Diane Finds New Allies In Logic and Common Sense

Just when things were getting chummy and predictable in the Big Brother house, occasional strategist Diane comes along and shakes stuff up. No, she didn’t do anything crazy like dump Drew for Cowboy – although such romantic intrigue is always welcomed. Instead she did what we’ve been waiting for someone to do: she thought ahead a few steps. With all sorts of potential allies such as Marvin, Adria, and Natalie waltzing out the front door, Diane at long last saw the light and realized that Karen and Nakomis would only take her so far in the game. After that epiphany, it was just a matter of moments before Diane officially became the third Horseman.Luckily Diane will never be considered an actual Horseman, which is good because that would have really screwed up Cowboy’s math. Towards the end of the show, he tried to do a little numbers game, but wound up tripping over his words when he proclaimed “Two happy men, two… uh… two four horsemen… in the final four.” I feared that if the producers hadn’t stopped him, he would have rattled on with random numerical facts: “The four horsemen are down to two but I have my half sister which brings it up to two and a half, or maybe down to one and a half. But April and Chason are two more and then you got to figure Julie Chen, so now we have twelve, but I forgot me. Shewt. Where was I?”

When Michael wasn’t trying to develop his own version of The Twelve Days of Christmas, he was displaying his tour de force karate skills which mainly boiled down to a spastic dog-peeing stance. His signature move was standing on one wobbly leg and unevenly kicking out with the other, all the while rotating his body 360 degrees. It was about as graceful as a jerky lawn sprinkler. The good news is that if Cowboy gets into a fight because of his amazing freak-dancing, he can always finish off his attacker with these martial arts moves, provided his opponent is either a man with no arms and no legs, or simply a fluffy pillow.

Still, Michael has come impressively far in the game, which led him to tell Nakomis that “our real father should be proud”. Why’s that? Because his kids wound up exploited on a reality TV show? Or because Michael was about to embark on the most convincing flamingo fakeout the world had ever seen?

A flamingo fakeout, you say? Okay, I gotta backup a little bit. Remember all that jive about Diane getting her act together? Well, I said that because she hatched a brilliant plan to turn the tables on Nakomis. Assuming that Michael and Drew would go up on the chopping block (which is what happened), Diane could use the veto to save her and Drew, forcing Karen up. And then Karen, of course, would be sent packing to the Jury House From Hell, courtesy of the house’s resident couple: Driane (or Diew, haven’t decided yet). Fantastic plan, but of course it hinged on the very risky stipulation that Diane win the Veto.

Well lucky for our kiddos, the veto competition was a wonderful challenge that allowed players to cooperate towards a common goal. In this case, everyone was locked in a cage and given a pile of junk that could be used to create some sort of hook to grab the keys needed to escape. While Diane taped together three golf putters, Michael fiddled with a flamingo in an effort to look like he was fashioning some sort of crude avian device to snatch those keys. While this may have looked like typical Cowboy thickheadedness, it was actually a clever ploy to divert attention away from his participation in the Three Putter Plan (which was almost as good as the Six Finger Plan which got rid of the second of the four horsemen and… oh, there I go again with the numbers. Shewt!). Diane snatched the keys and the veto, and another wonderful Big Brother plan came to fruition. Granted, this was not only very exciting and satisfying, it was a little anticlimactic. After all, wouldn’t it have been even more exciting if all five houseguests had managed to get themselves locked in the cages for real? I mean, what would have happened had they not been able to reach the keys? Now that would have been fun.

Drew and Michael were extremely happy with the results, since it confirmed that they might just have a direct link to God. Before the whole veto competition shebang, the two said a little prayer in the most sacred of places in the Big Brother house: the weight room. Yes, where else to find a moment of spirituality other than amongst a claustrophobic cluster of exercise machines? The two guys approached the moment with such solemnity that I half expected to hear Gregorian Chants in the background. Oh wait, I did. Props to the Big Brother production staff. I personally think God must be pretty annoyed with all these reality stars praying for help in their quest for moolah.

In the case of Cowboy and Drew, the Lord must have been feeling generous – or maybe just worn down by Michael’s filibuster of a prayer – because the two guys wound up exactly in the position they had wanted to be in. Cowboy forced Drew to agree to take him to the final two, a move that will certainly come back to bite Drew in the ass. Still, he couldn’t exactly say no to Cowboy, so he simply went along with the plan, carefully warning Michael to not say a word to Diane, lest she reverse her veto intentions. I have to admit, I was a little worried that gossipy Michael might just go up to Diane and say “Hey, so Drew and I are going to take each other to the final two, but Drew said I shouldn’t tell you because – oh shewt.”

Of course who knows what Drew will do if it comes down to choosing between Diane and Cowboy. His loyalty to Diane is very ambiguous, especially since he seems hellbent on kicking her out of beds and hammocks and cuddle positions. It seems like all she needs to do is be in the same room with him for Drew to suggest that she go away, lest people catch on to their oh-so-hidden alliance. Maybe Drew just really doesn’t like Diane.

Well, Diane certainly likes Drew, which is why she took him off the chopping block by the end of the episode. She gave a wordy speech that kept Drew on pins and needles, and a random eye-bulging expression suggested he was using all his power to keep his brain from exploding yet again. There was some doubt about whether Diane would follow through with her clever switcheroo plan, after all, that old pinky swear is still lingering around. What is it with the damn pinky? These people treat it with such importance that no one seems to be able to say “pinky” anymore. Everyone just says “this” and wiggles their pinky around, as if uttering its name would unleash some biblical terror on the compound. Next year, I hope the producers cast all pinky-less roommates.

The end result of all this silliness was that under-the-radar Karen suddenly found herself in the hot seat for the first time since week two. I guess Nakomis should have kept her third wheel on a tighter leash. Instead, the Head of Household seemed busy trying to find the perfect sweater to serve as camouflage on the hammock. Did anyone else notice that? Nakomis full on blended right in with the hammock patterns. Maybe this was some stealth tactic to overhear any strategic plans being hatched on the hammock. If you squinted just enough, it looked like Nakomis was merely a floating head on the hammock. Very impressive.

In an episode filled with power shifts and tense scheming, I have to say the producers did leave us with one gem that almost got lost in the shuffle. That would be Nakomis’s comparison of Marvin to the horny fish in the tank. Now, it was funny watching the footage of a lonely fish dry humping (or the piscine equivalent thereof) a lazy aquarium shark, but when the producers assembled a side-by-side comparison of the fish’s technique with Marvin’s flirty approach, I have to say it was quite impressive. Had we more footage of the fish and Marvin, we here at TVgasm might have been able to fashion a longer, more substantial comparison.

Still, even with an all too brief Marvin/fish skewering, this was a fantastic episode that had all the intrigue and suspense that we’ve come to love on a Big Brother show. If only there were a dash of Julie Chen in there, we might have had a golden episode.