Soul Survivors

BB9 came along as an unexpected winter interlude and had to serve as replacement entertainment for scripted TV during the writer's strike.  It didn't quite cut it for most people, and the ratings were horrid.  But for the die-hard fans it was still BB to feed our addictions.

BB paired them off as "soulmates," quite possibly not knowing how long they would have for the season.  So the hamsters were kicked 2-by-2, then 1-by-1 and one even got kicked twice.  As always, all we wanted was a good show.  So, at the end of the day, we grade them on drama, entertainment, gameplay/strategy and like-ability. 

Jacob/Neil

I always say the first to go is the one we never really get to know.  But this time, wow.  Jacob and Sharon were gone before the feeds kicked in, before the first show ever aired.  An odd "eviction," no votes, no POV, no nomination even.  "Power Couple" Jen/Parker just got to pick and kick.  And they sent them out b/c Jacob "lied."  From what we saw on the show, he did seem like a bit of a snake, but who knows what's real and what's editing.

Then, in an unplanned twist, Neil left under mysterious circumstances and Sharon got to come back, so we did see her on the feeds.  Neil, though, was gone before we got to judge him. 

Jen/Parker

The fall was fast for the Power Couple. After going after Jacob/Sharon due to a lie, they were doomed to nomination, along with Ryan/Allison, as soon as they spilled about Ryan/Jen's real life relationship.  It's starting to look like one of the dumber moves in BB history...if Jen/Ryan kept quiet, or let only their partners in on the secret, they could have had a 4 person alliance, and not had the real couple target on both game couples.  But Jen quickly got on everyone's last nerve, so when it came time to pick a half of the couple to kick, J/P were gone. 

Parker did get screwed by the twist, but he didn't handle it well.  His DR strike and such didn't earn him any points with the house or the fans.  On the other hand, he was cute with Amanda, and when he wasn't on strike, he was entertaining to watch. 

Alex/Amanda 

Amanda brought the drama, and that may have been their downfall.  When it came down the choice between Alex/Amanda and Matty/Nattie, A/A had a pretty good argument as to why they were a better choice for the rest of HGs to keep in the game.  But Alex wouldn't or couldn't bring himself to campaign.  He made a misstep similar to BB8 Mike's, thinking that showing himself to be a man of his word would earn him some respect in the house.  Hardly.  Honesty and integrity may get you something in the real world, but it's not that much help in the world of BB.

Allison 

Matt

Chelsia 

The first of the Fearsome to go (or at least to go and stay gone), Chelsia was right in the middle of much of the drama.  But she tended to get there by going negative and nasty, which loses her entertainment points.  She wasn't quite as bad as James, or certainly Joshuah, and often was being egged on (no pun intended) by them.  If she'd outlasted them, we might have seen another side of her, but she didn't, so we'll never know.  She got a kind edit from the prods (standing so close to James, how could she not benefit from some of the glow coming off him) and I strongly suspect that a lot of what we saw from her was really an act, and she's probably a much nicer person in reality than she came off as in reality TV land.  Her strategy was okay, she had some strong alliances and a few side deals, but at the end of the day her strategy wasn't as strong as the rest of the FF, which is why she was the first to go. 

Joshuah

For someone who kept saying he wanted a drama free zone, he sure brought a lot of drama himself.  He get under just about anyone's skin.  Sometimes it served him well, and sometimes it was amusing for us.  But other times he went to far with the nastiness and personal attacks.  His gameplay was decent, though not quite good enough.  He never really seemed to quite have it in comps, but his alliance building skills were great.  He was largely responsible for the Fearsome Foursome, and had a number of strong secret alliances on the side.  He could definitely be entertaining, with his poolside prayer sessions, dancing and prancing, etc.  But, at the end of the day, he didn't quite have the like-ability factor to put him high on our scale.

James

Like his Fearsome Foursome compatriots, James brought the drama though the instigation and the fights, but it wasn't always clean enough to be truly entertaining.  He did have a great strategy, having figured out who he wanted out and when, and generally being able to get what he wanted.  He won comps like crazy, giving his namesake BB6/7 James a run for the title of Veto King.  But the blatant favoritism by the prods, evidenced not only by the return-a-hamster vote rip-off, but also by the ridiculously kind edit he got on the show, gives us pause as to whether he really deserved all those comp wins. 

Natalie

In the beginning, I bought Natalie as the brain-dead bikini barista that the prods wanted to sell her as.  But as the feeds kicked in, it was clear that she was so much more than that. She brought the drama, but did it without going negative the way so many of the BB9 hamsters did.  Everything from her relationship with Matt to her fights with Joshuah made things interesting whenever she was around.  She took the abuse from the Fearsome Foursome with an amazing amount of grace.  She fought back and stood up for herself, but mostly let things slide off.  It wasn't that it didn't hurt her, or even that she didn't let it show, it was just that at the end of the day she knew that there are more important things in life than pickle juice and smashed Easter eggs.  Entertainment points for always being perky and keeping herself and the rest of them active and entertained with things like nailpolish paintings and hide-and-go-seek.  Big entertainment points for things like Crazy 8s and the alphabet incident.  I'm not sure what her strategy was...she made some good alliances, but never realized when they were turning on her.  For a while it seemed she could win comps when she needed to, but when it really mattered she couldn't pull out that critical veto.  Which was disappointing because I really thought she should have had that morph-o-matic comp wrapped.  And she made the grave tactical error of agreeing to an end of an end. comp. deal not once, but twice.  The first one got Matty kicked, and the second got her kicked.  She was by far the most likable one in there, and that along with drama and entertainment points, overshadows her game mistakes to make her the hands down winner in my book.

Sharon 

Sharon is one of those HGs that I really have no use for, but I feel bad saying that.  She seems like a perfectly nice, normal person and I'm sure I wouldn't mind knowing her in the real world.  But in the BB world, nice and normal are not what we want.  Sharon was basically a placeholder in BB9.  She filled out the Fearsome Foursome, but she was never that Fearsome herself.  She didn't particularly seem to have a strategy.  She stayed out of everyone's way, and off their radars, making herself the Perpetual Pawn.  But we all know what happens to pawns in the end....they either make it all the way across the board and get converted into a queen, or, more often, they get sacrificed. 

Sheila

Ryan 

Adam 

Well, he won.  He started out on a bad note, making an offensive comment (which CBS opted to air) on the first show, and alienating his partner from the "git-go."  Even his fighting with Sheila wasn't really drama, it was just fighting.  He gets minor entertainment points for Bible Buddies, but the entertainment from that was really in the editing; just watching them sitting around reading the Bible is pretty darn dull.  Gotta give him strategy points for his alliance skills.  He stayed out of the fray early on, letting the bigger targets pick off each other.  Then in the end when it mattered, he was the only one who still had his partner around, and he'd built a real alliance with Ryan.  And the Bromance played Natalie and Sharon well, aligning with them for a while but then ditching them in the end.  All in all, Adam comes in low on my scale, but at the end of the day he's still the winner, so whatever he did it worked out for him. 

Hugs all around....