How great a manipulator and master of the game has Amanda really been if she never expected people to come after her nearly season-long showmance with McCrae on “Big Brother”?
No couple ever lasted this long on the show and just the manner she behaved shouldn’t have made it surprising that someone would eventually put her up for eviction.
Still, for much of Wednesday’s episode Amanda wandered around teary eyed saying things like “I’m pissed and crazy and confused.”
It was even a bigger insult to her that it was GinaMarie, who she always disdained for her amusing malapropisms, that was brave enough to do it.
“This doesn’t make sense!” Amanda kept saying after the lovebirds were perched on the block. When in actuality, it made perfect sense. And in a house where there is nothing much more to do to pass time than to play checkers or chess, and the only book is the Bible, she should know something about scheming gameplay or Old Testament retribution.
When Amanda cried to Andy and Elissa overheard it, she was almost convinced Andy had been on McCranda’s camp all along. But there was plenty of time to set her straight.
If Sunday’s episode was all about how cool it would be to put the couple up (and they did), Wednesday’s was all about how important the veto competition would be as well as how likely it would be that just about anyone who won the veto except those up for eviction would leave things right as they were.
Joining McCranda and GinaMarie to play the competition was Elissa, Andy and Amanda’s “houseguest’s choice,” Spencer (who, as part of the Exterminator Alliance with GinaMarie, Andy and Judd, was promising to keep things just the way they were if he won).
The way the competition was set up, though, he had no chance.
It was a combination of ballet and bowling for a game called Bowlerina. But with the competitors in tutus and trying to bowl, it was pretty much a ripoff of that old “Flintstones” episode where Fred uses his Twinkletoes approach to win.
In this case, they had to spin around 15 times before being allowed to approach the lane, where they’d try to roll balls up a ramp to topple four pins before the barrier went up after 15 seconds. If they didn’t get them all, it was back to spinning.
All this spinning leads to dizziness and then nausea such that Amanda was puking a bit after the first round when she picked Elissa to go against her. She won that round.
But then the next contestant, Andy, picked Amanda to play, which kind of showed his hand that he wasn’t in Amanda’s corner.
Still, the dizzier and sicker she got, the better she got at the game. She beat him as well.
GinaMarie was up next and to continue the Exterminator strategy, she picked Amanda for a fourth consecutive round. What nobody was realizing was that Amanda was getting better and better at this. She won that round too.
By the time McCrae was up, he chose the only other guy who hadn’t played yet, Spencer, and eventually won, though he got a little sick of the spinning too.
So nobody failed to notice that here in the final round were lovebirds who were the very the two who were up for elimination: Amanda vs. McCrae.
McCrae calls the matchup “one of the most tragic things I’ve ever experienced. It’s like i brought Old Yeller to the field and i have to put her down. It doesn’t feel good.”
(Weird that they’ve been kept in this house for months away from everything and he still comes up with the same metaphor they used in “Breaking Bad” Sunday).
GinaMarie had a more high-minded literary comparison. “It was like Romeo vs. Juliet, fighting for their life. It couldn’t be more dramatic.”
“Right now I’m not McCrae’s girlfriend,” Amanda says (in the diary room). “I am McCrae’s worst enemy, and he is mine.”
And they fight to the death, with three rounds of spinning and in the end, by a split second, McCrae winning veto.
He pukes, either because of motion sickness or emotional pain.
“It really sucks knowing I have this medal on and she doesn’t,” McCrae mopes to the diary room after his victory. “Because in my eyes she’s a much better player than I am and it’s a shame she’s not going to make it further.”
Well, actually she could, if he decides to use the veto on her instead of himself.
But he only thinks of that for a second, dismisses it, and besides that Amanda says in her own defense at the veto meeting “I would never ask nor expect nor want you to use the veto on myself.”
Everybody else feels a little ill too because their plan had gone awry. For the second week in a row, Amanda is a real contender at veto competitions, after winning nothing all summer. And one of them will have to be put up opposite whoever is left. Even if that person is a pawn, nobody wants to go up.
McCrae uses the power of veto on himself, immediately starts to regret it, and GinaMarie puts up this season’s pawn of choice, Spencer, who notes that he’s making Big Brother history by being up for elimination the most of anyone who’s ever played has been up in a single season – seven.
So it’s either Amanda or Spencer who goes home Thursday. Though maybe both will. After stretching out the action so long the last week, a whole week’s worth of play will be compressed into a single episode with the season’s second double elimination.
In the short term, the veto results made for an interesting “Big Brother After Dark” for the first time in a long while, with Amanda and McCrae bickering and brooding and looking on the verge of breaking up as she complained that he wasn’t sticking up for her. Which made me really think somebody was sneaking in a TV set: It was basically the U.S. argument for invading Syria.