Big Brother 4, September 5: Trust Is A Four-Letter Word

They head out to the backyard, which has been decorated to resemble a Mexican festival. Continuing to show how enlightened she is, Alison beams to us that it was like Spain brought to the Big Brother house! Spain, Mexico - hey, they both speak Spanish, right? Sigh. The women shriek as Robert tells them they will each be responsible for breaking their own piñata. “Not Joey!” cries Erika. Er, what exactly did they think they were going to do to their piñatas - frame them for posterity? Robert continues that inside each piñata are various denominations of Mexican pesos. Once the contents of the piñata fall to the ground, they have 10 seconds to collect as many pesos as they can and put them in their basket. 500 pesos or less: PB&J for a week, starting immediately. Lest we forget that this is a fate worse than death, Robert has a mercifully brief confessional articulating the sentiment. 600-2399 pesos: their usual food for the week. 2400 or more: a luxury dinner from a four-star restaurant every night, starting with four-star Mexican food that night - PLUS margaritas! The margaritas get the loudest cheer. No fools, they. It’s not clear at first, but these peso totals are for the cumulative efforts of the whole group, not each individual. “Are you ready to pound the piñatas to win the pesos so we can buy dinner to feed our face-os?” Robert asks the group. Someone actually gets paid for this? Oy.

Since her piñata is already hanging, Jun is up first. They’re blindfolded while they hit the piñata, then are able to take the blindfold off to search for the money. The catch is, there are a lot of other goodies and trinkets hidden in the piñata as well as fake money, so it takes some sifting to find it rather than it being cut and dried. “Jee, I hate you!” screams Jun with laughter as she demolishes her piñata, telling us it was fun to get her aggressions out. It breaks and she gets as much money as she can. Erika tells us she hated the thought of beating up Joey, but demolishes him anyway. She doesn’t do as well with getting the money. “I’m sorry, I love you, but you gotta go,” Alison informs Donnie Piñata as she kisses it, telling us that a girl needs to eat, so peace out, piñata! OK - heh. She decapitates it in short order, then beats the headless piñata corpse open on the ground and grabs the money. “Beat the piss out of your happy little star!” she yells as Robert steps up to bat. Jun chuckles to us that Robert needed their coaching because he’s actually smaller than all the women left in the house! He finally breaks it and scrambles for the money as they point it out to him. He smiles to us, “I thought I did the best out of all the girls!” I don’t think he meant that quite the way it came out. In the end, they’ve collected 2820 pesos - more than enough to win the grand prize! They enjoy a great fiesta dinner in the backyard. Alison, not surprisingly, tells us she encountered things she’s never eaten before. Jun, equally not surprisingly, tells us it was great not to have to be the cook for a change! Erika tells us it was eerie to see everyone getting along! You know, I imagine it would be kind of odd living there at times - you have group competitions and activities that bring everyone closer together, and then you have to go straight from that back to tearing each other apart.

Oh, joy! I get to recap BOTH “the table has gotten smaller” sequences this season! They come in from the feast to see that the kitchen table now only seats four. As usual, pointless and self-indulgent oral essays on What The Smaller Table Means To Me ensue, such as Erika helpfully explaining, “It has four chairs. There are four of us,” and Jun saying that it’s “symbolic of their being down to four.” Symbolic?!? It seems like more of a practical reality to me. Anyway, I’ll join in. To paraphrase a line from a pretentious French film I once saw, their table is smaller. I know it is smaller because my patience has gotten smaller. Alison: I want to be the last person to leave that table! Me! Me me me me me! Except that you’ll never be the only person in the house even if you do win, so cram it. Speaking of needing to cram it, here comes Robert to gloat to us that he has all the power in the house and these three girls have none, neener neener! Ah, so you’re going to be casting the sole vote and canceling the Power of Veto this week, are you? Hubristic moron.

More filler! Erika tells us, “Certain people, whose names I won’t Robert mention, leave their dirty soda cups all over the place!” This attracts ants, so they now have a major ant problem. Alison has taken it upon herself to be the ant killer and is going nuts all over the house with Raid. “Whenever I see an ant, I zap it!” she gleefully proclaims. I’ll bet she pulls the wings off butterflies in her spare time as well. “She’s got issues,” Erika tells us; Jun concurs that she gives Alison a wide berth when she’s in mass murderer mode. There’s also spiders! They’re huge! They outnumber the HouseGuests tenfold according to Jun! They scare the women! Alison kills them anyway! They don’t have bugs like that in Pennsylvania and she wants to go home! And on that note, I’m killing this segment.

And now we come to a segment in which it’s blatantly spelled out for us that it’s alllllllllll about Alison in her world! “Did you see that? Did you see that? Did you see that?” she demands of Jun as she shuffles cards… apparently about her shuffling cards. Ye gods. Jun tells us she doesn’t know how much more attention a pageant queen would need, but she has to admit that Alison needs more attention that even she does! Alison tells everyone that both she and Donnie had tubes put in the back of their head when they were infants because they almost died, and that she only found out about hers when she told her mom about the strange lump Donnie had in the back of his head as a result. She was born breech and upside down with bad jaundice and they didn’t think she was going to make it. Jun tells us that if Alison really was that bad off, she was obviously reborn as a demon child rather than a miracle baby. Hee! Alison tells them that she later had meningitis and again, the doctors thought she was going to die, but she survived! You know, it really says something about her that I’m sitting here thinking, “Pity.” Robert tells us he doesn’t take it too seriously because she exaggerates and you can’t believe a word she says; Erika doesn’t know if she’s trying to work a sympathy angle or what, but in any event, Alison is very strong now. “She’s probably the most macho guy in this house!” she cracks. Alison, however, tells us she says these things not as sob stories but because they’re the truth, and it’s the reason why she’s such a fighter and it’s informed her personality 100%! How Beating Death Twice Made Me The Obnoxious Braying Self-Absorbed Twit I Am Today: coming soon to a bargain bin near you!