Big Brother 5: Why Mike Lost

Well, that was certainly… anti-climactic.

It was so obvious that Mike was going to be voted out in the first week of Big Brother 5 that I probably could have written this article days ago. But there is always the possibility that somehow, some way, people might change their minds. After all, the decoy strategy has failed almost every previous time it’s been tried. Not this time, though. So what happened? Why did the targeted person actually go? Why did Mike lose?

We will answer these questions by looking back at What Big Brother 5 Houseguests Should Have Learned and going through, step by step, each of the rights and wrongs Mike showed us. In this case, there are a lot more wrongs than rights.

The first rule is to scheme and plot. From all appearances, Mike knew coming into this that scheming, plotting, and alliance-forming was a key. He knows how the game is played and wanted to eliminate threats early. So he started trying to form alliances.

Unfortunately, he was beaten to the punch. As I noted in the discussion of this rule, “The alliance based on an original grouping has been a starting point in almost every series.” That alliance this time around was the Four Horsemen – Scott, Jase, Drew, and Michael. Mike was on the outside looking in. He wasn’t one of the cool younger guys. He wasn’t a woman. He was a singleton looking to create an alliance in a situation where nobody really wanted to commit.

Unfortunately, the Four Horsemen alliance won both the Head of Household (HOH) and the Veto. Scott and Jase acted like they were in control, they convinced the others that they were in control, and therefore they assumed control. Even though the others had the numbers, they didn’t want to go against Scott and Jase.

It also hurt Mike that while Jase went directly against my advice and used a decoy strategy, he picked a good decoy. He didn’t pick somebody who was actually in his own alliance, for one thing, so the others had no good reason to vote Jennifer out. Furthermore, he picked one of the two most heartstring-tugging players. Who was going to vote out Jennifer when she just found out that Michael was her long lost half-brother?

In addition to all that, it seems that Mike’s will to plot and scheme mostly ended once he was nominated. He made a few half-hearted attempts, but they never really went anywhere. He admitted to Julie Chen after being voted out that he had lost his will to play the game, and therefore didn’t plot and scheme when it really counted.

The second rule is to make sure not to plot and scheme too much, and not to backstab until you absolutely need to. Unfortunately, Mike blew those two parts of the rule.

As already mentioned, Mike found himself a singleton. There were other singletons at the time – Will and Marvin, to be specific. But they didn’t push it right away. Mike did. He jumped into game mode immediately, rather than just trying to quietly gather some support while staying out of the way. By trying to create alliances, word got back to Jase – who Mike had not approached – and Jase knew there was a problem.

Furthermore, it was obvious that Mike was targeting Scott and Jase. While it wasn’t technically “backstabbing” since he never had allied with them first, it was still making it clear who was in his crosshairs, and doing so before he had any power to do anything about it.

Mike did mostly okay at the “pretend to be nice” part of the third rule – but he had trouble with the part about keeping politics and controversial beliefs to himself. He was an admitted conservative in a universe that is usually inhabited by liberals (the same can be said about most reality shows). That’s not a problem, in and of itself. However, he made it a point to talk about it. While Will found their political debates intellectually stimulating, that was not an across-the-board opinion. Karen, in her voting session, noted that Mike could be very opinionated and even belligerent. Not everybody likes a good political debate – some people take it very personally. There was no reason for Mike to bring this stuff up, especially at this point in the game, after he had been nominated! It likely didn’t do much to hurt him, but it sure as heck didn’t help.