Big Brother: Lather, Rinse, Cry, Repeat

Brendon and Rachel: they are nominated.  Matt calls them “a virus in the house”.  I don’t think “virus” is the appropriate term, because 1)it makes me think of Dr. Mario, and 2)many of these people are probably immune to vaccines.

Especially this guy.

Brendon whines about being put on the block.  “Whoever stays is going to target Matt,” he says.  Yeah, right.  I highly doubt that Matt’s thinking “Oh, no!  Brendon’s coming after me!” and cowering in fear.  Brendon’s about as indimidating as a balloon animal.

“Whyyyyyyyy am I the bad guyyyyyyy?” Rachel whines in the confessional.  “It doesn’t make sense that everyone’s targeting meeeeeeee,” she continues, because winning two HOH competitions and stomping around the house acting like you’re queen of the world isn’t reason enough. Cram it, Daniele Donato.

She’d better not start whining about her daaaaaaaaaad

Soooo, guess what?  Rachel retreats to the bedroom and pouts!  I know!  This is all so new and interesting!  Captivating television!  I know I ask this every season (except for the Keesha/Renny/Dan season, because: awesome), but when is Survivor coming back?

You know the drill: Rachel pouts, Brendon enters the room, Rachel pouts, Brendon touches her face, Rachel sheds tears and makes that one face, Brendon says dumb shit, Rachel keeps pouting.  So. Tired. Of. Watching. This.

Brendon decides that they should go back into the kitchen and make everyone uncomfortable instead of holing up in the bedroom, so they wander out into the kitchen so Rachel can pout there instead.  Brendon calls Matt a midget, for some reason.  Matt shrugs it off, instead of dropping some of that badass trash talk he’s so famous for.  You know, stuff like “I could hang out here all day!” and “Man, I’m not tired at all!”  Those insults?  They cut right to the soul, man.

Then Rachel starts to chop vegetables like a serial killer, slamming the knife down onto the table (no cutting board! tramp) and generally acting like a five-year-old.  Oh my god, you’ve already done this to two other people.  Take it like a grown-up, Poor Man’s Janelle.

Who lets her prepare food without a hairnet?

And then, you’re never going to believe this: Rachel goes back into the bedroom to pout some more.  Oh my God, and then!  Brendon shows up to comfort her.  WHAT WILL HAPPEN NEXT?

“My spirit is broken!” Rachel whines in the Diary Room.  Just a hint for those of you watching at home: if you’re going to start talking about your spirit on national television, you may want to avoid wearing a shirt with a hole cut in it specifically to show of your cleavage.  Also you may want to avoid making this face:

The houseguests check out the backyard, where Big Brother has given them a bowling lane as practice for the upcoming veto competition.  Most of the houseguests take turns and bowl a few frames, except for Rachel, who’s too busy moping.  OH MY GOD, AND THEN!  Rachel stomps into the bedroom to pout.  What happens next?  Shift+F1!  And then, after that: Shift + F2!  After that, Shift + F1 happens some more!  Man, these recaps write themselves.

Can I tell you guys how excited I am for one of these two to go home?  Because I really, really hate watching this shit three times a week.

Rachel wants to give up, but Brendon eventually talks her into returning to the backyard to practice.  At 2:30 in the morning, Brendon and Rachel are still practicing.  The editors, bored, drop the Rocky-style montage music on us and show Rachel dropping pins like it’s her job.  At 5 o’clock, they’re still practicing.  Man, whether it’s crying or bowling, these two sure can do one thing over and over again, can’t they?

Including whatever this is.

Time to pick players for the veto competition!  There will be seven competitiors this week, since Ragan won the right to play during last week’s veto competition.  Matt picks Kathy, Rachel picks Britney, and Brendon gets Houseguests Choice; he only has Brigade members to choose from (not that he knows that), and he picks Enzo since he hasn’t been doing very well in competitions.  A few hours later, the doorbell rings and it’s Jeff and Jordan!  Hey, interesting and fun people!  Remember when they had those on this show?

Everyone else is super excited to see them and their pink bowling shirts.  ”Jeff would definitely be part of The Brigade,” Enzo says.  Doubtful.  Jeff and Jordan sit down for a little Diary Room session; they talk about how excited they are to host a competitino since they never got to host one in their season.  “Everyone hated us,” Jordan says hilariously.  They confirm that they’re still a couple, in case you were wondering whether they’d broken up since you saw them roughly eight minutes ago on the last season of The Amazing Race.

Now let’s get Natalie to host a competition!  The veto can be hidden inside a giant set of nostrils.

The veto challenge is like this:  There are ten pins set up in groups of two, with one stacked one on top of another and forming five columns.  One person bowls and has forty-five seconds to knock over as many pins as possible.  They’ll then challenge another person to beat that score.  The victor stays, the loser goes; last person remaining wins the Veto.  Rachel is first and she knocks over six pins; she chooses to challenge Kathy.  In any other competition, this would be a wise choice, but Kathy has the look of someone who bowls a lot.  Kathy then proceeds to knock seven pins down, eliminating Rachel from the competition.  Kathy celebrates nominally (this will be important later) while Rachel heads to the sidelines with her bitchface.  You will be shocked to hear that Rachel immediately starts to bawl.  Man, she cries more than Amber.

Let’s hope she can avoid a Tetherball to the face. Or not.

Brendon starts off round two.  He does…not great.  He knocks down three pins, but then begins to choke completely while Rachel cheers for him annoyingly.  Finally, he gets so frustrated that he chucks a ball clear off the court, nearly hitting Jeff and Jordan.  “Whoa, where’s the insurance clause!” Jeff quips.  Remember when he called Lydia “Mrs. Roper”?  That was delightful.

Britney recaps Brendon’s tantrum for us while we enjoy a slow-motion replay.  “Brendon has the worst sportsmanship I’ve ever seen in my entire life, and I played fifth grade basketball!” she snaps wonderfully.  Isn’t she, like, four foot two?  I bet she was the Mugsy Bogues of that fifth-grade team.

Brendon challenges Britney, who knocks him out with minimal effort.  Brendon proceeds to throw a tantrum, muttering about how he’s “tired of being targeted by assholes”, stomping his feet and huffing.  Rachel begs and begs him to be a man and be classy, which is pretty comical considering what we’re going to see later.

Now that Brendon and Rachel are out and the interesting part’s over, Ragan recaps the rest of the challenge for us.  Britney knocks Enzo out, then Matt knocks out Ragan (Matt smacks his ass and says “sorry baby”, probably to antagonize Rachel for calling them a couple), leaving Britney and Matt as the finalists.  Britney manages to knock down all ten pins (that’s my girl!) and wins her second consecutive veto, because she is a badass.  If she were not around this season, I’d have long since gone outside and enjoyed my summer, and who the hell would want to do that?

Damn right.

Oh, and Rachel and Brendon?  They mope.

Someone must have told them about Dr. 90210 getting cancelled.

After the veto competition, Rachel is bitter about losing and has decided that Kathy celebrated too much and has insulted her.  She drags Kathy into the cabana room and starts to bitch her out, calling her “unsportsmanlike” and telling her that she talks about integrity and character way too much.  To her credit, Kathy only has to hear about five seconds of this before she decides to get up and leave.    “You can’t talk to me like a woman?” Rachel asks. “I am a woman, that’s why I walked away,” Kathy responds while Rachel continues to completely lose her mind, demanding an apology for some imaginary slight.  Hey, at least she’s not crying, right?

“You thought you could beat me and you didn’t! I was excited,” Kathy continues, refusing to apologize.  ”I beat you, end of story.”  Good for Kathy.  I’d point out how hypocritical Rachel’s being right now, but the houseguests do a pretty good job of it themselves.  “She is disgusting,” Britney comments after watching from the spy screen upstairs.  “She wants an apology after she did the same thing to Monet and Kristen?”  Well said, girl.

Kathy finally escapes Rachel and enters the HOH room.  “Kathy, if you apologize to her, I will slap you in the face,” Britney says hilariously.  “She is such a skank.”  Yo Flip, after this season, can you hire Britney to write recaps?  I would seriously be her biggest fan.  She can even do Survivor if she wants.

I would give Britney my ATM Pin number at this point.

After the commercial, Ragan sneaks off to the Diary Room to choose his first Saboteur task.  He gets a little laptop put in front of him and gets to read some of the suggestions viewers have submitted on Facebook and Twitter.  One person wants him to hide Rachel’s nasty hair extensions, which he refuses to do because he doesn’t want to touch them.  Another suggests hiding stinky cheese in one of the bedrooms, which Ragan thinks won’t do anything since it already smells.  When someone suggests that Ragan try to turn Brendon and Rachel against each other, Ragan is fully on board.

Seconds later, a new Saboteur message appears on the TV screen and the houseguests run in to see it.  The Saboteur tells Rachel that Brendon has been throwing competitions to further his game; Rachel just kind of rolls her eyes and dismisses it, knowing that the Saboteur is trying too hard to rattle her.  “Don’t worry, the two of you can discuss this at the jury house,” voice-altered Ragan continues.  If Ragan doesn’t get off his ass and form an alliance with Britney and a couple of others soon, they can all talk about it together.

The message may not have worked on Rachel, but it did have an unintended side affect; the rest of the house thinks that Rachel is the Saboteur, since the message is trying to get them to vote Brendon out.  “I think the message went great!” Ragan says, even though it went terribly.  Man, this twist is worse than Project DNA.

I’ve got it!  Ronnie is The Saboteur.  Wait, no?

Rachel finally gets around to lobbying Britney to use the veto.  Obviously her temper tantrum ruined any chance of this actually happening, but Britney indulges Rachel anyway.  When Rachel asks Britney for her initial thoughts, Britney tells Rachel that she’s not going to use the veto.  Rachel then pulls her trump card: she offers Britney the five thousand dollars she won last week at the veto competition.  Britney doesn’t seem tempted at all, telling Rachel that it would hurt her game to take her off.  Britney also correctly points out that using the veto wouldn’t help anything; if she takes one person off the block, the other will go home no matter what.  Britney’s face is amazing throughout this whole sequence: she looks like she can barely keep from lunging.

Attack! Attack!

Wow, you guys will never believe this: Britney’s refusal to use the veto makes Rachel retreat to the bedroom and cry.  I KNOW.  And then Brendon shows up, and you know how this goes: where’s the fast forward button?

Time for the veto ceremony.  “I’m going to try to do something drastic to shift the attention off of Rachel,” Brendon says.  What, like win a competition?  ZING!

Britney offers Brendon the chance to argue for himself.  “I insist on Rachel going first, as a gentleman,” he mutters like a turd.  Brit’s all “Um, okay?” and lets Rachel go.  She offers Britney the five thousand dollars in front of the entire house, then starts to literally beg for her life.  And then, it’s Brendon’s turn: ”Britney, you are a spoiled brat, and selfish.  Last week I know you wanted to work with us, yet this week you’ve been up in the room and have teamed up with them.  I think you’re going to play this game like you’re going through life, and do what’s best for Britney, but if you will, I’d like you to use it on me.”  What does this accomplish, besides making Brendon look like an asshole?    And also, that was the lamest attempt to be provocative ever.

Britney laughs in Brendon’s face, because that was completely dumb and everyone knows it.  “You’re a class act, Brendon,” she says before saying something I can’t entirely make sense of about Brendon being a jerk.  Then Britney declines to use the Power of Veto and adjourns the meeting, making an amazing bitchface the entire time.

Snap!

Tomorrow: I am absolutely giddy that Rachel is going home.