Big Brother: All-Stars – Why Marcellas Lost

When Marcellas left the game in his original season, he did so with a move so stupid it earned him the quickest Reality TV Hall of Shame induction ever – a feat that still has not been surpassed. But this time, he left with class and even gained some closure in the process. Still, the fact remains that he was evicted, and that means we have to ask the question: Why did Marcellas lose?

Marcellas said he came into the house seeking revenge against Danielle and trying to prove he isn’t an idiot. The former fell away as he made his peace with Danielle, but what about the latter? Let’s look back at What All-Star Houseguests Should Have Learned to see how he did in this regard.

Did Marcellas follow the first rule, which says to scheme and plot? Yes and no. As we saw during his final words before being voted out, Marcellas felt that lying and backstabbing was not the proper way to play Big Brother. I’m not sure how he planned to play, though, since he also admitted to Julie Chen that his alliance with Janelle would have involved backstabbing Kaysar and Howie. Frankly, it seemed to be “do as I say, not as I do.”

But Marcellas was at least smart enough to know he need to have allies. He hooked up with Janelle, he allied with Danielle, and he generally floated around as necessary. If he truly believed that his alliance with Janelle was legitimate, then it wasn’t a bad move. As we’ve seen, almost all the season sixers had backup allies at one time or another, which makes sense in case the alliance was broken apart or, on the flip side, in case they held together long enough to turn on themselves. But it really should have been obvious to Marcellas that Janelle was not going to stick with him instead of her season six partners.

Eventually, he did figure that out, but by then he was already in trouble and didn’t know it. On one side stood season six. On the other stood the Legion of Doom. Playing both sides was Chill Town. And then there were the remaining floaters – Marcellas, Erika, and George – none of whom seemed to have any real power.

This season has been marked by the powerful taking out the powerless rather than going head to head, and that continued with Marcellas. Chill Town schemed against him much better than Marcellas did all season long. They managed to convince Janelle to go against one of the parts of the first rule: “Anybody who has been watching the show … should know by now that the “decoy” strategy all too often does not work. … In short: Don’t do it!” Marcellas himself certainly knew this. But Janelle bought the story told by Chill Town, and she lost a potential ally down the road because of it.

The second rule tells players not to scheme and plot too much. Given that Marcellas didn’t really do enough of it, it seems safe to say he didn’t do it too much. Let’s move on.

Third is to pretend to be nice and act like an adult. Marcellas could be nice when he wanted to and when he put effort into it, but as we saw when Julie read some of his greatest hits, he could also be incredibly vitriolic. When he got mad at somebody, everybody knew. Yes, he tried to be secretive about his growing dislike of Janelle, but word got back to her and she was not happy that he was talking smack about her. Needless to say, this was not a brilliant move on his part. It’s one thing to say things when you have power, but quite another when you depend on those very people to keep you around!

Still, was this a reason for Marcellas nomination and eviction? It’s hard to say. If he had done a better job of keeping up appearances, maybe it would have been too difficult for Chill Town to convince Janelle to nominate him. Since she was already somewhat upset with him, I’m sure it was that much easier to put him on the block.

Of course, this is a good reason to follow the fourth rule and not let your emotions control you. The problem is that Marcellas is a very emotional, rather than strategic, player. He trusts people, even though that trust is so often stomped on in this game – as he should certainly know by now.

Ironically, I expected going into this game that people who were friends on the outside might find that friendship strained on the inside, turning them against one another as we saw in Survivor: All-Stars. While that is happening to some degree with James, quite the opposite happened with Marcellas. He went in as a bitter enemy to Danielle, but that all fell away and they ended up mostly aligned and even friendly to the point that Danielle cried a fair amount when Marcellas was evicted. This has little to do with the reason he lost, but is simply an interesting item of note.