When we left off on Thursday, the house guests were in the middle of the latest HoH challenge. Meg, not surprisingly, was the first one out, but everyone else still had two hands and a foot in the competition. For those that don’t remember, the backyard has been turned into a race track. In each lane, the house guests have to assume the starting position for a race – two hands on the ground, one foot back against the starting block – and wait for the monitor to show the word “Go.” The last person to hit the buzzer at the end of the race is out. If a house guest takes their hands or foot off the buttons on their starting point, they’re out. The last person standing wins.

In no time, Julia and Vanessa accidentally trigger false starts, so they’re both out. This leaves the four dudes left in the game. I’ve been rooting for John to win, so of course, during the next race, he’s the last to cross the finish line. This leaves Steve, James and Austin, and as James tries to psych Steve out, Steve worries that he can’t win a competition against James the Soldier and Austin the Wrestler.

He’s right. He triggers a false start as well, which leaves us with two people. Austin and James egg each other on, and Julia does some weird cheer thing from the sidelines when they get the final go. Austin wins by a hair and is the new HoH!

Vanessa, naturally, is extremely happy because she knows she’s safe. She can get rid of an enemy without having to do any dirty work. Austin will do it all for her! Meanwhile, Austin himself and the twins aren’t sure how they feel about it. They’re all safe, but now Austin has to actually play the game and evict someone. Yeah, dude, that’s how it works. If you didn’t want the responsibility, you should’ve gone ahead with your initial decision to throw the challenge. You could’ve let James win to take out Vanessa for you.

And the fact that the Austwins made another alliance with Meg and James should’ve solidified that decision. Austin is unwilling to nominate either of them because Meg and James are another duo, and as long as there is another duo in the game, then the targets on his and the twins’ backs won’t be quite as big. If James or Meg were to go home, then Austin and the twins would be the biggest targets. So since James most likely wouldn’t have put Austin or the twins up anyway, why did Austin need to win the challenge? James’s target would’ve been Vanessa, so Austin would’ve been safe. Plus James wouldn’t be able to compete next week, which would give Austin a chance to win when it matters more. Now he won’t be able to compete, and he’ll have to rely on the twins to do it for him.

Anyway, Austin is trying to figure out who to put up. He won’t nominate the twins, Meg or James, so that just leaves John, Steve, and Vanessa. He’s got alliances with everyone, so now he’s got to decide which alliance to break. Vanessa, of course, has an answer: target John. She tells Austin that Steve is more loyal to John than he is to them. Last week, they were all gung-ho to include Steve in their alliance, but now, Vanessa tells Austin that before they left, Clay and Shelli had told her that they somehow found out that Steve and John had a final two pact.

Austin doesn’t believe her, of course. He realizes that every week, Vanessa has some new, last minute knowledge about the person she wants evicted that someone had told her long ago. So, he figures, either she’s lying, or she’s got information, and she’s not telling him the whole story. Either way, Vanessa proves herself to be untrustworthy.

When Austin tells Meg and James that he’s thinking of targeting John because he’d be the easiest, he’s the only one who wouldn’t hold a grudge for being sent to jury, Meg and James point out everything that Vanessa has done over the past two months. She’s had a hand in every eviction. She sets her sights on someone to evict and suddenly she’s got reasons to get rid of that person. She tried to get rid of Austin all those weeks ago. Austin gets it and is considering getting rid of Vanessa. He can’t trust her, and she’s a wild card. Who knows what she’ll do next?

Completely overwhelmed by indecision, Austin goes to the Scamper Squad (still a really stupid name) to find out what they think he should do. He tells Vanessa that he’d made a deal with James right before the final race (though that’s a lie, as they’d joined forces a few days ago) so he can’t nominate them. He knows he’s going to put John up, but he doesn’t know who else to put up as a pawn. Vanessa immediately throws Steve under the bus. Obviously, the other person on the block has to be either her or Steve, and she thinks it should be Steve. It would look weird if Austin put her up next to John. Everyone knows that John and Steve are working together, so it would make sense that Austin would put both of them up against each other. Blah, blah, manipulations, blah.

Steve adamantly doesn’t want to be a pawn, as he’s been a pawn a few times before, so Austin offers to talk to him alone. They both agree that Vanessa had known exactly what she was going to say before she entered the room. They remind themselves that she always has some sort of new information about her intended target to screw them over and out the door. Then Austin tells Steve what Vanessa had said about Steve and John’s final two, and Steve looks like he’s going to be sick. He assures Austin that it was a lie, and he says the same thing when everyone else comes back into the room. Vanessa looks vaguely like a deer in headlights when Steve tells her to her face that he and John don’t have a final two deal, but she covers herself. He says again that he doesn’t want to be a pawn, and Vanessa counters, saying that they’ve all got to be willing to be pawns.

This is where my anger topped out. WTF? They’ve all got to be willing to be pawns…except for Vanessa herself? If I recall correctly, Steve has been a pawn at least a couple times. Vanessa has only been on the block once, and that was when she was the actual target. And yet she’s lecturing him on his willingness to be a pawn? Are you kidding me, Vanessa?

When that doesn’t seem to sway the others, she turns to Austin and reminds him that she’d hurt her own game by saving him all those weeks ago, and my lid flips again. So does Austin’s. He asks her about her role in it, and she denies being part of it, telling him that she’d put up Becky and Clay to throw the challenge. Obviously, he knows she’s lying. She asks for some alone time with him, and he tells her no. He really doesn’t want to talk to her right now when he knows that she’s been lying to him for so long.

But he still hasn’t decided what to do yet. He’s still trying to choose between Steve and Vanessa. Steve adamantly doesn’t want to go up on the block next to John. He’d rather go up against Vanessa, and it makes sense to me. Against Vanessa, he’d most likely stay in the game. Against John, the house would probably be split. Meg and James would probably vote him out. The twins would most likely vote for him to stay. Vanessa could go either way. He feels that if Austin puts him up next to John, it proves that he’s closer to Meg and James than to him, and it makes sense too. He’s not willing to put up these two, who he’d just started working with, but he’d be more than willing to put Steve up, when they’ve been working together undercover since almost the beginning of the game. Maybe they’re not as close as Steve had thought they were.

Austin is frustrated that Steve doesn’t want to be used as a pawn, and Liz is annoyed too, by Steve’s behaviour. How dare he not want to be put up on the block? She suggests they just get rid of Steve instead. A couple weeks ago, they were super close to Steve when he helped them out by evicting one of their enemies, and now they’re ready to throw him away. Vanessa is too, after Liz complains to her about Steve. Vanessa, who, from what I’ve been told, has a final two deal with Steve, is not only more than willing to make sure he gets thrown up on the block, but now she suggests that they get rid of Steve instead of John, since at least John is loyal. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Vanessa herself doesn’t want to be put up as a pawn, and that’s totally fine, but Steve complains about being put up, and that makes him disloyal? Disloyal enough, even, to be thrown out? The gall of this woman blows my mind.

When Austin asks Vanessa again about the ploy to get rid of him, she comes clean, saying that she’d been scared because he’d lied to her (about Jason wanting to get rid of Julia, I think), so she hadn’t thought she could trust him. The lie had had nothing to do with her, but it’d been enough to make her turn on him. But now she’s sorry. She’d made a mistake. She deserves a second chance. Forget the fact that she’d totally turned on him and then lied about it for several more weeks and, in fact, lied about it a day or two ago. Now she’s telling the truth, so she should get a pass. But Steve! He doesn’t want to be used as a pawn. Blasphemy! He deserves to be thrown out the door!

The nomination ceremony comes around, and of course, Austin nominates John and Steve. He makes some big speech that makes no sense, and he mentions the fact that he was almost backdoored in week five, and he looks directly at Vanessa as he says it. He admits that Steve and John had no part in this plan. They’re the victims too, in this situation, but he’d had to nominate them because…well, I don’t know. He mutters some sort of lame ending and then throws his top hat across the room, and then ends the ceremony. Dude! If you’re still that upset about almost being evicted all those weeks ago, then James and Vanessa should be on the block, since they’re the only two left who had anything to do with that plan. And yet it’s John and Steve. So mad.

Right now, all I can hope is that either John or Steve will win the veto. Since Austin refuses to nominate the twins or Meg or James, his only other option will be to nominate Vanessa. He keeps saying that Vanessa is still a backdoor option, but I don’t buy it. He’d basically said that she’d have to do something to piss him off to get him to backdoor her. Here’s hoping that the boys on the block will step up to force his hand. Then hopefully we’ll be able to get Vanessa out of the house, once and for all. Or at least until one jury member comes back into play.

– Rebecca