Big Brother 19 live feed spoilers: The Paul – next HoH debate & more (day 43, morning)

Our day 43 Big Brother 19 morning update would feel a lot like our day 42 one were we not injecting a few more discussion points in. After all, much of the game is at a standstill, and this is what we imagined that most of the week would look like: Cody and Jessica being isolated from the rest of the house while everyone waits for the show to officially move on to the next phase. Everyone knows that she’s using the Temptation, and Paul’s week of power produced no tangible result.

Considering this, let’s view the larger question for a bit this morning: Why isn’t Paul allowed to compete in the next Head of Household? It hasn’t been an active discussion on the feeds all that much, but we’ve already spoken with Allison Grodner about it. If the Halting Hex is used, we understand that there is some logic in saying that his entire week never even happened.

Here’s the issue with that thinking: It clearly did. He knew all week long that Jessica had the temptation, and while we do think that flushing it out is the right move, he could’ve went another way. Letting him keep his HoH eligibility is rewarding him for the moves that he made this week — we’re not talking about any of the nastiness, but just him deciding to put her on the block. The awful behavior is a separate issue and shouldn’t dictate the rules of the game.

If production had just gone into the game and decided that nobody was leaving this week for literally no reason, we’d shrug our shoulders and say that he should be able to compete for HoH again. As it is, he had control this week of what happened, especially since Jessica told everyone going into it that she had the temptation. We’d feel a little bit worse for him in terms of fairness if he didn’t know about the temptation and couldn’t plan for it, but even then, there are two other things to consider.

1. Paul knows the game – America likes people who are underdogs. Therefore, it was possible that Jessica could have benefited from the twist and gotten the temptation.

2. Paul already had three weeks’ safety – It’s hard to really claim that anything is unfair to Paul when his fans got him that at the start of the game.

Ultimately, it’s the right move to not allow Paul to compete moving forward. There will probably be people angry about it, but judging from the past few days, probably not that many.

It’s a fun exercise to think about Paul’s popularity then as opposed to what his popularity is now, where he’s one of the most-disliked people on the season. There may even be something about that psychologically: How we can like people in one environment and dislike them in another. It also happened with Nicole on this past season of the show.

Maybe something more will happen beyond people sitting around and sniping each other later today. If that happens, we’ll have more insight for you over here.