Big Brother 8: Why Jessica Lost

Jessica was in a tight alliance – and romance – with America’s Player, Eric. This gave her some benefits, but also some problems. For example, despite the fact that she wanted Zach gone last week, Eric insisted on sending Amber home (because America insisted on Eric sending Amber home). How big a role did this play in her downfall? Why did Jessica lose?

Sometimes the reasons a person believes they lost don’t line up with reality. Just look at Amber, last week, for example. This week, Jessica likely believes she lost because Eric targeted Amber rather than Zach. But that by no means tells the story. We will, as usual, look back at What Big Brother 8 Houseguests Should Have Learned to see what happened to cause Jessica’s eviction.

The first rule tells players to scheme and plot – and Jessica did. Putting romance aside, Jessica was a good strategic partner for Eric because they could bounce ideas off of one another. As other alliances fractured, she and Eric remained tight.

At one point, Jessica and Eric broke from Dick and Daniele, but then they secretly rejoined them. Jessica now says she never really trusted the Donatos – and she was right not to. Although their four-person alliance was a powerful one, one of the duos had to break off first. Jessica had the opportunity to get rid of a Donato during her last HOH rule, but allowed Eric to convince her otherwise.

Of course, we all know that Eric was just doing what America told him to do, and he could obviously be very persuasive. But Jessica needed to be the one to step up and say, “No.” She needed to do a better job convincing Eric that the Donatos would turn on them (again, we know that no amount of convincing would have worked, but she could have still agreed to disagree and played the game her way).

Perhaps in a “normal” game of Big Brother, without America’s Player, she could have succeeded. So it’s difficult to hold this one too much against her.

Indeed, it could be argued that she followed the second rule by not backstabbing too soon. After all, targeting both Dick and Daniele would have made for a difficult week of being accused of breaking her promise. No matter what, one of the Donatos would have been around, gunning for her. And she likely would have lost the votes of both of them if she had made it to the final two. So there were compelling reasons not to break the alliance at that point.

But what about backstabbing Amber too soon? Jessica seems to think that if they had kept Amber and gotten rid of Zach, everything would have been okay. And you know what? She’s probably right. But 20/20 hindsight isn’t terribly helpful in planning ahead. Amber was a threat to go up against if she made it to the final two. Zach had shown no ability to win competitions. There was no way to know the next HOH battle would be something he could do better than anybody else.

Zach was considered to be a non-entity, while Amber was volatile and attacked Eric to Jessica. At the time, it seemed to make sense to eliminate Amber. Jessica may be upset about it now, and indeed it did contribute to her loss, but by that same token we could simply say that Zach winning HOH is the reason for her loss. It was not a bad play at the time.

However, one area where she blew it was the part of this rule that says players should not form open couples. Sure, Dick and Daniele have survived, and we’ll address that in a later column. And yes, I’m sure it’s hard to control emotions when you’re locked in a house like this. But strategically, as much as Eric said after his eviction that their romance didn’t hurt them, the fact is that it did play a role.

If Dick and Daniele had been in a four-person alliance with two singles, they could have allowed the alliance to go to the final four and then grabbed one of the two singles to join them – very much like they are doing right now with Zach and Jameka. However, they knew full well that Eric and Jessica would never turn on one another.

That means if the Donatos had stuck to the final four plan, the winner would have come down to who could win HOH and veto. The HOH would nominate both people from the opposing alliance, the veto winner (if not the HOH) would be the vote to evict. Considering that Jessica had done well in competitions and Eric could be a threat in thinking-type challenges, it made sense to eliminate this coin-flip aspect of the final four – and that meant eliminating at least one part of the couple.

The third rule has pretty much no bearing on Jessica. It says to pretend to be nice and act like an adult. While her first week in the house, being petty with Carol, wasn’t a pleasant showing, Jessica quickly rose above it when Carol was evicted. I don’t believe there was a person in the house who disliked Jessica on a personal level, so she did well here.