Paulie's Emotional 'BB' Nomination Is Enlightening

It has been a seriously emotional time in the Big Brother 18 house with tensions hitting a boiling point during double eviction week. Now, with Paulie and Corey on the block, it feels like anything could happen in the house. From the moment Paulie was nominated for eviction on Big Brother 18 , he seemed to be intuiting his inevitable eviction. Over the course of the last week or two of the game, it seems that all of the simmering drama has finally turned into the kind of juicy, melodramatic gameplay that is part and parcel to the very nature of Big Brother. This is the kind of gameplay we've been waiting to see all summer and it all came to a head when Paulie cried after being nominated for eviction.

This was perhaps the most sensitive and charged moment of the season so far. As the credits rolled on the June 14 episode, Paulie was seen in the DR letting the tears roll as he expressed his frustration at being nominated. What seemed to have been the breaking point was Victor saying that he nominated Paulie because he had back-doored Victor early in the game. After the ceremony, Paulie immediately went to Corey and opened up about his feelings and how to strategize. It was a major moment in how viewers saw Paulie, because watching him give in to a sensitivity he hadn't exhibited before actually highlighted a major issue with they way nominations have been chosen recently.

In a game that's all about strategy, the last few weeks of nominations have become muddled by an "emotion vs. logic" kind of elimination process. The house coming together to get Frank and Bridgette out? Methodical in every way. But for Michelle and Tiffany, their tendency to become "emotional" made their fellow houseguests take a step back and immediately peg them as ticking time bombs. This is just confusing because aren't we all human? Wouldn't a game like Big Brother start to have an effect on you and cause you to express your feelings to the only people you're allowed to interact with? In Paulie's case, are men not allowed to cry now?

It always felt a bit odd watching those who got emotional suddenly become negatively targeted for their actions in the house. The need to separate the weak from the strong, however absurdly Darwinist that is on a reality TV show, can be done in plenty of ways that have nothing to do with who is most likely to cry or break down. What the Big Brother 18 houseguests should be doing is figuring out who poses the biggest actual threat to their own games, and that has nothing to do with who expresses emotions. Paulie should have felt comfortable expressing his feelings before being nominated for eviction, but the atmosphere of this Big Brother house may have made that impossible.

Image: Sonja Flemming/CBS