Endgame

The feeds may be over, but Big Brother Canada isn't - I'll have more blog content coming from you all throughout this four-day feed outage leading up to the finale. (Though, let's face it - in four days, will anyone still care? We'll see.)

"How straightforward the game, when one has trust in one's player..."

So, it comes down to this: the feeds are finished, and while we've yet to see the endgame play out, it's becoming fairly obvious what's about to happen. 

With Emmett holding the final Power of Veto, he decided long before the feeds ended that Gary would be moving on to the Final Three, with Talla heading out the door.

The true tragedy of the early feed outage is that Emmett was planning to admit this to Talla before her eviction, but after the POV. The beauty of that plan is: Emmett didn't seem to realize that Final Four POV and eviction are the same ceremony, so we'll probably get the footage of Talla's reaction to her betrayal anyway on Wednesday night. Goody!

So with only Gary, Emmett and Jillian left in the game, what happens now?

Emmett's chances of winning the final HOH are strong. He's a comp beast, no doubt about it.

Should he win the endgame, which is likely, Emmett will probably take Jillian. He's confident that he can beat her, and in the off chance that he can't, he might suspect that he can benefit from her win more than Gary's.

He's probably right, though. If Emmett squeaks in to the final two in any form, he's likely to have this game in the bag. 

At this point, it's extremely unlikely that anyone else will win, which I guess is deserved, though, ugh.

Gary's chances of winning the final HOH are not good, especially against Jillian and Emmett. He has two chances to beat them and get into the finals, though, and if it's anything like the BBUS final HOH, the last competition will be the usual crapshoot. So what happens if he lucks his way to the end?

He's promised Emmett that he would take him to the final two, but from his conversations with Dan, that's unlikely to happen. He knows that the jury despises Jillian and grudgingly admires Emmett, and he's not stupid. Gary would take Jillian to the finals if he won, leading to his one potential path to victory.

On the off chance that Emmett does fall for Gary's machinations and take Gary to the finals, Gary would probably lose to him, but it wouldn't be out of the question for Gary to squeak it out with a bitter jury. If that were to happen, Gary would have earned it - he's been working his tail off since his return, trying to convince everyone that the jury admires Jillian and will vote for her to win. And they've all fallen for it. Not bad on his part - if he'd actually been able to win some competitions here in the end, it might have been worth something. 

Jillian is one final HOH away from a record number of Head of Household wins. She should be focusing on that record more than on this silly "first showmance in the final two!" dream, especially since Mike Boogie and Erika already achieved that on Big Brother All-Stars, so, yeah.

Jillian will likely pull out one of the two final Head of Household rounds and end up in the final, given her track record, so her chances of being the final one to make the decision are high. 

In the endgame, she's guaranteed to take Emmett, thinking that even if she doesn't win, at least her boyfriend will, and she'll be guaranteed some cut of the prize. (There hasn't been any overt discussion of prize sharing that I know of, but we can assume she's assuming.)

Her chances of winning are really null at this point. She'll probably get a vote from Andrew and maybe from Talla or AJ, but Emmett should easily get the votes of Topaz, Gary, Alec, and Peter, all of whom despise her to varying degrees.

Jillian will not take Gary to the final, which is smart of her, since she'd likely lose to him anyway, and better to be making out with a winner than not making out with a winner.

If Talla somehow manages to squeak through after what we saw on the feeds, chalk it up to her idiot savant floating skills. It's unlikely to happen, but we can't rule it out - maybe Emmett would legitimately flip for once this year.

In an endgame, she would probably take Jillian, leading to Jillian's sole potential path to victory.

Neither Jillian nor Emmett would take her to the finals, so I'm not even going to entertain that hypothesis at this point.

***

The fact that Jillian and Emmett spent most of the game betraying their allies over and over, without alienating the allies they had left, really did make for some masterful gameplay. I admit it grudgingly, but I admit it. Emmett should have been questioned from the instant he turned on Tom, and Jillian from the moment she lied to Aneal, and yet Alec, Topaz, Peter, Andrew, and Talla all walked out the door at their hands, still thinking they were besties with Emmett and Jillian up until it was too late.

I still can't say I particularly enjoyed watching it, but would Emmett deserve to sit on a list with the Big Brother US greats?

Oh fine, yes, sure, whatever.