Big Brother 10: Why Angie Lost

When I interviewed Angie after she was voted out at Keesha’s behest, she was hoping that watching the episodes of Big Brother might help clue her in on exactly why she was targeted. I’m not really so sure that will help, because I watched them all and I was not exactly sure what happened! Coming into this article, I really do have to wonder why Angie lost.

But that’s what this column is all about. Ideally, as we go through What Big Brother 10 Houseguests Should Have Learned, the situation clarifies itself for us and we can answer that key question. Let’s give it a shot.

The first rule, of course, discusses the need for players to scheme and plot. Angie came into the house with a plan to make one solid alliance and then work with other people. And she did that – she and Michelle had a “to the end” alliance, and then the two of them made a further promise to work with Jessie and Memphis at least until the jury phase. Unfortunately for Angie, though, she was the first member of her alliance to get the boot.

Some of the confusion over the situation begins to creep in here. Angie was viewed as suspicious by some because she continued to hang out with Brian after the rest of the group had decided he had to go. Steven was another one who had befriended Brian. In her own mind, Angie separated friendship from strategy, but most of the other houseguests this season are incapable of differentiating the two.

So Steven was sent packing by the house as part of a group decision that Keesha decided she didn’t like a bit too late. Angie was supposed to be a target next because she had hung out with Brian and Steven. In theory, Keesha should therefore have kept Angie because they were both pals with Steven. Ironically, though, Keesha was mad at Angie because she was a friend of Steven’s but didn’t help try to save him!

I didn’t say it was logical… but that’s what happened.

So basically, the fact that Angie didn’t scheme with Keesha to try to overturn the “mob mentality” that both Angie and Steven described in the house, Angie became a target.

So could it be interpreted as Angie failing in terms of the second rule? Did she scheme and plot too much or backstab too soon? Well, Keesha might certainly have seen it that way, but only because she wasn’t thinking rationally. As Angie told me, she was never in an alliance with Steven, they were just pals. So she didn’t really backstab him. Indeed, if Angie had tried to align herself with Steven, that would likely have been considered too much scheming!

Furthermore, Angie was smart and followed the part of the second rule that noted, “do not let it be known that you are the decision-maker” in your alliance. In Angie’s case, she really wasn’t the decision-maker, because she was purposely trying to lie low. But oddly enough, Keesha and the voters had the opportunity to target the guy who made the decisions she was upset about – Jessie – and they chose not to go after him! It doesn’t make sense.

Then again, very little about this particular eviction makes sense, especially when you realize the whole house voted out Steven, and then the whole house voted out Angie ostensibly because Keesha was upset she didn’t stand up for the last guy the whole house voted out! It’s enough to give you a headache just thinking about it!

We’ll shake that off for now and move on to the third rule. Did Angie have problems pretending to be nice? Well… maybe. While she didn’t mention it specifically, when I interviewed Steven, he mentioned that Libra, April, and Ollie “were difficult to be friends with.” He further noted, “I liked them but didn’t really like hanging out with that. I probably should have sucked it up and tried to be close friends with them, but instead I grew closer to Keesha and Angie and Dan.”

I strongly suspect Angie had similar issues – indeed, she was listed by Steven as one he hung out with, meaning she was with him instead of the other group. Oddly enough, Keesha is also in that list, so you’d think Angie might have had some good luck there – but we already discussed the reverse thinking that seemed to go through Keesha’s mind in that regard. Keesha knowing that Angie was friendly with Steven actually worked against her!

Another reverse situation occurred in the fourth rule, which says not to allow emotions to control you. Angie seems to have done a good job here, in that she understood that she could be friends with one person and be aligned with another group. They were separate issues. Unfortunately, as I mentioned earlier, much of the rest of the house doesn’t seem to get this point. To them, “friends” and “allies” are synonyms. So Angie suffered due to their errors.

However, I should point out that the sixth rule (we’ll skip the fifth for a moment) does address the need for flexibility. Angie needed to recognize the strategic ignorance of her housemates and find a way around it. Indeed, she knew about the former, but she couldn’t figure out a way to do the latter.

Moving back to the fifth rule, Angie knew that she needed to avoid being considered a threat. She told me, “my strategy was basically to try not to put a target on my back… not winning HOH or POV, because it seemed in past seasons those people were the first to go.” And to top it off, Angie was up against bodybuilder Jessie, who had already won one Head of Household and one Power of Veto competition! He was obviously the bigger threat. And yet, Angie was evicted.

Seventh is to trust nobody. Angie didn’t have a problem with that, as her allies weren’t the ones who turned on her. Well, not her real allies, anyway. Technically, I guess Keesha was in the larger group that Angie was also in, but that was never really an alliance so much as a mob.

So has this exercise produced any good results for determining what happened to Angie? I would say yes. Angie did a lot of things right. However, she did make a couple mistakes, with most of them being in how she reacted to the big mistakes made by other players.

Angie recognized the lack of good strategy on the part of the other players, but she was unable to turn it to her own advantage. As she told me, “I cannot explain something to somebody who can’t think rationally. For me to try to stay in the game and talk strategy, it was almost looking at a deer in headlights – my words went in one ear and out the other, even though it was common sense.”

But if the common sense, rational approach didn’t work, Angie needed to try something different. She needed to turn that irrationality to her advantage somehow. The problem is that I’m not entirely sure how she could have done that, barring having extremely good foresight to know that Keesha would behave so illogically.

Angie was a victim of the mob mentality. As Dictionary.com notes in defining a mob, the word is “directed at or reflecting the lowest intellectual level of the common people.” The twisted reasons Keesha gave for targeting Angie certainly reflect a low intellectual level, and the rest of the common people in the house went along with it, even though it made no logical sense. After all, they didn’t want the mob to turn on them next. Even though those very people made up the mob, nobody wanted to take the first step and tell Keesha she wasn’t making sense. So they all lined up and voted against Angie. That is why Angie lost.

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