Big Brother: Surfin’ US-Lame

We pick up right where we left off on Thursday, with all of the contestants perched on surfboards in the backyard.  The very first sentence in my notes is “Andrew’s shorts are alarming.”

Britney notices.

By the way, can we talk about how much I’m loving Britney right now?  Her delightful bitchiness is a breath of fresh air in this boring-ass house, and her goodbye video for Monet last week was absolute gold.  She’s easily my favorite houseguest right now.

Speaking of Monet’s eviction, we flashback and watch her absolutely book it out of the house again.  ”Monet jumped out of that seat like a clown running from a bull!” Lane says.  Why does he get so much screen time when his lines are all so obviously fed to him by producers?  The guy is obviously dumber than a box of rocks, and I honestly have no idea why he was cast, because he doesn’t seem interesting in the slightest and is basically functioning as a large, rednecky parrot for the producers.  You can practically see Grodner’s hand up his ass in every single one of these diary room sessions.

Matt says thanks to everyone for keeping him.  “Well, except for the two of you that voted for me, you can eat shit,” he clarifies, quickly sussing out that it was Kathy who cast the second vote against him.  Kathy explains that she voted for Matt because she liked Monet and isn’t about to go along with the rest of the house.  Has she seen this show before?

Kathy’s pretty boring too, which is annoying, and also: the makeup.

Back on the surfboards, no one’s fallen off yet after eleven minutes.   “Surfing is now a Jew sport,” Andrew helpfully declares.  Are there any sports that are “Jew sports”?  It’s not like there are a lot of Finklesteins storming the NBA courts or NFL wide receivers named Feinberg scoring touchdowns.   Just saying.

Brendon mentions that the surfboards were hard to stand on for someone with big feet like him.  I’m glad that he found a way to mention that he had big feet on live television; that’ll be great for me when I sit down at the computer tomorrow to read the million pervy commenters (and Flipit!) making obvious inferences about Brendon’s crotch.  Goes great with the morning coffee!

Shockingly, Kathy is the first to fall off the surfboard at the thirteen minute mark, and Lane follows right after because he is useless.  Rachel cheers annoyingly for Brendon from the sidelines the whole time, because I haven’t quite heard enough of her voice this week.  All the fake, awkward laughter during her interview with Julie last Thursday?  I wanted to puncture my eardrums.

A few minutes later, the water starts drenching the contestants again and Hayden slips off.  “I THREW THE COMPETITION SO I COULD EAT!” he Natalies, blatantly lying.  Britney also tells us that she doesn’t want to be a Have Not for two weeks in a row, and she takes a dive too.

By the way, there’s all this white stuff floating through the air, and I think it’s supposed to be bird shit.  Random.

It looks more some teenager “discovered himself” all over the set.

Since there are now only five people left (Matt, Brendon, Ragan, Enzo and Andrew), everyone remaining in the competition will be either the HOH or a Have Not.  At forty-five minutes in, everyone starts to pick on Andrew about his tiny shorts.  “Those things don’t look kosher,” Enzo jokes, marking the first legitimately funny thing he’s said this season.  Meanwhile, Matt tries to trash talk everyone and psych them out, but he’s pretty bad at it, drumming on the wall and joking that Big Brother’s going to unleash crocodiles into the water below.  I’ve seen better trash talk in an episode of Family Matters.

Enzo finally falls and becomes the first Have Not for the week.  Soon after, Ragan randomly decides to start whining about how he got picked on in high school, and how hanging out on the surfboard for an hour shows that he’s tough.  Ugh.  This is one of my reality show pet peeves. Scratch that, this is one of my real life pet peeves.  Write this down: if you are older than the age of 19 and are still whining about how you were treated in high school, just do us all a favor and cram it, because you know who else got picked on? EVERYONE.  We all know your life was hard; we were all teenagers at one time, (except for Julie Chen, who was fabricated wholesale in a non-union robotics plant in Asia, but that is beside the point) and we know how much it sucked.  Get over it.

Brendon starts to visibly shake, and pretty soon he’s eliminated, taking an absolutely nasty header into the water.

Now only Andrew, Matt and Ragan remain.  At one hour in, the water starts up again and Ragan is ready to make some deals.  He promises Andrew that he’s not going to put him up at all this week, and Andrew makes the same promise to him, not quite getting that Ragan wants him to step off the surfboard.  Eventually, the surfboards start retreating almost all the way into the wall, and Andrew is unable to keep his footing on the small space he’s given and falls in, leaving only Ragan and Matt.

Brendon and Rachel really, really don’t want Matt to win, because they know that he’s going to be out to get them after their idiotic house meeting stunt last week.  Ragan makes a ballsy move and asks everyone to head inside so that he can have a private discussion with Matt.  Once everyone’s left, Ragan admits that he’s completely fine with losing the competition as long as he knows he’s safe.  They agree that Ragan’s going to take a dive in a few minutes after everyone gets back so it doesn’t look obvious.  When Andrew comes back out to get his yarmulke (I wonder how many of those he goes through in a year?) the water starts up again and Ragan begins to shiver.  Ragan waits about thirty seconds and “falls” off the surfboard, giving Matt the win.

“All those kids from high school are going to be so impressed that I’m sitting here covered in fake bird shit!”

Brendon and Rachel are distraught, knowing that their terrible gameplay and general ineptitude is finally going to catch up to them now that Matt has won.  Rachel immediately retreats to the red bedroom, flops down onto the floor and cries, because that is what she does: she makes a scene and throws a tantrum so that Brendon can come in and make a big show out of cheering her up, because she needs constant validation.  And just like we’ve seen a billion times this season, Brendon shows up thirty seconds later, plops down next to her and starts whispering sweet nothings while she blubbers like a child.  I am so over these two, you guys.  I’m so ready for one of them to get evicted so I don’t have to watch this boring shit anymore.

Preferrably Rachel.

When Rachel recovers enough to get up off the floor, she pulls Matt to the side for some one-on-one time, telling him that she wasn’t going to go after him until he decided to play both sides of the house.  A compelling arument, except for the part where she admits that she almost had him kicked out.  He tells her that she was the one who broke their deal by deciding to tell the whole house that he volunteered to be put on the block, which is absolutely correct, and insinuates that he’s going to make his decision based on who he thinks is going to come after him.   At that, Rachel leaves the room, presumably to go look for a floor to drench with crocodile tears.

So, we made it a whole seven episodes before we got the obligatory segment where the other houseguests make fun of Enzo’s accent!  That’s high restraint for this show, frankly.  Britney makes Enzo say stuff so that she can laugh at him; it starts with the word “dog” and progresses into making him say, “Hey, can I borrow your saw?” which is, of course, a sentence that Britney uses regularly in her daily life working as a carpenter.

It’s time to see Matt’s HOH room!  He gets photos from home, an entire basket full of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and a letter from his wife.  The letter says some fairly generic stuff about how she’s holding up; there’s lots of stuff about how their family is keeping her company while Matt’s away.  It’s a pretty lucky break for Matt, because the letter matches up perfectly to the lie he’s been telling about his wife’s disease and he garners a lot of sympathy from the other houseguests.  It’s pretty ingenious, really.

“Everything’s going great and I am 100 percent healthy…..wait, looks like a typo in here.”

Afterwards, all four members of The Brigade celebrate their victory up in the HOH bedroom.  “Finally, we catch a break!” Matt says, I guess because winning HOH two out of three times and volunteering to be nominated the other is shitty luck.  Enzo states the obvious and argues that Brendon or Rachel need to go home this week, but Matt doesn’t seem super interested in that.  He actually wants to nominate Kathy, since she tried to vote him out last week.  This is a dumb idea for several reasons, not the least of which is that Kathy has all the competence and ability of a tree slug.  Also, she didn’t try to vote you out, Matt; she just didn’t want to vote for Monet.  It’s not like she was stomping around the house last week actively campaigning for you to leave.  That would mean she’d have to do something besides fail spectacularly at every single challenge.

Hayden says goodnight to the rest of the Brigade and heads down to Kristen’s bed, probably to lay on top of her and shout directly into her ear.  While they round first base and head for second, the rest of The Brigade speculates about the nature of their relationship.  Lane even has a theory: Kristen and Hayden are related!  They are who The Saboteur hinted was related during the first week! They even have the same birthmark!

“And when I grope them both in their sleep, their asses both feel really firm!”

All of this is intercut with shots of Hayden and Kristen going at it, just to drive home the point that Lane is dumb, as if we needed that clarified for us.  Enzo drops a “bros before hos” reference during the family hour, just to make this whole thing even more tasteless.

And now, MORE Brendon and Rachel.  Dear God, I cannot wait for this to be over so I can watch Mad Men.  Rachel straddles Brendon in the bathroom and cuts his hair, and Andrew, unable to read the room, vacuums awkwardly and hilariously behind them.

Unclean!  Unclean!

It turns out that Andrew is quite adept at cockblocking these two, which is probably not very difficult given that they’re attached all Human Centipede to each other for twenty-four hours a day.  Later, Brendon and Rachel feel each other up in the red room and Andrew interrupts them again.  I mean, the gall of this guy.  How dare he enter the room where his personal belongings are stored and where half the house sleeps at night?  I mean, Brendon and Rachel are just trying to get it on without anyone bothering them, except for the cameramen lurking in the walls and the thousands of online spectators, of course.

Later, Britney and Lane watch Brendon and Rachel flirt and work out in the backyard.  Britney gets the idea to roleplay; Lane will be playing the part of Brendon.  Unfortunately, Lane’s not really good at this game, because it involves thinking, so the roleplay goes like this:

Britney: “So, what do you want to do tonight, Brendon?”

Lane: “My abs.”

Britney: “Babe, your abs don’t need any work, they’re perfect.”

Lane: “Um…my face?  My arms.  My legs.  Wait, how does this work?”

“Yeah, you really have a….face.  Let’s go tie each other up.”

And so on.  “I love to role play!” Lane says, probably because he just learned what role playing is.  He then makes yet another awkward, producer-fed reference to his private sex life.  “I primarily role play with horses and cows, wondering what they’re saying and what they’d say to me.”  This is getting way too freaky for me, you guys.

Out in the backyard, Andrew and Enzo speculate about what food America’s going to vote to give them this week.  It turns out that they’ll be getting baby food and bok choy, which disgusts Enzo and delights Andrew, who’s happy that the baby food is kosher so he doesn’t have to starve.

Mazel!

Can we pause for a moment here so I can ask who the hell is voting?  I mean, who spends 99 cents of hard-earned money to vote on whether these idiots get to eat baby food or fish sticks?  Where’s the gratification there?  I am mystified, is all.

Later that day, Matt brings Brendon and Rachel upstairs.  He knows they’re desperate, so he wants to leverage them and stick around for another couple of weeks.  He makes them squirm a little by telling them how angry he was after the house meeting before telling them that he’s going to keep them both safe this week.  He basically just wants to make them grovel, it’s pretty great, actually.  In return, Brendon and Rachel promise not to put Matt up next week, which will mean that Matt makes the jury.  Matt then dismisses them and brings Andrew upstairs.  He tells Andrew that he doesn’t want him to go home, but that he’s probably going on the block as a pawn, so that he can take another, unspecified person out.  Like most of us, Andrew is confused; he thinks that it’s pretty much a no-brainer to put Brendon and Rachel on the block and be done with it.  Matt doesn’t really have an answer for Andrew, mostly because there’s really no good reason for the idiotic shit he’s going to do later.  SPOILER!

The Jew-minator

FOR ONE PARAGRAPH!  It’s time for nominations; Matt pulls Ragan’s key out of the box first; hot invisible Kristen’s key is next, and Matt leaves Brendon and Rachel’s keys for last before putting Andrew and Kathy up for nomination, strangely.  He argues that Andrew and Kathy are both after him and that he has to watch his own back; the whole thing doesn’t make any sense, really.  Matt continues to call himself a “diabolical genius” in his Diary Room commentary, even after completely wasting his opportunity this week.  I mean, why lie about your wife’s disease if you’re going to play it safe?  Enzo is confused, hoping that Matt’s got some kind of backdoor plan in place to get Brendon or Rachel out.  Hell, even Kathy knows it’s a dumb idea, pointing out that she’s a small fish in a giant pond and that she should be the last thing on anyone’s mind at this stage.  And when freaking Kathy emerges from her sloth-like state to comment on how dumb you are?  You should probably reassess your life choices.