If you think you’ve been feeling unsettled by the double eviction last Thursday, it’s nothing compared to what the house guests have been feeling since that night. The Sixth Sensers, of course, are happy with the result of the second eviction but the Goblins are devastated, especially Meg. She can’t stop crying, and she’s extremely angry to boot. She’s out for revenge. Becky is upset that she hadn’t been able to better protect Jackie. Maybe if she’d been closer to Steve, things would’ve gone differently. James knows that Steve was given bad information (Vanessa had told him that he’d been Jackie’s target when she was HoH). Basically, they’re all still in shock. Me too, guys, me too.

Steve, meanwhile, is freaking out too. He hadn’t wanted to be HoH. He’d apparently tried to throw the challenge (not sure I believe that. He could’ve easily gotten one of the simpler questions wrong, but he didn’t). Now he figures he’s lost the whole game because of the number of people he’s pissed off. He starts crying as soon as the twins come into the room to talk to him, and it gets worse when Vanessa joins them. Like, total breakdown. Full on sobbing as they hug him and tell him it’ll be alright. This, of course, really gets to the twins. They want to keep him safe because he’d kept them safe.

But the moment they leave the room (he tells them he wants to be alone), most of the tears immediately dry up. He’d only been 50% sincere in his sobbing. Whoa. Dude is a way better actor than I’d given him credit for. He’s so confusing. So does this mean he was also only 50% sincere when he’d been pacing the room by himself, muttering about not wanting to be HoH and wanting to throw the challenge? Is he trying to trick all of us? I can’t tell if this guy is smart or crazy!

Meanwhile, Meg, James, Becky and John have a conversation down in the Have Not room. It’s four against four with Steve in the middle. They need his help, or they’ll be screwed. Even with three powerhouses on their side, they can’t do it alone. So when Steve comes in to talk to Meg, she and Becky play nice. He tells them that he hadn’t been prepared for HoHdom (this also rings untrue, as when he’d won, people asked him if he’d wanted to talk to anyone, and he’d said he was good). He’d clearly been going after Jackie, and I think the girls see right through him, but they tell him that there are no hard feelings. Jackie hadn’t been going after him, but who cares? They just want to bury the hatchet.

In the HoH competition, the house guests have to look at boards of emojis and then answer a question based on what they’d seen. For example, which emoji is shown five times? They’ve got three choices for each question, and the first person to buzz in with the correct answer moves onto the next round. If they get it wrong, they’re out. Each round is drawn randomly, which kind of sucks, because I feel like if they’d been able to pick the next people to compete against each other, there may have been a different outcome.

Anyway, Meg beats James, John beats Austin, Julia beats Vanessa (yay!) and Liz beats Becky in the first round. In the second round, John beats Meg and Liz beats Julia. So the final is down to John and Liz. I was on the edge of my seat for this round. GO JOHN!!! Take it home for the Goblins!

No such luck. Liz answers first and thus wins the game. Boo. Looks like the Sixth Sense is still around and a Goblin is going home. I swear it’s like the popular kids picking off the misfits, one by one.

Becky is justifiably terrified. She’d put up a huge target in Vanessa last week, and it backfired on her. She knows that Vanessa moves everyone in the house and that she’s had a hand in every big move besides Clay and Shelli, so she’ll be in Liz’s ear now.

And she’s right. As soon as she’s got Liz in a room, she immediately tells her to go after Becky. Liz figures she’ll nominate John and Meg and then back door Becky, which makes Vanessa happy. She gets exactly what she wants with Liz doing all the dirty work for her. Just like almost every other eviction she’s orchestrated since the beginning. And now that they’ve gotten that out of the way, they’re onto their next important order of business: choosing a new alliance name. Since the Sixth Sense is dead, they’ve decided they’re going to call themselves Austin’s Angels (Barf.)

But don’t count Becky out yet. While the three minus Vanessa are in the HoH room, she joins them to plead her case. They ask her if she’s got any information about the backdoor plan to vote out Austin a few weeks ago, and does she ever! She tells them exactly what role Vanessa had in the whole thing, that she’s the one who pretty much orchestrated the plan. She lets them know that as soon as they don’t serve a benefit for her anymore they can expect to be backdoored. It looks like everyone believes her. Austin and Liz are pretty pissed off that Vanessa would do this to them. Of course she would! You’ve seen her do it to others! Why should you be exempt from her machinations?

On a lighter side, it looks like James and Steve have become friends. James says originally he’d gotten close to Steve on a strategy level, but even though they’re completely different from each other, they’ve developed a friendship. Aww. This is good news for James. It may put him further down on the target list if Steve has any say about things.

And he might. When Vanessa tells the others that she wants to pull Steve into the alliance, everyone is all for it. Not sure what happened to Austin’s Angels (barf), but now with Steve, they’re calling themselves the Scamper Squad (SUPER lame).

Once again, John decides things in the house are too easy for him, so he’s got to make it harder on himself. You know, just to be fair to the other house guests. He asks Vanessa if Liz is going to put him up—not sure why he’d do that, especially after the crap that went down with Clay. Everyone knows that John doesn’t trust Vanessa now. She tells him that he’s not the target, but wants to get to the bottom of things with him. Apparently she wants to work with him, and I call bull on that. I think she just wants someone else to throw under the bus in case evicting Becky doesn’t happen. When she prods John, he tells her the truth—that when she cries and yells at people, it feels like bullying. I personally agree with him there. Every time she doesn’t get her way, she cries and acts as if the person has committed a crime against her, and then people side with her, and that person goes away.

Well clearly, Vanessa doesn’t like that she’s being told she’s a bully. She says she’d wanted to work with him, but he’s doing everything he can to work against her. In other words, as John points out in the DR, he didn’t tell her what she wanted to hear, so now she’s going to throw a tantrum, and indeed, she marches right upstairs to throw John under the bus. She tells the Austwins (and I think Steve) that he was giving her attitude. John follows her up to the HoH room and tells them that it’s sketchy that they had a conversation, and then she immediately went upstairs to them, but he leaves when Vanessa basically pushes him out the door. Then she goes back to badmouthing him and more or less calling him crazy for following her upstairs. I hate her. I really do.

Julia tells us that after everything Becky had said about Vanessa, she finds everything Vanessa says suspect now, which is great to hear, but it doesn’t mean anything. At the nomination ceremony, Liz nominates John and Becky, saying they’re both big competition threats. She isn’t sure who the pawn is and who’s the target, which tells me she has no intention of listening to Becky about Vanessa’s suspect behaviour.

Not that I can really blame her this time. Unless she and Julia and Austin can make another alliance with either John and Becky or James and Meg, they’re not going to get rid of Vanessa. They need her for numbers. They may be able to get rid of her later, but not now. As Becky says, it’s going to take a long time before they’re poised to oust Vanessa again. I think she’ll eventually be evicted by her own alliance, but not this week. Either John or Becky will head to the jury house. My money is on Becky, since Liz really doesn’t seem to like women that much. She’d rather surround herself with dudes.

At this point, I don’t think the Goblins have much chance of pulling this one off. No matter which one goes home this week, that leaves the other one and James to win the next HoH since Meg is pretty much useless and Steve has clearly joined the popular crowd as their token nerd. They’ll have to alternate winning HoH competitions until hopefully a fellow Goblin makes it back into the game. It’s a tall order. My prediction for now is still that one of the twins will win the game, and if not one of them, then Austin, depending on who wins the last HoH. Unless the Goblins can take it back, there’s no hope for anyone, as no one seems to understand that they’re all playing second fiddle to the twins.

– Rebecca