Big Brother 5: Why Diane Made the Wrong Decision

Over the course of Big Brother 5, my opinion on Diane has changed. Earlier in the game, when she was part of the opposition to Jase and Scott, I liked her. As the saying goes, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

Later, she managed to draw Drew over to her side and away from Jase and Scott. This helped to decimate the Four Horsemen, which I saw as a good thing. I understood the irony of Drew wanting to get rid of Holly so a woman didn’t destroy the Horsemen, only to have Diane accomplish the same task through Drew, but I didn’t mind because I was happy about it.

Up until that point, she had been playing smart. This continued when she secretly aligned with Drew, Adria, and Natalie as the twin alliance. She saw that Will and Karen were inseparable, and Nakomis was on their side. It only made sense for her to find her own alliance to oppose that one.

She further helped her cause by acting as the go-between for the two alliances. She told each that she was just pretending to be with the other. That way she could have gone either way, depending on who was in power, and nobody would have been the wiser.

But then everything started to fall apart. She wanted Will gone for strategic reasons, but wanted him to stay for friendship reasons. In the end, friendship won and she voted to keep him. What’s worse is that she then turned on Adria and Natalie for carrying out the mission that she had wanted carried out! It was almost as if Adria and Natalie represented her own “dark” or strategic side, and by lashing out at them she could feel better about herself.

However, that vote was moot because Adria did the right thing and sent Will packing. Soon enough, Diane had an opportunity to redeem herself strategically. After Adria won the Veto, Nakomis had put up Michael in her place, alongside Natalie. Diane had the chance to better her position in the game. Instead, she went with emotion – an illogical emotion.

Diane was still upset that Adria and Natalie broke the oh-so-important pinky swear. She seems to have conveniently forgotten that she wanted Will out as well, in violation of said pinky swear. She claimed to Drew that because the twins broke their promise, she couldn’t trust them anymore. Hello? In fact, the twins showed that Diane could trust them because they sided with her. But Diane didn’t want to see that. She wanted to hate them for getting rid of Will. And that blinded her to the strategic reality of the situation.

Although Drew pointed out that the person Diane felt most threatened by in the game was Michael, it still didn’t help. But really, at this point players should be looking ahead to who they can and cannot beat in the end.

Who can everybody beat? At this point, probably either Adria or Natalie. Will obviously isn’t going to vote for one of them to win – although, ironically, by sending Natalie to the sequester house with him, she has more time to talk to him and smooth things over, meaning his hatred for Adria might actually decrease. Nakomis won’t vote for them to win. Karen almost certainly won’t vote for one of them to win. The only sure votes they would have are Michael and the other twin.

Who would people have the hardest time beating? Right now, I would say Michael and Marvin. Michael is the sad puppy of the house. Everybody knows he needs the money. Everybody knows he never knew his father. Everybody knows his whole life story at this point. Marvin is a risk because he is so likeable in general – but he wasn’t at issue here. Michael was. Diane had the chance to get rid of somebody who is a true threat in the endgame. She didn’t.

Furthermore, if she had voted to evict Michael, Diane would have maintained the twin alliance and kept in two people who she could easily beat at the end. Her four-person alliance could have been in a powerful position within the game. And if they didn’t have power in a given week, both Adria and Natalie are bigger targets than Diane is.

In case anybody thinks I’m ignoring the fact that Adria and Natalie are certainly the tightest alliance in the game, I’m not. And there is certainly something to be said for breaking them up. However, there is also something to be said for keeping them both around as a distraction and a target for the other players. Just as a magician keeps the audience’s eyes focused on the distraction while he does something else where they’re not looking, Diane had the opportunity to let the twins distract attention while she plotted her rise to the final two.

Instead, Diane voted out Natalie, thus solidifying herself with Nakomis and Karen. So there is a three-person alliance there; a potential three-person alliance in Michael, Drew, and Adria; and a loner in Marvin. Those odds are not nearly as good as they would have been if she had stuck with the twins.

There is still plenty of game left to play, with far too many variables to predict. But if Diane continues to play the kind of emotional game that she has recently been exhibiting, she will end up being evicted sooner than if she snaps out of it and goes back into a strategic mode. Then again, perhaps she never was as strategic as I thought. It might simply be that she wasn’t purposely hanging on the edge of two groups, but was torn between what was right strategically and what was the friendly thing to do.

Whatever the case, Diane made the wrong decision, and I suspect she will pay for it.

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

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