Big Brother 19 episode 22 review: Who’s feeling dispensable?

Clearly, dispensable / expendable are the words of the day judging from Big Brother 19 episode 22 and how often it felt like Elena said it. We’d also consider another here: Helpless. That’s what it ultimately felt like seeing her continue to scramble and talk in the Diary Room tonight. She continued to speak as though she could win competitions and keep herself from becoming a pawn in the future, but she hasn’t won a single thing yet!

In some ways, we appreciate Elena as a player given that she hasn’t said anything altogether terrible in the house and seems self-interested, something that many players are not this season. Her biggest issue is that she let herself get on the wrong side of the numbers and didn’t wake up early enough. Credit to Paul, who snowed her for so long into thinking that she was a legitimate part of his game and his long-term plans. He convinced her that he actually wanted to work with her in the long-term and she bought it.

Unfortunately, we’d argue that the majority of the episode was dispensable in its own right, a byproduct of just how easy it is to chart the game right now. Obviously, Cody is the target and the person that the remaining people in the game all want out of there, and they are all going to be working as much as they possibly can in order to ensure that he goes. They’ll do more or less whatever it takes in order for that to happen. That meant encouraging Matt to throw the Temptation Competition as a means to further ensure that Cody couldn’t play in the Veto.

By far, the Temptation Competition was the best part of the episode given that it was basically all about watching to see whether Cody or Matt could suck the most. Matt achieved that, which ironically is the biggest victory to date Matt’s had this whole season. This competition was also pretty fun given that it forced houseguests to remember where they were at the time in which they heard various sound effects. They even had to stand on a massive blueprint to signal out some of their choices.

The rest of the episode was fairly predictable in between seeing Alex figure out who to nominate, matching Temptation Competition Mark get into it with Christmas, and seeing in general the pretty boring strategy of “if someone talks to Cody, attack them.” It’s not that we’re the biggest Cody fan in the entire world, but this sort of groupthink mentality doesn’t make for good television.

We love the Big Brother game, and we appreciate that production is doing what they can now to stay out of it. Alas, sometimes the show is only as good as your cast, and this year you’ve got useless players like Matt and Raven alongside some sheep like Josh who just follow Paul’s lead. We need a shake-up, and we’re unfortunately not getting that this week. Grade: B-.

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