Big Brother 11: Why Laura Lost

So far this season, the first two Big Brother evictees have not been who I would have expected. That is, they were not two people who were playing the game balls-to-the-wall over the top, which is frequently a cause for early eviction. Braden was a laid-back surfer dude (until he was nominated and earned himself a Reality TV Hall of Shame Moment through his racial epithets). And nobody would have pointed to Laura as an obvious super-competitor either. But there she went, second out of the house. What happened? Why did Laura lose?

Although the answers might not seem obvious at first glance, that’s why we have this column! As we will do each week, let’s look back at What Big Brother 11 Houseguests Should Have Learned to figure out what happened to Laura.

The first rule, of course, is to scheme and plot – and to do so early. Laura had been a huge Big Brother fan for years, and she knew she had to have a strategy. Unfortunately, she picked the wrong one and missed an important point.

As she told me in my interview with her, “I was going to play on what the cast was like. Once I saw the cast, I figured I should probably stay low, which is what I tried to do. But I didn’t realize what was going on behind my back and they were forming all these alliances, and it was too late when I realized it. It kind of backfired.”

It’s smart to not lock into a specific strategy before knowing the cast, but it’s not smart to let everybody else get into alliances before you can. As this rule specifically notes, “From the very beginning, you have to start making alliances and cementing relationships. It can be difficult to know whom you can trust after just a couple days – or even hours, sometimes – but if you don’t start fast, you’ll be watching from the comfort of your own living room like the rest of us.” That perfectly describes what happened to Laura – at least in part.

This is not to say that Laura didn’t have any strategy, because she did. As she told me, “I totally planned on being the pretty girl who everybody thinks I just want to be on TV, that I don’t know anything about the game, flirt with people and be supersweet to the girls and play dumb a little bit.” Under many normal circumstances, this would have kept Laura safe for quite a while. In a way, it was a specific avoidance of the second rule, which says not to scheme and plot too much. Nobody would think the somewhat dumb, sweet girl would be a schemer.

Not to beat a dead horse, but the problem was, going back to the first rule again, that she didn’t follow it up by actually scheming. She figured she would be safe long enough, but starting as an outsider always creates a difficult road.

Moving to the third rule, did Laura do okay in pretending to be nice? Generally, I would say yes. However, there were certain people in the house that she never really meshed with – and those were the ones in power.

While she was in the house, she blamed Ronnie’s lies for being unable to really get to know some of the other houseguests. But when I asked her about it, she admitted she was mostly talking about Jessie and added, “I didn’t really want to get to know Jessie any more than I did.” She then told me, “Jessie and I are like oil and water – they don’t mix. I don’t know what it is, he’s very, very cocky and he’s not interested in females that don’t worship the ground he walks on, and I’m not that kind of girl.”

I certainly can’t disagree with her on anything she said about Jessie. However, he was the first HOH, his ally was the second HOH, and he had played the game before, meaning that some of the other players gave him a bit of deference. He was somebody she needed to at least pretend to be nice to. Right off the bat, though, it was clear Jessie didn’t like her, and she didn’t really do anything to fix that. Maybe she thought at the time she didn’t need to, but she was wrong.

The fourth rule plays into this, as it says not to allow your emotions to control you. Once again, Laura generally did fine here, except when it came to Jessie. Because of her dislike for him, she didn’t kiss up to him or try to get to know him better. This led to the results I just described above.

The fifth rule is really where Laura had problems, though – it says not to be too much of a threat. Laura’s goal in coming into the house, as described above, was to avoid being seen as a threat. But it happened anyway. As Ronnie said, Laura was smarter than people gave her credit for, and she figured out Ronnie before anybody else did. She figured out that Ronnie was the mysterious tie vote and told others about it – most importantly Jordan. Jordan then naively discussed it with Ronnie.

With Ronnie trying to control the whole house by lying to everybody about everything and playing the sides against each other, having somebody around who had him figured out was definitely a threat. On top of that, Jessie probably felt threatened by Laura because she wasn’t sucking up to him and strategizing with him. In Big Brother it’s frequently true that if you’re not with somebody, you’re against them.

The sixth rule emphasizes flexibility. While we’ve already seen that Laura went in with a flexible attitude towards strategy, she failed to be flexible in the other regards we’ve already discussed – that is, better getting to know those she didn’t personally like. We don’t need to rehash that, though.

The seventh rule says to trust almost nobody. One of Laura’s self-admitted mistakes was telling Jordan of her suspicions about Ronnie. We all know Jordan didn’t tell Ronnie about such things out of maliciousness or strategy (because she doesn’t appear to be capable of either), but tell Ronnie she did. Laura needed to be more careful about who she talked to, and sometimes it doesn’t take more than one little slip-up to start the ball rolling.

Once that ball was rolling, there was nothing Laura could do to stop it. She didn’t have any real allies to help slow it down, and she was nominated alongside her best friend in the house. The most she could do was make things very uncomfortable for Ronnie for a couple days – which indeed happened – but that didn’t prevent her from walking out the door (and won’t send Ronnie packing this week either!).

Laura had a good idea in terms of hiding her game smarts, but she also needed to work some of those game smarts in order to get herself into an alliance. That way, when her intelligence became more obvious, she had a way to deflect attention from herself. Furthermore, she needed to overcome her negative feelings towards Jessie and at least try to make him feel a bit more comfortable.

Instead, Laura alienated Jessie, who was the first HOH and unofficial leader of one alliance. Then she threatened Ronnie’s game status, who was the second HOH and also a member of Jessie’s alliance. These were fatal mistakes to her game and the main reasons behind why Laura lost.

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