Big Brother 6: Why Jennifer Lost

Once again, we saw a houseguest go from the top of the heap to the bottom of the pile – this time, it took less than 48 hours! How did Jennifer, like Eric and Kaysar before her, fall from grace so quickly? Why did Jennifer lose?

As we do every week – twice this week – we will answer this question by looking back at What Big Brother 6 Houseguests Should Have Learned. Did Jennifer play the game well? Or did she really screw up royally? Let’s take a look.

The first rule, of course, says to scheme and plot. Jennifer did a good job here, hooking up with the “Friendship” (aka the Fiendship) to keep herself safe. For quite a while, she stayed in the background, often to the point that we forgot she was even there! But she certainly was there, proclaiming her undying loyalty to Eric/Maggie/whomever was leading the charge for them.

And it worked. Until her week as HOH, nobody ever even thought of nominating or evicting Jennifer (at least, nobody thought about it seriously). She could have stayed in the background and let the others fight it out while she remained protected by her alliance.

But she didn’t – instead, she went and broke the second rule. She schemed and plotted too much and she backstabbed too early. For that matter, she also failed to keep her scheming secret, though that is a failure that is shared by almost everybody in the house these days.

First, Jennifer schemed and plotted too much when she and April talked to Howie, Rachel, and Janelle about the possibility of evicting Ivette instead of Sarah a couple weeks ago. If she was truly going to jump to a new alliance, it would have been fine. However, by talking about it and then not following through, it gave the other side ample opportunity to point it out, thus making her position in her own alliance a bit shaky.

Why is this an issue? Because when she went back on her deal with Kaysar to nominate two of her own people, one of the reasons she had to do it was because some members of that alliance did not feel comfortable with the idea of being nominated by Jennifer. She had planted a seed of distrust in them.

But that wasn’t her real problem. Jennifer’s real failure with this rule came when she swore on her life to Kaysar to go along with the previously-determined plan that both groups had agreed to – evicting James – and then turned around to completely go against it. If Jennifer had won HOH fair and square by refusing to make a deal with Kaysar, things would have been very different. If she had simply gone along with the plan – at least the part about backdooring James – things would have been very different.

But Jennifer painted a target on herself. The plan was set to do in James, but she decided to backstab Kaysar instead. And she did so in the worst way possible – by violating her own promise and becoming a huge hypocrite in the process (remember, she and the rest of the Fiendship became angered by James because he swore on the Bible and then changed his mind).

What’s worse is that she specifically went against what one part of the rule noted: “you should not stab somebody in the back until you need to – and you’re sure they’re not going to be able to get back at you. … If you’re the HOH and you nominate two people who had trusted you, one of them is definitely staying … And make sure when you’re sticking the knife in somebody’s back that it’s going to be the fatal blow, game-wise.” Sure, Jennifer got Kaysar evicted, but his allies – one of whom had been nominated alongside of him – stuck around to finish her off.

The third rule says to pretend to be nice and act like an adult. We’ll likely be addressing this more later this week, but Jennifer had her own problems. In particular, Jennifer seemed to be a child in a number of ways. She had a tendency to put on a smirking face that made people just want to wipe it off. She also seemed to be playing the game in a childish manner, such as when she sing-songed about how evil she was.