Amanda & Alex: Bueno and Adios
In a season where the houseguests are getting along better as a group than usual (yeah, there have been arguments, but it's not tense all the time in there), it's funny that the evictions have been personal thus far. True, the nominations of Parker/Jen and Allison/Ryan were due to a perceived need to split the teams up, but the house preference for Jen was purely personal.
And so it proved to be with the eviction of Alex and Amanda. Frankly, their eviction embarrassed me because I spent the first few days of the game talking Amanda up as a power player, a rare BB alpha female. As the first HoHs, they should have been in a strong position to, if not set themselves up as dominant, at the very least insure they didn't get voted out the very next week. But if the best possible thing to be in Big Brother is an under-the-radar personality with a keen appreciation of how the game works--Danielle Reyes being the best ever example on this show--Amanda and Alex were just the opposite, above-the-radar players who didn't seem very interested in the game. This season is hard to judge by traditional standards because of the soulmates, but there were some very basic elements that were ignored by this couple.
One of the first things we realized when the feeds came on is that there had been a 6-person alliance formed in the very early stages: Alex/Amanda, Parker/Jen, and Matt/Natalie. That's a pretty good alliance for starting purposes, providing good protection for HoH and veto competitions. The revelation that Jen and Ryan were a couple outside the house created the impetus for splitting them up as the first order of business in the house. I thought it made sense as a means of giving the house the proverbial easy week--everyone understood why the nominations were made, including the nominees themselves--but there should have been a way to insure that the team you were allied with was the one that stayed. Even after the nominations were made, Matt and Natalie could have vetoed Jen and Parker, forcing no worse than a 2-2 vote tie with Alex and Amanda themselves breaking the tie. This move might have divided the house earlier than anyone would have liked, but not dividing the house didn't protect Alex/Amanda and Matt/Natalie, since both went up the next time around anyway.
We could also second guess whether it was really all that important to break up Jen and Ryan anyway. if they had been co-opted, there might have been a long term issue of having that couple within a 4-team alliance (not to mention that an alliance containing Amanda, Allison, and Jen might have spontaneously combusted). But having both Jen/Parker and Ryan/Allison within the big alliance would insure that if someone else got HoH, those two would be the nominees rather than Alex/Amanda.
In the end though, Amanda and Alex got voted out because no one liked or trusted Amanda in the end, and even her collapse could not engender enough sympathy to keep her around (the first reaction when she hit the floor, both inside and outside the house, was that the drama queen extraordinaire was at it again, protesting slop in her own way). Amanda liked to talk in there, and liked to hear herself talk. The image I like to use is that the house is a Petri dish of intrigue and gossip, but what you want to be doing is listening, not talking (as I've said before, this is where Sharon is doing well--rolling grenades into the room and then sitting back and witnessing the damage).
Julie made a big deal about Alex's refusal to campaign for the team (and against Matt), and while I doubt it would have made much difference considering Amanda's toxicity, not campaigning can never really be excused--especially since Matt had no such qualms. He turned out to be a solid citizen by BB standards; even if he got a little gross in the pool with Sharon. But he seemed like a rarity for this show: someone with leadership ability who wasn't completely overbearing. Like Parker, he was dealt a bad hand by the twist.
Most reality shows have a tension between the two different ways you can make yourself memorable: either by winning, or by becoming a "personality." Amanda certainly insured she'll be remembered longer than the average 3-week survivor of the Big Brother house, but my guess is she would probably have liked the money more.