Big Brother 11: Why Michele Lost

Michele went through the game of Big Brother essentially by herself. Unlike most of the other contestants this season, she never really paired up solidly with another player (or multiple players) and frequently saw her erstwhile allies voted out or turn on her. How did she manage to make it to the final four under such circumstances? And once she got that far, why did Michele lose?

It’s coming down to the wire, but we’re still here to answer these questions as we have throughout the season, by looking back at What Big Brother 11 Houseguests Should Have Learned. So let’s jump right in.

The first and most important rule is always to scheme and plot. Honestly, I don’t think that Michele did a whole lot of this – or should I say a whole lot of this in the right way. Michele is a smart woman, but I don’t think she used her brains well in the strategic portion of the game.

Indeed, when I asked Michele, in my interview with her, what her strategy coming into the game was, she didn’t talk about playing strategically like some of the past winners (Dr. Will, Dan, etc.). Instead, she said she “tried to come into the house playing a Renny-type character, house mom.” Renny ended up leaving right about the same time Michele did, so maybe Michele did a little too well, even though she laughed and admitted, “that didn’t work out.”

I’m just unsure as to why that would be her strategy. She knows this is a game, she knew she had to play it, but she didn’t choose to play it in a way that was more likely to end up with a winning result. That is, she apparently didn’t come into the house with a plan to make and break alliances, etc.

I will give her credit for apparently realizing the error of her ways. As she later told me, “I realized that I would be eliminated quickly in the game. As a brain, people were threatened by me. So I had to make unpredictable moves and court both sides to stay in the game.” While I may disagree with the reasons people turned on her, at least she knew she had to try to work with both main alliances in the house.

The question then becomes one of whether she was successful in doing so. I would have to say, generally, no. She never really became a trusted ally of anybody, other than maybe Russell (and even that isn’t totally clear, and it was late in the game in any event). But I believe that actually helped her at that point.

Sure, nobody really trusted Michele. Heck, several of the players really did not like her at all. But just as she was not anybody’s ally, she was also not their main enemy. In most cases, the players wanted to evict somebody whom they knew was against them. So Jeff targeted Jessie and Lydia; Natalie and Kevin targeted Jeff. This was the point in the game when an independent just had to keep her head down and hope not to get caught in the crossfire.

With all this in mind, does that mean Michele did okay in terms of the second rule, which says not to scheme and plot too much? Well… no. Earlier I mentioned that I disagreed with Michele as to why people turned on her. The reason, I believe, is because she gave them reason not to trust her. If she had just joined the other two Brains in their alliance with the Athletes, I don’t think anybody would have been “threatened” by her being a Brain as well. What threatened people was the fact that they didn’t trust her to remain true to them, because she had shown that she was not necessarily on their “side.”

As I noted above, this eventually helped her out a bit. But early on, it’s a large part of what separated her from the other players. Mind you, by the time she was evicted, it was no longer an issue.

The third rule addresses how players should pretend to be nice. In general, I’d say that Michele accomplished that. The times when she didn’t involved situations that I frankly don’t understand. We all know that Ronnie was extremely pissed at Michele when he left, calling her a despicable human being, etc. when I spoke to him about that, he said, “The reason I made the comments I did on the live show is when Russell was making comments about me my wife and my family [early in the game], Michele was so quick to condemn them and we bonded. But then she did a compete 180 on a personal level and attacked me and made very hurtful personal comments.” He more recently clarified in a post on Twitter, indicating that Michele had made some nasty comments about his wife. I don’t recall those statements, so I can’t say what happened, but that was certainly not the side of Michele that we saw, either on the show or the live feeds. So I’m not really sure what was going on there.