We are witnessing the rise of Jason Dent as a potential fan favorite on "Big Brother" Season 19.

(Spoke too soon on the "fan favorite" business. See bottom of post for unfortunate update.)

He's not quite a Kevin Schlehuber-level favorite, but considering Jason just stood up to his masters -- Alex Ow and Paul Abrahamian -- to save Kevin, he has earned some respect. (Plus, CBS has been jamming Jason down viewers' throats on the taped episodes, showing his personal family moments. Why not Kevin's? Or anyone else's?)

Jason won the Power of Veto over the weekend, but refuses to go with his team's plan to take down Raven Walton and put up Kevin. He realized, perhaps belatedly, that his alliance was pushing for Kevin to go up as a potential backdoor move. They want Kevin gone. But that doesn't help Jason.

Jason is close to Kevin. Jason is not close to Raven or Matt Clines. Jason can't stand Raven. Most viewers can't really stand her either, and apparently CBS is fine with indulging that, giving us a full segment on Sunday night's show highlighting all of Raven's questionable statements. (That "Big Brother" had Paul be the one to call Raven out in his Diary Room sessions is probably not a coincidence. Fans have grown tired of The Paul Show, but letting Paul be the one to call out Raven gives him a popularity boost. This whole season seems designed to give him a boost at every stage.)

The PoV Ceremony was held earlier today (Monday), and Jason kept the nominations the same. Either Matt or Raven will be evicted.

They did not handle it well, to say the least. After Matt and Raven yelled at Jason, the whole alliance turned on Kevin. Josh picked a fight with Kevin, even bringing Kevin's family into it, to the point where production briefly shut down the live feeds to talk to the HGs and calm things down.

These awful HGs are treating Kevin like crap now, fully blaming him for actually being a good enough ally to Jason that Jason might not want to backdoor him. Imagine.

The target is still 99 percent going to be Matt, but Matt isn't nicknamed Mattress for nothing. He just sits there. He's fine with leaving. He just wanted to make jury. He's happy to keep Raven in the game. He expected Jason and Alex to throw that HoH to Raven. He wants everything thrown to Raven.

Meanwhile, Raven has been throwing stuff at Matt. They got into some kind of a spat last night (read the details). Raven is annoying. She's on the block and could be evicted but she's either too oblivious or too entitled to campaign for herself or behave in a way that doesn't grate the other HGs.

However, Raven does actually perform better in competitions, since Matt is a pure flop even when he tries. (His one PoV win was handed to him when Elena took the $5,000 instead.)

So there are arguments to evicting Raven instead of Matt -- 1) peace and quiet without her, and 2) she has more potential to win comps, whereas Matt may just give up even more without her.

We'll have to see what "the house" decides. For the moment, they've just decided they are angry at Jason for not putting up Kevin, since they decided somewhere along the way (when Paul told them to think this) that Kevin was acting shady and can't be trusted. Kevin could expose Paul's game, but this doesn't seem to be something that has occurred to him. Kevin just wants to stay good with the crowd.

Paul was already planning to target Jason and Alex -- having them turn on Maven, then get rid of them -- and this will probably be used as reasoning. Alex will just blame Jason for blowing up the Jalex game instead of Paul, who is now planning to go to Final 3 with Christmas Abbott and Josh Martinez. Because neither one of them could beat him in the Final HoH Part 1 endurance comp, and he's also most likely to beat them in Parts 2 and 3 as well. He has a clear path to victory. It's boring, but that's this cast. He is playing major league ball with 6-year-olds.

"Big Brother 19" will air the PoV comp on the Wednesday, Aug. 30 episode, then air the eviction Thursday, Sept. 31 (barring any surprise changes in schedule). It seems unlikely that we can expect the unexpected in BB19, but maybe -- just maybe -- the next Head of Household will actually put Paul on the block for the first time this year. Only Paul and Kevin have not sat on the block even once. Paul is hoping to pull a Derrick and win without ever sitting there. Part of his reason for targeting Kevin may be to prevent Kevin from doing the same.

***

MINI UPDATE: Spoke too soon to root for Jason as a fan favorite. He just made a seriously crude joke at the expense of Kevin's family:

Kevin didn't see that, so instead he was more upset with Josh when Josh told him to swear on his kids that he didn't win the $25,000. Kevin did win the $25K and he should wonder how Josh knows he did. Because Paul told him! Paul is the source of all of this drama, but he just winds up his minions and sets them loose without getting his own hands dirty.

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