I’ve watched Big Brother for nearly every season, and I think season 15 has more crazy strategy and gameplay in week 1 than ever before. Things have been seesawing back and forth on the first two nights of live feeds and now there are three huge alliances in the house and a master plan in the works.
SPOILER WARNING: This article contains Big Brother 15 spoilers.
First, here’s a recap of what’s happened so far. McCrae nominated Candice and Jessie, promising that they were both pawns and the plan was to backdoor Elissa. Elissa won the MVP and nominated David, then McCrae won the Power of Veto. Since he’s promised everyone that would backdoor Elissa, he plans to use the PoV on Candice and nominate Elissa in her place. But that’s when things get tricky.
The current plan, as of Friday night, is to tell one side of the house that Elissa is going home, but a huge group has formed to save Elissa and evict David instead. This seems to be something orchestrated by McCrae and Nick, who are working in a secret alliance and as the heads of two opposing alliances. But Amanda, who has attached herself to McCrae like a barnacle on a ship, is trying to take all the credit. Here’s how they stand.
The Moving Company (aka the MC)
Members: McCrae, Nick, Jeremy, Howard and Spencer
This is the main alliance, the one masterminding all of the events. They formed it fairly early and, by all accounts, seem to be loyal to one another and plan on working to evict everyone else. They’re a bit like the Brigade, only more sinister because they hatched a plot to split up and form two separate side alliances with the rest of the house, turning those two sides against one another while covertly working to keep each other safe.
The Blonde-tourage (aka the Boom Squad, aka Bieber Fever)
Members: Nick, Jeremy, David, Aaryn, Kaitlin, Jessie and GinaMarie
For the most part, this group is made up of all the younger people in the house, hence the insulting nickname of Bieber Fever by Amanda because they’re viewed as a bunch of teeny-boppers with nonstop drama. Nick and Jeremy were sent to this side of the house by the MC to form a bigger side alliance. Jeremy has been flirting with Jessie and Kaitlin (which caused a bit of a love triangle). David and Aaryn are a showmance, and she’s very knowledgeable about the game and constantly yells at him for doing things wrong. FinaMarie is one of the older people in the house, but she acts like a young person, so she fits in better with this crowd.
Sadly for them, the majority of the Blonde-tourage is made up of people who are largely unfamiliar with how the game works (David, Jeremy, Kaitlin, Jessie), so they don’t understand strategy and often let emotions get the better of them. The goal for week 1 is to have Nick and Jeremy vote with them to evict Elissa, but when the actual vote tally sends David home, they will have to act shocked and Nick hopes to take over the alpha male role in the group.
I’m wary of this plan because it requires a level of sophistication and acting that I don’t believe Jeremy is up to. Nick can definitely pull off the role of a double agent, but I think Jeremy is the MC’s weak link and could doom them all.
Mega Alliance (aka the newest alliance that’s too new and large to have a cool name yet)
Members: McCrae, Howard, Spencer, Elissa, Amanda, Helen, Andy and Judd)
Yup, it’s an alliance of eight, and almost all of them are huge fans of the game. Since the PoV competition, they have slowly coalesced and are now united in a master plan to take out David. The idea is to have all six of them who are eligible (minus HoH McCrae and future nominee Elissa) vote to evict David. The five voting members of the Blonde-tourage will vote to evict Elissa. And at the last minute, McCrae will tell Candice to evict Jessie.
That last part is very difficult. The goal is for McCrae to make a deal with Candice where he’ll use the Power of Veto on her, but only if she promises to vote however he wants. They’ll initially lead her to believe she’ll be voting for Elissa (because they don’t trust Candice), but at the last minute, they’ll tell her to switch it to Jessie so they avoid a tie vote. McCrae doesn’t want a tie because if he has to cast the deciding vote to send David home, it exposes him as a huge target for the Blonde-tourage.
Also, as you’ve noticed, Candice is in none of the alliances. She’s a wild card, a free agent who is viewed as a nonentity in the game.
If you’re wondering why all of these people want to save Elissa when, a day ago, everyone was eager to get rid of her, it’s because they assume she’ll be the MVP every week because she’s Rachel’s sister (a fact that is now common knowledge for everyone) and they want to be able to control the MVP vote. In other words, they’re using the potential producer manipulation to save Rachel’s sister (which is how I view this twist) to their advantage.
The Plan for Next Week
There are several ways next week could go. The MC’s strategy is to have the Blonde-tourage target Amanda and Elissa, blaming them for organizing the plot to take out David. However, it will be up to Nick and Jeremy to make sure, if someone else in their side alliance wins, they won’t target McCrae, Howard, or Spencer.
On the other side, even though Amanda is gung-ho about targeting Nick, McCrae, Howard, and Spencer are hoping if someone in their new alliance wins HoH that they can steer them to target Aaryn, Jessie, or Kaitlin.
The Many Problems
This is all great on paper, but I have no idea how this will all work. First of all, the plan seems to involve leaving Candice in the game as the Ultimate Floater, someone who is expendable but who will also benefit from these two warring factions. If I remember correctly, that’s how Dan Gheesling won Big Brother 10. Also, will she actually vote to evict Jessie? If so, Aaryn will immediately figure out that McCrae put her up to it. If not, she’ll either evict David (which, again, will make Aaryn believe that McCrae was behind it) or she evicts Elissa, in which case it’s a tie vote and McCrae is exposed. Either way, McCrae WILL be the obvious target for the Blonde-tourage.
This leads us to the second problem, which is that the MC must trust Jeremy to be able to convincingly lie to the Blonde-tourage and act like he had no idea David was going home. Good luck with that.
The third problem is that an alliance of eight people is absolutely ridiculous, and with five days until the eviction vote, can they really trust that all of them will keep the secret?
The fourth problem is that it relies on the ability to manipulate smart people. Already Amanda is trying to convince everyone in her new alliance that Jeremy is a huge threat and needs to go next, so McCrae, Howard and Spencer will need to work hard to save him if she wins HoH. As for Aaryn, she’s a smart girl who knows this game (she kind of reminds me of Britney Haynes, if Britney was a ball-busting control freak). Does McCrae really believe she’ll buy that the entire house concocted a scheme to secretly evict David without him knowing about it?
Basically, there are so many moving pieces that this plan is almost certainly going to blow up in everyone’s faces over the next few weeks. McCrae and Nick are playing too hard too soon, which is always a bad idea. The big plan to turn the two sides of the house against each other, with them leading the two groups, is nice in theory, but in practice, it will make them the biggest targets on either side.
With so much aggressive planning, things will fall apart. The genius of the Brigade is that they let things play out naturally. They had each others’ backs and befriended other people, but they didn’t plot out the entire season and try to manipulate everyone against one another.
My prediction is that big players will go to war and, despite Julie Chen’s warning that floaters need to grab a life vest, the people who lay low will prevail. I now assume people like Candice, Helen, and Judd could have a great chance at winning just because they will never be seen as huge threats.
Of course, it’s entirely possible that, by Monday night, five more alliances will be formed and the target will move either back to Elissa or to Jessie. Big Brother 15 is completely insane, and I’m loving the nonstop carnage.
(Image courtesy of CBS)
Senior Writer, BuddyTV
John watches nearly every show on TV, but he specializes in sci-fi/fantasy like The Vampire Diaries, Supernatural and True Blood. However, he can also be found writing about everything from Survivor and Glee to One Tree Hill and Smallville.
