Welcome, everybody, to the surprise live eviction episode of Big Brother! Things are quickly coming to an end here, so it’s time to say goodbye to one more person. Who will it be? Well, if Vanessa has her way, John will be heading out that door, but I think by now we know better than to count this guy out! Just when you think he’s down, he pops back up again to ride the next wave.

We join the house guests when they’re called into the living room by Julie. Everyone looks shocked when Julie tells them about tonight’s eviction. Well, everyone except maybe John. I can’t tell if his glazed expression spells surprise, or if he’s just dozing with his eyes open. Steve, on the other hand, looks like he’s about to be sick. Probably because he knows he’s on the block next to Austin and thinks he’s going home. But we’ll get to that in a second. What happened during the past couple of days, you ask?

Well, the nerds are surprised that Vanessa had sided with Liztin. I get John’s surprise, but I’m not really sure why Steve is surprised, since she flat out told him what she was going to do. Unless maybe he was hoping that she was kidding or something. Or that she’d change her mind. But she didn’t, so they’re on the block, and Liz and Austin are safe. Again. John, of course, will do what he can to save himself. Vanessa thinks it’s dangerous to leave John in the game, since everyone will want to take John to the end. And once again, I’m a little flabbergasted by her decision-making skills. Yes, it’s true that people will want to take him to the end, but he’s also easier to beat in competitions, so she’ll have a higher chance of winning against him than she would against the other three house guests. Why not take out a strong competitor to increase the odds of winning the final HoH competition and secure a final two slot?

Anyway, Vanessa is crying yet again because she feels so bad for putting up Steve, and blah blah blah. Steve doesn’t fall for it but plays along anyway, so that she go all paranoid on him for no good reason. He can’t decide if she’s actually upset about nominating him or if she’s doing it to make him feel bad and to forget his anger. I’m going to go with option number two, Steve. This is what she does when she makes a big move and then has to face the consequences. This is why no one ever stays angry with her. Because they’re too busy feeling bad for making her cry about something crappy SHE’S done to THEM. Hello manipulation.

John tells Austin and Liz that he’s considering throwing the veto challenge as a sign that he trusts them in the hopes that they’ll save him over Steve, and you can see them starting to salivate at the idea. A chance to take a veto from John and then use it to evict him? Who wouldn’t love that opportunity? Vanessa starts salivating too, when Austin and Liz tell her the news. This would be perfect for her. Her target goes home without a fight.

When it’s time for the veto competition, the house guests are told about a new comedy coming next week called Life in Pieces that they’ll get to watch later. It’s a shameless plug, though I’ll give it a shot. I love comedies. Plus they were right about Scorpion last year, so I’ll trust them this time too. The veto competition is the magnetic puzzle challenge. House guests hit their timer, and then race across their balance beams to start putting their puzzle together on the magnetic board. They’ve got to race back to their timer again before the twenty seconds are up, or else their board will demagnetize, and they’ll have to start the puzzle over again. If they fall off their balance beam, the board will also demagnetize. And once the timer runs out, they’ve got ten seconds to hit the timer or else they’ll be out of the competition for good.

I love this challenge, so I may have squealed a little at the sight of it. The challenge starts, and before even the first minute is up, Vanessa is out. She’s too busy looking at her puzzle pieces to notice her timer running out and then her ten seconds running out as well. So she’s out of the way, leaving Steve and John an equal shot at winning the challenge. If John decides not to throw it that is. He’s still considering it. He figures he’ll keep an eye on everyone else, and maybe he’ll let Liz or Austin win. But if Steve looks like he’s getting too close, he’ll have to pull ahead and beat him. So while everyone else starts putting tiles up on their boards, John decides to put his puzzle together in his trough first, so that he won’t have to worry about the board demagnetizing. It’s a good strategy. While Austin’s puzzle pieces constantly fall off his board, making him have to start from scratch each time, John is making progress with his puzzle.

Liz knows that this challenge is really up to her to win, since Austin apparently sucks at puzzles. She seems to be pretty good at it too. She’s close to the end, but then, so is Steve, so John decides he’s got to win this one on his own. And while Steve and Liz struggle to make every piece fit on the board, John just slaps up his organized pieces and then hits the buzzer for the win.

JOHN IS GOING TO FINAL FOUR!!!!

This is Vanessa’s worst case scenario, and I laugh in her face as she starts to cry, yet again. This time she doesn’t even cry to anyone else. She makes a beeline for the HoH room, and the tears start flowing. And then she cries to us in the DR. I know, that John, he’s such a jerk. How dare he save himself and threaten your chances at 500K. Doesn’t he know he’s supposed to be playing for you?

Steve isn’t safe though, and that’s nerve-wracking, for him and for me. His anger at Vanessa really seems to come out now, as he talks to himself. “Cry your eyes out, Vanessa,” he sneers. Shouldn’t have gone against the nerds to begin with. He does go upstairs to try to talk to Vanessa, but when he gives her the option, she turns him away. Austin, on the other hand, barges in, and he doesn’t seem to like it when she tells him she feels bad about voting Steve out.

So John obviously takes himself off the block, and Vanessa, in a surprising move, puts Austin up in his place. I’d thought for sure she’d put up Liz, since I’d think that Liz would be her second choice of person to go home. Apparently she’s planning on getting rid of Steve. She tells everyone that Liz was up last week, so she doesn’t want to do it to her two weeks in a row. So Austin joins Steve on the block. Finally. Now John needs to decide whether he wants to just vote with Liz and evict Steve out or force Vanessa to make a decision between her two boys. I love this side of John. This John is awesome. He goes up to talk to Vanessa about what she’s going to do, and she finally realizes that her previous calculations were wrong. If she keeps Steve, the three of them can make it to final three, guaranteed! (It’s not exactly true. If Liz wins HoH or wins Veto, someone else will go home, but her chances are definitely much higher with Steve and John than they are with Liztin.)

Now John has to decide if he wants to go with what they both actually want, or if he wants to vote Steve out, just to piss off Vanessa. Part of me is laughing at John’s ridiculousness, and if I didn’t want the showmance broken up so badly, I’d probably want him to do it just to screw Vanessa over. But I want that showmance split up, so please don’t do it, John! My pleas grow even louder when he tells Austin he likes the idea of going to final three with a showmance. Austin loves that idea too. Or rather, Judas loves it. This is the second time in a couple of days that John has really gotten Austin’s hopes up, and I don’t know if he’s doing it to mess with him or because he’s actually thinking of doing these stupid things. You never know with this guy. He’s a hilariously loose cannon, and this time, he’s got ammo in the form of the veto.

The vote rolls around, and after a sweet speech from Steve and a hokey one from Austin (complete with product placement about Life in Pieces), Liz happily votes to evict Steve, and John, ready for the blood to fly, gleefully votes to evict Austin. So now it’s up to Vanessa. As the tie breaker, she’s got to stand in front of the boys and tell them face to face who she’s evicting. I would never want to be in that position. She evicts Austin, a move that devastates and shocks both him and Liz. She immediately and continually starts to apologize to him, but he isn’t having it. He tells her that she’ll never win the game. She doesn’t have the jury votes. Then he leaves the house and joins Julie.

He tells her that he thinks that he was evicted so that Vanessa could target Liz. I don’t know. It doesn’t really make sense to me. I figured she put up Austin with the intention of voting out Steve and then changed her mind. He also legitimately thinks that she’s got no chance in the finals. I wonder if he’s ever actually watched the show. Yes, there are bitter juries, and I’m sure he’ll try to spread that bitterness like wildfire, but a lot of the time, juries vote based on who played the best, not who hurt them the least. There’s a reason why Victoria’s never win.

The HoH competition is another quiz style challenge called What the Bleep, in which the players watch clips of their former house guests and then have to answer true/false questions about a word or words that were bleeped out. Liz looks extremely pissed off and ready to tear some heads off. She definitely looks like she’s ready for revenge, and honestly, I don’t blame her. Actually, part of me feels bad for her; she’s just lost her sister and her boyfriend in less than a week. I’d be pissed too.

However, I don’t feel bad enough to want her to win the competition, and she doesn’t. By the end of seven clips, John and Steve are tied for the lead, so they get a tie-breaking question, while Liz gets nothing. And the final question asks how many seconds the Under the Rainbow challenge took. In the end, John guesses 3600 and Steve guesses 601, I believe. The correct answer is somewhere around 2400 seconds, so Steve wins HoH again! Steve looks shocked, and then we realize why: apparently he’d forgotten to add a zero to his answer. If he’d added it, John would’ve won HoH. I think that’s so funny, though I do feel bad for John. He was so close, and yet once again, he didn’t win HoH.

So congratulations to Steve for securing his spot in the final three! But who will he nominate for eviction? I think it’s pretty safe to say that Liz will be one nominee. But I’m not sure after that. He himself has said that he doesn’t want to go to the final two with Vanessa because he doesn’t think that he can beat her. Plus, she did just nominate him. On the other hand, she also saved him tonight. And he’s been pretty loyal to her this whole time. I honestly don’t know who he’s going to pick. On the upside, if he does nominate Vanessa over John, she’ll only be able to cry for a day before the next eviction. So there is that.

I think, if I were Steve, I’d probably nominate Liz and John with the possibility of backdooring Vanessa. That way, he wouldn’t have to listen to her complain and guilt him all day. Plus, then she may not fight as hard to win the veto, giving the rest of them a slightly higher chance to win. Really, it doesn’t matter so much who he nominates. It’s all about who wins the final veto. That person will be off the block and will be the sole voter. Personally, I want it to be John.

But we’ll see! By tomorrow night, we’ll have our final three! I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait! See you tomorrow!

– Rebecca