There have been lots of times, this summer, where Vanessa has made moves that have shocked and awed the world over with their brilliance. Take last week’s simple whisper to Julia to make her challenge Austin in the veto competition. What is she, magic? No one could deny how incredible that move was, especially since she made it look so easy. But then there have been other times when her decisions seem to make absolutely no sense whatsoever. Personally, I think her nominations this week fall into that latter category. But let’s start at the beginning of tonight’s episode, and maybe we’ll be able to make sense of it all together.

So the house guests minus Steve are in the middle of the egg/chicken wire HoH competition when we return to the house tonight. It’s immediately obvious that Liz doesn’t stand a chance of winning. She’s clearly this year’s Victoria in this competition, so when she realizes that she can’t win; she goes for the luxury prize and wins that instead. The other three, though, are all doing well, more or less keeping up with each other until the end, when Austin and John fall a little behind. Vanessa has realized that she’s basically everyone’s replacement nominee, so she needs to win this challenge.

And win it, she does. Steve and John are happy, because of course Vanessa will nominate Austin and Liz, and one of them will go home this week, right? Not so fast there, guys. As soon as she wins HoH, her paranoia sets in, right on cue. Everyone knew this was coming, as it always does when she’s HoH, and you can really see how tired they are of her when she gets like this. There’s a lot of sighing and eye rolling and shoulder slumping. You’ve had multiple chances to get rid of her, guys. I don’t feel sorry for you.

Vanessa has always needed justification for nominating people, which drives me crazy. I wish she’d just own up to things, rather than creating dramatic situations just so that she can feel good about who she’s sending home. She goes to just about everyone in the house to try to get dirt on everyone. She’s looking to see whose stories match and whose don’t in order to determine who is lying to her about whatever. Steve knows that telling the truth is the best way to go, so he tells her that Austin and Liz had promised to keep him safe last week if he’d make sure Liz stayed in the house and Julia went home. He also tells her that Liz promised him that if she won HoH next week, and he was up on the block, she’d save him over the other person in a tie breaker vote. Of course, Vanessa takes this to mean that he’d made a deal to send her home, which isn’t even necessarily true. What if John had been the other person on the block, Vanessa? Then you wouldn’t even be in that equation. She talks to Austin and Liz, and they tell her that they’d only said these things to Steve so that they could get what they wanted. Vanessa isn’t happy about this. Apparently it’s fine for her to make deals with everyone in the house, but no one else can.

She talks to John too, to find out if Austin had made a deal with him. John reminds her that she herself had told him to go to Austin to make a deal so that Austin wouldn’t suspect that she and John were working together. Of course, she conveniently forgets now that she’d told him to do this. John and Austin had also had a conversation about going to the final two together, because it would be in Austin’s best interest to go with John, but when Vanessa confronts Austin about it, Austin denies it.

Now, based on everything people have told her so far, you’d think that she’d side with Steve and John. Austin and Liz are clearly making deals with everyone, and even though they’re telling her that they’d never follow through on those deals, how can she know whether or not they’re telling the truth? Not only that, but she’s getting conflicting information from John and Austin, so you’d think that would throw a little more doubt onto Liztin, but apparently not. She tells Steve to his face that it’s not in her best interest to target them this week. She points out that John has never won an HoH, so he’d be the perfect person to bring to final two. She wants to target him this week instead. Steve, of course, thinks this is a terrible idea. They’d worked hard to split up the threesome so that they could come into this week with a 3-2 advantage, so if Vanessa evicts John now, they’ll be back down to 2-2 again. It doesn’t make any sense, numbers wise, and I agree with him. I said last week that I think that Vanessa is thinking too much about the end game and not enough about her present game. She needs to make it to the end in order to win, and by targeting Steve and John, I think she’s cutting her chances of making it to final three.

But we step out of game mode for a little while when Liz gets her luxury prize, and I can’t help but roll my eyes when Frankie enters the house. I absolutely cannot stand Frankie. He’s so high on himself, it just drives me crazy. But he’s here to pick up Liz so that she can go to see his sister in concert, and she gets to bring someone with her. At Austin’s prompting, she picks Vanessa, and the two of them leave the house and get made over so that they can go out in public without being recognized. Really? They’re going to a concert with thousands of people, and they’re going to watch the thing from a private suite, and people are going to recognize them? Really? Whatever. Liz actually looks really good with her red pixie-style wig on, though Vanessa looks a little garish, but they enjoy their concert and then return to the house and the game, and Vanessa jumps right in.

John goes up to talk to Vanessa about what she’s going to do, and she tells him that she feels like she’s caught between two showmances because she thinks that John and Steve are in it together until the end. This makes absolutely no sense, to me or to John or to anyone else in the world. He tries to use reverse psychology on her, and she takes his advice and nominates him and Steve for eviction, citing yet again the fact that she thinks that the two boys are too strong a duo, conveniently forgetting that there is an actually strong duo on the other side of the table. Hello, Vanessa! You’re afraid that Steve and John will take each other to the end, but you’re not afraid that Austin and Liz, the ACTUAL couple in the game, will do the same thing? That makes no sense! There’s no way that Austin or Liz would take Vanessa over each other. How she doesn’t get this is beyond me.

Personally, I think she made a huge mistake. Let’s say John goes home on Tuesday. That will leave Vanessa, Austin, Liz, and Steve in the house. Vanessa can’t compete in the next HoH competition. If Steve wins, I’m assuming he’ll put up Liztin, but if one of them wins the veto, Vanessa will go up in their place and go home, as the one who comes off the block will be the only voter. If Austin or Liz wins HoH, Vanessa and Steve will go up, and if Steve wins veto, Vanessa will go home. Or, if Austin and Liz realize that they can’t win in a final two against Vanessa, they may just send her home anyway. This situation would be the same if Steve goes on Tuesday and John stays in the game.

And if Austin or Liz wins HoH and succeed in sending Steve home next, that leaves the three of them in the house, and once again, she’s at a disadvantage. Both Austin and Liz are good at competitions, and if either of them wins the final HoH comp, you can bet that they’ll take each other to the final two and not her. Whereas, if she backdoors Austin or Liz on Tuesday, John and Steve can both compete for her against the one left standing and hopefully send them out next. Then, she’s got a better chance of winning final HoH against Steve and John than she does against Austin or Liz. No matter how you look at it, it is in Vanessa’s best interests to evict either Austin or Liz on Tuesday. It’ll leave a hell of a lot less to chance, and it’ll increase her odds of making it to the final two.

I just don’t understand why she doesn’t get this. For someone who prides herself on her ability to run numbers and calculate odds, how does she not see that sticking with Austin and Liz is a bad idea? How can she think that Steve and John’s connection is so much more dangerous than the one between Austin and Liz? Not only do her odds of making it to final two drop by sticking with the showmance, but if she does manage to make it to the end, going to final two with either Austin or Liz also puts her at a disadvantage, as Liz or Austin will already have two of the five votes needed to win the game, from Julia and from the one who doesn’t make it to final two. And if the jury is feeling bitter, all it would take would be another three votes to snatch the title away from her. If she’s against John or Steve, her chances of getting votes at the end are much higher, as John, while well-liked, hasn’t done much game-wise, and really, neither has Steve, though he has made a couple of big moves. Nothing as big as Vanessa though. She’d have a much higher chance of winning against one of these two than against Austin or Liz. Her fear that everyone will want to take John to the end as this year’s Victoria is sound, but I definitely think she’s getting a little ahead of herself here. By surrounding herself with strong people, not only is she decreasing her chances of winning the final HoH, but she’s also decreasing her chances of getting votes if she does make it to final two.

But we’ll see what happens on Tuesday, I guess. I just hope that either Steve or John will win the Veto and then convince Vanessa to nominate and evict Liz. It’s a long shot, as Vanessa’s decisions seem to have been lacking in the logic department as of late, but hey, a girl can hope.

– Rebecca