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111. Michael Bruner (Big Brother 24, 6th place) [14/16]
Oh Michael, what high hopes I had for you. After coming into the house as the BB-equivalent of the Spencer archetype, playing a miserable social game week 1 and positioning himself to be an obvious first-boot, he won the first Veto, pulled himself off the block, and rode this train to becoming one of the most dominant challenge competitors Big Brother has ever seen, while simultaneously dramatically improving his social game and becoming the biggest strategic player and finally getting eliminated at the final six as the obvious frontrunner to win the whole thing. Quite a story, right? Wait. Lets rewind a bit.

Yes, in the first few weeks after surviving the first boot, Michael managed to be quite entertaining, with some great confessionals, an amazing comeback story, and being one of the first people in the house to actually treat Taylor like a human being. But after a while he started to sound more like a snarky know-it-all and it occasionally got grating. This was incredibly evident during Taylors first HoH, where he berated her strategy and nominations as if he had any better ideas that didnt involve betraying the Leftovers. Im not saying Taylors first HoH was perfect (in fact it was actually quite sloppy), but at the end of the day her nominations were sound and Michael was just being a bitter baby because they werent exactly what he wanted. Not only that, but after winning enough challenges, he finally decided that it wasnt even worth hiding his threat level anymore and so he was just going to go all-out. Except he didnt just announce this to the audience; he made sure the whole house knew what a gigantic threat he was. Ive gotta say, theres something to be said for making your high threat level known in a returnee season where you can use it as a strategy to try and target people who otherwise wouldnt have a target (like what Sandra tried to do in Winners at War), but doing it on your first season is just stupid and bad and is setting you up to be taken out much later in the game.

Then we get to Michaels role in the Kyle situation. Michaels initial reaction to Kyle coming to him with the idea of an all-white alliance was pretty genuine. He basically said IF there is an alliance that Im not part of, Ill do what I can to break it up, but I wont assume people are working together based on race. Which I think is fair. And he and Brittany showed some uncomfortability with the plan. The issue is that they continued working closely with Kyle for two additional weeks without Michael ever bringing the race comments up again until revealing them to the remaining houseguests benefited him strategically. And Im not denying that his feelings toward the situation were genuine but that was really icky and Im very glad that the other houseguests did not let this go unnoticed. To be fair, he seemed to want to do what he could to mitigate having it be just a strategic tool - running it by Monte and Taylor first and letting them decide what should be done with it (though I couldnt help but notice Terrance wasnt included in that conversation), and keeping his word with Turner not to nominate him the following week, even though it was best for his game, after Turner essentially burned his HoH doing what was morally right rather than what was best for his game. But it still felt like there was a lot of strategy involved in this damage control.

So after a whole summer of Michael not even attempting to hide his threat level, he gets backdoored at the double eviction and while it was fun to watch him scramble to survive like Ive never seen anyone do, he blew it by totally throwing his ride-or-die Brittany under the bus in a needlessly mean-spirited fashion in his eviction speech, and then making one of the most unjustifiably bitter exits ever. Its one thing when someone like Cody who truly hated everyone left in the house at that point storms out without any goodbyes. Even Terrance having done it moments earlier was kind of understandable, because nobody left except for maybe Alyssa had ever seen him as more than a pawn in their game and he knew it, but Michael totally undid his own game by playing way too hard and he had to have known that he would inevitably run out of lives. It was just such a crappy ending to the spiral of a character that I actually kind of enjoyed and rooted for early on.

110. Came in 4th place and their last name is Young