Big Brother: Jenement Symphony

This recap is brought to you by the letter "J" which is in the midst of a cunning and subtle plan for world domination. Today it conquers all letters that dare to appear next to the letters "E" and "N" which includes "D", "G", "S" and "T." See, overall, I have a weakness for bad puns and I'm not sure how long the gold mine of unintended hilarity that is Jen will create opportunities to work her name into Jentences. See, I'm starting already.

Tonight's "previously on..." segment is pretty precious. I love how, when they get to Jen's HoH victory, we see all these shocked and outraged expressions. It looks like they're reacting to the idea of Jen, who until that moment was a shoo-in as the second evictee, as HoH, but you know those faces are really saying "We were supposed to figure how much water that teacup would hold with that big door draining water out? That's so lame!" As trick questions go, that does seem like the kind of thing your eighth grade geometry teacher would try, isn't it? Also, they've revised the visuals we get in the credits. Carol is seen leaving the house and the images of Jen Mike are now showing some skin. Are the producers trying to get the audience to stop fixating on Nick? I appreciate the effort, Jeninitely.

Sunday's episode opens with the expected flashback to Carol's eviction. Hey anyone remember Jessica getting gloaty about Carol's eviction? Because I do not remember her gloating when it first aired. I don't remember her gloating at the news of Carol's nomination or while Carol tried to get some votes. I would have expected such gloating to have at least come up in Carol's exit interview. Nope, she's been so quiet all this time.

Then we get to hear Kail's reaction: "As Head of Household, I definitely accomplished my goal. Our alliance wanted Carol out of the house and sure enough Carol left." From what I've read of the live feeds, Kail's alliance switched their vote a few times, so I'm wondering if Kail's that co-worker you have who's always talking about things as if they went just the way she planned.

Meanwhile, Amber is still contemplating the divine micromanagement of reality TV: "It's amazing that ten Jen people voted for me and I feel like God put me up on the chopping block this week to make me realize I am much stronger than I give myself credit for." I'd pray for Kail to bring over her Bible at this point and make Amber read about Job, but I worry that the lesson in perspective might get lost in favor of "That's so like what I went through when I was on the chopping block!"

Dick is so happy he gives us this set-up: "I can trust Amber through and through all the way to the end. She's like number two. Danielle's number one, Amber's number two." As we speak, there had better be producers for Best Week Ever and The Soup trying to secure the rights to show that clip followed by a brief glimpse of Beavis and Butthead giggling on their living room couch. "He said 'Amber is number two.' Heh, heh."

Then the houseguests see Carol's picture go from color to black and white. "Oh, no way!" cries Joe. "Oh! My! God!" Jameka reacts, "Seeing Carol walk out of that door, it was sad. It gave me a feeling -- the finality of 'Wow, this is really a game.' People will be leaving. Her picture was in black and white." I start to worry about Carol at this point, it's sounding like they think Carol was sent to meet the Davinadroid instead of the Chenbot. Then I remember that Big Brother houseguests have a flair for drama.

Lastly, we see Jen talking with Amber and Danielle about her vote against Amber. Danielle tries to offer Jen a way to explain her vote: "It really sucks when you don't get any votes." Jen missed the opportunity: "I never thought of it that way but... I should have said that. That would have made me look nicer."

And now the flashbacks finally catch up to the Head of Household competition. Nice, it took only what -- ten Jen minutes for this show to get to the point where we left off last time?

Kail is thrilled with Jen as HoH, noting that she was nice to her in week one. Then again, based on what's been on the show, Kail has barely talked with most of the houseguests and, from my understanding, she's mostly been giving every houseguest a Jeneric expression of "Look at me pretending to care about whatever you're telling me." Was there any potential HoH that would have left her sweating?

Joe's less happy about Jen's victory: "I'm sick of people being rewarded for stupidity in this country." I spend an equally amount of time being annoyed at Joe and finding him funny. This is one of those latter moments. We see Joe ask her if she was thinking about the hole in the tea cup. "I was just writing down a number." she responds. So, Jen tries to come up with a number out of thin air and gives us '41' -- so close and so far from making an accidental Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference.

And now, a brief interlude from out-of-sequence theatre... presenting the Jen drinking game. Mike, Zach and Justin listen in to Jen talking and take a drink every time she refers to herself. The sound editors add the sound of a bell every time, but even they (who, unlike the drinkers, have the Jenefit of a rewind button) miss a few instances of Jen on Jen talk. Now in reality this happened earlier in the week, but in this order it makes Mike, Zach and Dustin seem bolder and more daring than they really were in this moment.

Jen starts running around the house asking "Who wants to see my Head of Household room?" Now, would you be surprised if Jen is, once again, disappointed in the pictures used to decorate her HoH room? "I was definitely expecting more recent pictures. There was a picture of me from my 21st birthday. I'm 23. So, I was like, 'That sucked.'" Talk about different shades of vanity. In 2002, I went to the Alternative Press Expo, where a friend snapped the nicest picture of me I've ever taken. Everything is just right in this picture -- the light, the angle and, most importantly, I managed not to blink for once. The rest of my pictures aren't horrid, but this one is perfect so I still use it. So while Jen's vanity requires her most recent pictures be used, I'm still showing people a 5-year-old pic that won't ever be matched.

Jen ends up taking down the only picture of her with her mother because she's not wearing any make-up in it: "Like I have so many better pictures." Yes, Jen, we're sure you do have better pictures. Do you have any better pictures with your mom? I think the producers put that picture up not to humiliate you, but to make you think of your mother.

I won't be recapping the "Magnus and Kragnus" segment because I keep getting distracted by Mike's bare torso whenever I watch it. Yes, I do believe the producers are trying to get us to realize there's another hunk in the house besides Nick. I hope they remember that we like Nick for more than his looks.

Moving on to Nick and Danielle being cutesy with each other in one of the bedrooms. He gives her "the key to his heart" which is really the key to his suitcase. With those puppy dog eyes and that slight accent, Nick comes off as earnest and goofy enough to come off as Jenuine in the gesture. It's kinda cute until I think of the boyfriend we saw Danielle kissing goodbye in the season premiere. I wonder if he's watching the show right now.

Meanwhile, Kail is coaching Jen through her potential nominations. Jen says she'd rather nominate one of the guys, noting that the women have less power in the household. Kail suggests Joe and Dustin. That's not going to help anyone who tries to defend Kail against from the perception that she's homophobic. Still, I do like hearing Jen say, "Anyone who believes Joe is an idiot." Jen moves on to suggest Nick as a potential nominee, causing Kail to go glassy-eyed and frozen for a moment until she thinks to change the topic to Jessica, swearing that Jessica would nominate Jen if she had the chance. During this conversation, I realize that Jen has picked up Kail's Jendency to refer to Dick simply as "Evil." Unfortunately, that does not lead to moments of unintentional philosophy as it does with Kail.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the food competition, a faux-game show titled "Name that pie." The game is simple -- two houseguests bid on how many bites of a mystery pie they will need to guess its ingredients, Name that Tune-style. At first, I got all excited about this game thinking how much fun it would be to try to identify mystery pie fillings. Then I saw some of their pie flavors -- bacon & banana, potato & pineapple, sausage & apple. Basically, they took a really strong flavor with a rather mild one which would make it all very confusing. Also, I doubt the Big Brother producers really saw this as a test of the houseguests' palettes, but really a chance to haze them.

Hence, there's a good chance that some of those fillings don't taste anything like what they really are -- I'd bet they bought strawberries that were picked when they're not yet ripe and, therefore, taste like paper. Eric has the worst performance, making overdone facial expressions as he tastes his sausage and apple pie. He guesses SPAM (BTW, Big Brother producers, it's spelled SPAM not Spam) and fig. Even considering the challenges presented here, I'm not sure how you could confuse apples for figs. Well, there's one worse performance -- Joe mis-identifies anchovies as clams. How do you not recognize the flavor of anchovies? Ew! In the end, Danielle loses the competition by mixing up clams and tofu, confirming my theory about crap ingredients.

The show makes a big deal that Danielle is on the slop for a second week in a row -- at this point was I the only one yelling at my TV "What about Jameka?"? After all, she was the one who charmingly predicted she'd like the slop, only to have that change when she actually tried it.

We move on to America's Player. I have a theory here: this America's Player bit is a test to see if we're ready to evict Big Brother housemates on our own like in other countries. We get votes that are almost meaningless but can predict if we'd do better than our past habit of voting out all the interesting players. This time around we failed the test, telling Eric to push Jen to nominate the still-interesting Jessica. Come on, America, don't you realize how little entertainment Zach has to offer?

The next America's Player vote will turn Eric into a sleepwalker and we get to vote on who's bed he'll wake in. I voted for Joe simply for the entertainment value of a triangle of unrequited attraction between Joe, Nick and Eric.

Cut to the usual sequence of pre-nomination ceremony tension. Joe says that this could be "The worst day of his life. Ever!" Again, does he think it's the Davinadroid waiting for them outside the door? Big Brother housemates are so melodramatic.

As we watch Jen fill out the nomination ceremony wheel she contemplates, "I don't think there will be consequences for me. I think this will show these people that I'm nominating that they should be more pleasant and be better people. And that way they would have better lives." Did you realize that being Head of Household can be a noble endeavor? Siddhartha Gautama was in the very first Big Brother, he was a real piece of work until he was nominated for eviction, look at what became of him since then. So who needs to be better people, though Jen's intervention? It's Dick and Danielle ... so much for helping the women of the house regain their power, eh Jen?