Big Brother 4: Why Dana Lost

Dana had it made, at least for the early portion of the game. She was a member of the Elite 8, all of whom had agreed they would get rid of the exes first. Dana didn’t have an ex of her own present, but she had still promised she would be in the alliance.

Cracks started to form almost immediately as she realized that she liked some of the exes better than some of her alliance-mates. This isn’t terribly surprising as an alliance based on who happens to be around at the time isn’t likely to last too long. Still, even while she was talking to the exes quite a bit, she ended up voting with the alliance to get rid of Michelle, much to the exes’ surprise.

However, as soon as she became HOH, the power went to her head. She seemed to think that because she was the “head” of the house, she could direct everybody in what to do and they would simply do it. She had heard that her old alliance wanted her gone – which was true, but then pretty much everybody wanted her gone because she had gone psycho on them. She believed the exes instead of her old alliance and turned against her alliance-mates, nominating Alison and Jack. In the end, Alison ended up being vetoed by Nathan and Dave was evicted. When Alison turned around and won HOH, it was a foregone conclusion that Dana would be going.

While I don’t have a specific list of “rules” for Big Brother, several of the ones I use for my Survivor articles are appropriate here. The fourth rule there says, “Don’t let your emotions control you.” Unfortunately, Dana did exactly the opposite. While it was a good strategy to nominate two players from an opposing alliance rather than one player from an opposing alliance and one decoy who isn’t in that alliance, that’s about as much of a compliment as I can pay Dana. She switched sides because she was pissed off. She nominated Alison because she was pissed off. She didn’t nominate Nathan because she wanted to make sure Alison would be voted off. Bad moves all around.

We’ll discuss switching sides a bit more below. But even Dana eventually came to recognize that she should have nominated Nathan instead of Jack. It seems that everybody on the show – Dana included – recognized that she was playing too emotionally rather than with her head.

Another rule from the Survivor articles that Dana ignored is that players should not scheme and plot too much. Indeed, it appears that Jun may have read these articles before entering the house, as live feed watchers reported her discussing a few days ago that she read reality TV websites and then talked about scheming too much vs. scheming too little.

The rule notes:

If you spend all your time scheming and plotting, and you try to scheme and plot with everybody, everybody will know what you're up to... In the end, nobody will trust you and they'll turn on you.

Erika and others tried to tell her that if she switched sides, she’d become a target. She didn’t listen. Dana herself complained that she had saved the alliance of Justin/Jee/Rob, but they didn’t really care. She was effectively in nobody’s alliance, so she was left hanging out to dry.

Dana’s combination of playing emotionally rather than rationally and doing too much plotting and scheming came together in the only ending that was possible for her. That is why Dana lost.

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David Bloomberg is the Editor of RealityNewsOnline and can be reached at RNO@pobox.com.

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