Big Brother 13 finale recap, September 14, 2011

Julie begins tonight’s finale with “After ten evictions, twenty-nine competitions and seventy-five days cut off from the outside world, one house guest will walk away with a half-million dollar grand prize.” We get some highlights starting clear back to the beginning of the season. Promises made, promises kept, promises broken, promises lost. Friends and enemies, dancing and tearfests, laughing and shouting in anger, safety and eviction.

The final three Houseguests remaining are Rachel, Porsche and Adam. Two of these three will make it to the seven person Jury vote. The first competition to determine the final three is the giant butter mixer endurance challenge that began at the end of the last show. As they spin around standing on the mixer blades, they constantly get splattered from outside the pool. Adam is flagging early while Rachel closes her eyes and appears to go to sleep. After almost 29 minutes, Adam splashes. Finally, after 46 minutes, Porsche goes off and Rachel wins the competition!

Part two of the three competitions is between Porsche and Adam. There is a huge pool with transparent walls set up in the back yard. At the bottom of the pool are plaques of the previous Heads of Household and these need to be moved through a plastic maze and placed in order on a rack in order from 1st to 11th. It’s a tough challenge as they have to go down, get a plaque and then come up for air while stacking them. Porsche completes it fairly quickly. Adam walks out next and gives it a shot, but he’s having problems with water getting in his goggles. He tosses them and then realizes he needs them and goes out to get them, losing valuable time. He finishes the task in 6:03 while Porsche completed it in 3:50, so Porsche is the winner of the second competition!

The Jury is assembled in a faux outdoor patio (it’s probably on a stage) and they start talking about their judging, intended votes and what they perceive as the good points and weak points of the remaining House Guests. It gets a bit argumentative, particularly when Jeff jumps into the conversation. Shelly and Kalia take the bait, while Daniele, Brendon and Jordan pretty much watch on until later during the deliberation. It eventually turns into a shoutfest between Jeff and Kalia until they both shut up.

The final round of the three-part HoH competition will determine who will select which of the remaining two will join them for the Jury vote. It’s a memory challenge where Julie will give the first part of a statement made by one of the Jury members and then Rachel and Porsche have to select between two choices, A or B, for the last part of the statement. Whoever gives the most number of correct endings to statements made by the six Jurists wins the competition.

Both Porsche and Rachel get question one about Brendon wrong. Rachel gets the answer about Daniele’s statement about her dad correct and leads 1-0 after two questions. Both get the question about Shelly wrong, and it’s still only 1-0 after three questions. Maybe these two should start flipping coins instead of thinking too much. Again, they get it wrong, this time on Jeff’s statement. On Kalia’s statement, Rachel gets it right and wins 2-0 after five questions! Rachel goes into a tearfest of joy.

Now Rachel must choose who to evict between Porsche and Adam, with the remaining person joining Rachel for the Jury vote. Porsche begins her speech by saying Rachel has been a great competitor. Adam gets up and makes a bit of a show of it, saying he helped keep Rachel in the game. Rachel gets up and says she is so sorry that she has to evict Adam, who now joins the seven-person Jury. Adam gives a big hulk roar and then goes out of the house and onto the stage, high-fiving some of the audience and then gives Julie a bear hug! Julie asks Adam whether Rachel made the right decision and he says, yes, and Julie asks why, and he says that he would have won had Rachel left him in the House!

“The fate of the Final Two now rests in the hands of the Jury,” Julie tells us before she introduces all of them. They run onto stage one-by-one like football players running out on to the field. They find out now that Adam is the seventh member of the jury, and obviously Brendon is happy to see that Rachel is still in the House.

Before voting, the Jurists have a chance to ask final questions to Rachel and Porsche, which may or may not sway their vote. We’ll probably get some clues, though, who they intend to vote for just by the nature and tone of the question. Brendon sets Rachel up with a question about why she should be voted as the winner and she reminds us that she won four HoH and two PoV competitions, including for the final HoH. She’s saying that the vote should be “based on game play”. In response to Jordan, Porsche says “I decided to play a social game… I got along with everyone.”

Now Rachel and Porsche have an opportunity to explain why they should get the Jury vote as the winner. Rachel talks all about her game play and exposing Daniele’s back door move. Again, she says “I fought my heart out” more as a competitor rather than to play the social game (a shot at Porsche’s strategy). Rachel goes overtime and gets cut short by Julie. Porsche says she competed as hard as she could and played a social game by getting along with everybody. Both have pretty much followed the Competitor-Survivor vs Nice-Gal script lines.

Before the votes are revealed, the original non-Jury House Guests are brought back out. Evel Dick talks about Daniele’s strategy and they agree that she cracked the hard-to-break Vet alliance. Daniele says she wanted to play with people she liked, not necessarily the Vets.

And here are the Big Brother 13 Jury Votes:
* Brendon: Rachel (They’re getting married, after all)
* Daniele: Porsche (No surprise)
* Jeff: Rachel (The second Vet for Rachel)
* Shelly: Rachel (What?! The way she fought with Jeff and Rachel, who’d a thunk? With three Vet votes for Rachel, this is the decider.)
* Kalia: Porsche (No surprise)
* Jordan: Rachel (The third vet for Rachel)
* Adam: Porsche (Something of a surprise, which could have tipped the win in Porsche’s favor had Shelly not voted for Rachel)

Rachel wins Big Brother 13 with a 4-3 vote!

And as a sideshow, we find out that the ever-argumentative Jeff won the Big Brother 13 America’s Choice vote. It kind of makes you wonder about how Americans vote these days.

That’s all for this season of Big Brother! It was a real doozy. CBS has already announced that Big Brother 14 will be coming out in 2012. But please, Big Brother producers, let’s not have veterans from previous seasons haunt the House again! The scales were heavily tipped in their favor from Day 1.

So long, folks, and may there always be peace within your House.

And thank you, Vince, for your inspiration. This one’s for you.