[RichardG]

Originally Posted by M X

Your contradiction is that in your explanation of your theory you prove the original point that was made in this thread. By having different colours and knowing which value was inside each envelope, they could change their question no matter which envelope each respective housemate chose.

Yes, they asked them the question after they opened the envelope but that means that they still had the time to literally pick one of two or three questions based on which housemate had which.

I guess in layman's terms our disagreement really comes down to the timing of it all.

I totally understand the point about timing, they had maybe a minute to pick which question to ask with colours rather than say 30 seconds without colours, but when there's only a couple of questions available to them based on a very limited set of possible outcomes i'd like to think that wouldn't be much of an issue if they really were so adamant to fix/manipulate. Without colours they'd still know after the second had been opened what amount the third hm would have so between watching Sam open the final one and then waiting a little longer to ask the question, that's still a fair amount of time to pick which question when it's a very simple situation to analyse. If they had prepared the twist at all then this shouldn't be a problem, they could still very easily change the question based on which envelopes were picked up if they were all the same colour by the time Jack opened the second one.

Then again they've proved time and time again that they're not very clever through the mess they've made of this season so it's not impossible to believe that they really do need a full minute to get their head around the situation.