says that if he slips off the ledge he'll just use the bar to pull himself back up. Jerry drops to the mat below shortly afterward. How long did he last? 26 minutes. Libra falls seven minutes later. Dan starts thinking about throwing another competition, but he can't just go ahead and do it, choosing instead to talk about it a lot beforehand. He drops after 45 minutes. Libra, at long last, smells a rat behind Dan's sustained and increasingly vocal suckitude. Ollie suddenly drops at 55 minutes, and it's April and Renny up against Jessie, Michelle, and Memphis. Some time after that, the bargaining begins. Michelle promises to keep Renny safe. But soon, Jessie appears to be nearing the end of his rope, and drops off at 1:06. "That was a bogus competition," Jessie DRs. Yes, anything Jessie can't win must therefore be bogus simply by virtue of the fact that he didn't win it. Look, nobody made you build up all that muscle mass that you would have to one day hold up, you tool. Memphis tries to make April an offer, but April's doing fine, so Memphis ends up dropping at 1:16, totally empty-handed.
Dan starts offering motivational speeches, and Renny takes him up on it. While "Eye of the Tiger"-inspired music plays (let's just call it "Tear Duct of the Housecat"), Dan delivers a speech right out of every cheesy sports movie he can remember, first to Renny and then to Michelle. While Renny is shifting her legs to combat her growing numbness, she loses her footing just short of two hours, so now it's down to April and Michelle. April requests her own speech from Dan, and it seems to work for her despite cracking her up. Meanwhile, members of both players' respective alliances fret to us in the DR about the stakes of this HoH competition. But they're going to have to wait until after the commercials to find out the results.
Back from the ads, the two of them seem prepared to wait each other out indefinitely, even as the building tips them out a few more degrees. April promises not to put up Michelle, either initially or as a PoV replacement nominee. Everyone on the ground looks pretty nervous to hear that, and April sweetens the deal, adding in a whisper that she'll keep Jessie in the game as well. Note that she didn't promise not to nominate him. Both Michelle and Jessie start getting emotional, and after asking April to promise one more time, Michelle drops to the mat at two hours, forty minutes, crying like an asshole. April follows her down, still having the energy to crawl over to Michelle and hug her. Man, she didn't need to deal at all. She hops off with Ollie while Michelle is still lying there with Jessie, completely melted and grief-stricken at not getting to see her family pictures. Jerry has to half-lift her down off the mat, telling her, "You got a lot of heart," before letting her slide the rest of the way down and walking off, leaving her crumpled there on the ground. That was awesome. Michelle quietly tells Jessie about the deal she made with April, who comes over for another hug from Michelle and a thank-you from Jessie (which doesn't appear lost on Libra). And that's it before yet another commercial. This is the easiest weecapping I've ever done in my life.
Back from that, Libra and Keesha are congratulating April on her big win, and are even pleased with her deal to protect Michelle and Jessie. Not looking so good for Memphis right now.
April's HoH room tour is marred only by Michelle's disappointment that it's not her. Wait, is "marred" the right word?
Now that Keesha is out of the HoH room, she is also off the reservation, by which I mean that she's decided to become friends with Memphis. Of course she is. So I'm already foreseeing a replay of the whole Steven debacle, with Keesha vowing bloody vengeance upon whomever she arbitrarily decides is most responsible for Memphis's eventual eviction. April's kind of irritated about Keesha's friendship with Memphis, to the point that she threatens to Libra that she'll nominate Keesha if she gets too close to Memphis. Except she makes the mistake of saying this in front of Keesha's closest friend Renny, who reports this to Keesha the first chance she gets. But instead of reconsidering her friendship with Memphis, Keesha regrets not nominating April when she had the chance. Renny's not helping by exaggerating April's irritation as being more along the lines of "she is definitely coming after you." So now Keesha is completely invested in keeping Memphis in the house, to protect her from her own alliance. How stupid can she be? Is she literally allergic to the idea of a plan going smoothly?
1 2 3 4
Dan goes to the DR to open his America's Player instructions. He reads the question first: who should he try to get nominated? After hoping aloud that it isn't Libra, he opens the envelope to see that he's been instructed to target Jessie. Dan happily promises to do his best.
You can tell Dan's on a secret mission, because he's sitting around inside wearing his sunglasses. Out of nowhere, he approaches April to briefly pitch her the idea of nominating Jessie. April acts open to it, but goes straight to Libra and Keesha with the news that she thinks Dan is America's Player. Nice going, Dan.
Michelle borrows one of Renny's wigs to go out and sunbathe, where Dan gives her some unsolicited diction lessons. Half an hour of HoH competition tonight, and they're still putting in this filler.
Keesha, meanwhile, is talking to Memphis and revealing that her predictions are taking the same direction mine did. Memphis runs a scenario past Keesha: he thinks April will nominate Memphis against Jerry or Dan. Seeing Keesha's dubious expression, he asks her, "You think she'll break her promise to Michelle and put Jessie up?" Keesha claims this is the first she's heard of any such promise. Memphis smirks at having stirred up some shit that can only be to his advantage.
Up in HoH, April is complaining to Ollie about Keesha's "disrespect" in becoming friends with Memphis, after April "saved" her. Now she's calling Keesha a "little bitch" behind her back, though, so I think that evens things out a little.
What up, Karen from Ohio? She's the one who came up with tonight's America's Player task: "Which houseguest do you want Dan to hug for at least ten seconds?" I just love watching these voting instructions burn up air time.
April considers her nominations. Keesha is aware that being friends with Memphis might make her a target, but isn't going to do anything about it. Dan is only concerned about his America's Player responsibilities, which he spent all of fifteen seconds on. Michelle is confident in the promise April made to her up on the wall. Memphis says that April would be an idiot not to nominate him, and admits that he would have done the same to her. And as April loads the key box, she says that her two nominees are people she doesn't trust. Well, that narrows it down.
At the nomination meeting, April turns out to have nominated Jessie and Memphis. So that's a big win for Dan. April tells Jessie that he is an intimidating competitor, and April cites the car curse as her reason for nominating Memphis. Even though she's the only one who's ever been seen to give a shit about that.
1 2 3 4
In the DR, Memphis is sanguine: "One of us is leaving, and hopefully it's not going to be me." Jessie is less so: "My alliance sucks." April claims that she kept her word to Michelle, in that Memphis is the one she wants out and Jessie is just a pawn. Michelle, however, doesn't see it that way. "I'm hoping that April knows what she's talking about," she says nervously. Well, there's a first time for everything. Libra is hopeful that Jessie will put some more bullets in his already-Swiss-cheesy foot and get himself out of there. See you Tuesday, if you care.
M. Giant is a Minneapolis-based writer with a wife, a son, and a number of cats that seems to have settled at around two. Learn waaaay too much about him at Velcrometer, or just e-mail him at m.giant[at]gmail.com.
1 2 3 4