Last time on OBB: All-Stars, Nick won a crucial HOH (then again, they're all "crucial")- the house was antsy waiting to see who he would nominate. With only Nick safe at the beginning of the week, it seemed like nobody knew who would go- but of course, now it's time for me to rant on the week's happenings.

The episode started out with a few players gossiping behind everyone's backs in the Diary Room- mostly stuff about alliances, backstabbing, and shadiness from all directions. They were par for the course- nothing groundbreaking when it came to figuring out how the game will progress. Soon before nominations, Angela and Valerie made their "semi-alliance". It doesn't surprise me that Angie had her suspicions about Valerie's proposal- Valerie stated her intentions of doing this with everyone. Valerie's confessional made me a bit sick to my stomach- she seems to think that once she makes an agreement with someone, it's officially binding and nobody will be able to go against her- almost as if she thinks the whole house is full of drones who obey every whim of the great lord Valerie. This seems a bit naive- a scheme like this is totally unrealistic. The people in the house have eyes and ears, so unless one of the houseplants is Helen Keller in disguise, Valerie's grand scheme is bound to collapse on her in the near future. The final part of the episode was Nick's nominations of Ben and Joel. Neither of these is really surprising in a way- Ben was nominated last week, and Joel seems like he hasn't done too much in the house lately. The nominations were totally strategic, and I doubt that many hard feelings will ensue. The episode ends off with a teaser about the veto winner doing something astounding- it's bound to be interesting!

The veto competition opens the second half of the episode, and it's happily reminiscent of the various lawn gnome challenges from BB3 and BB4. The challenge was all well and good, but I would have much rather that it either involved smashing gnomes with hammers or having them steal underpants (shameless South Park reference). In the end, though, Joel won. It seemed obvious at first that he was going to save himself- but he goes and proves me wrong, vetoing (is that a word?) his good friend Ben. I thought Joel did the most honorable thing thus far in the game- and it's probably going to be the nicest thing throughout the entire game. His reasons for nominating Thomas weren't all that bad- I think Joel did a good thing overall. I had to laugh at Thomas' confessional- although we haven't been on the greatest terms in these games and he thinks I'm going to smoke him for being an ass in the Diary Room, I think Thomas has had the greatest confessionals of the entire game. His are the only ones that make me laugh out loud- I always appreciate the sarcastic ass, being one myself! Then, there is finally an alliance that seems like it might have an effect on the game. The group aligning to evict Joel seems like it has potential, but there's no way to see how this turns out until we check out the final part of the episode...

The episode starts with the voting from various houseguests- it seems a lot less skewed than one would expect it to be, but there seems to be a bit more sentiment against Joel- but we are once again proven wrong. Angie's attempts to evict her former hot tub partner failed rather miserably, and her alliance-mate walked out the door instead. Thomas' final words were great- he sort of came to an epiphany, but it wasn't really a big one- he just brought his usual Thomas-style humor, which will be sorely missed. Without him, who else is left to be my favorite asshole? The week wraps up with the new HOH turning out to be Joel- what goes around comes around, and in this case that actually turns out to be a good thing. Although much of the house is irked with him for his veto use, he's safe this week and will end up with a few close allies who owe their lives in the game to him. Tune in next time, for more of OBB: All-Stars!