'Celebrity Big Brother' recap: The Fun Five turns into bitter, party of two

Live from Studio City, it’s Saturday night!

Yep, Celebrity Big Brother takes a one-night-only sojourn to Saturday night (thanks a lot, football!) and whew chile, this was an EPISODE. Between the veto, live eviction, Julie Chen Moonves’ space saucer sleeves, and more awkward arguments than a community theater production of August: Osage County, it literally threw me for a loop when I realized all of this happened in a span of an hour.

Post nominations, the stupidity of Tom’s logic is clear to everyone but him as he’s still gung-ho about backdooring Ricky — even though he’s now got Tamar, Kandi, and Joey all gunning for him next. “Maybe today we can play murder mystery theater in the house,” Tom says in the diary room, as he’s set on finding out who truly has the Power of the Publicist.

Meeting in the HoH room with Ricky and Kato, Tom and his pals are quizzing each other on whether any of them has the power (they don’t), when Ricky throws out Tamar as a possible power holder (ding ding ding!). Tom, being Tom, isn’t quite sure and is looking for something, anything to give him a reason to backdoor Ricky. Tom and Kato meet with Lolo and Natalie and the HoH tries to point the finger at Lolo. Thankfully for us, she is not having one bit of it and forcefully rips Tom’s paranoia into shreds. Once that conflict dies down, Tom moves his focus back on to Ricky and continues to try and get his alliance mates on board with backdooring him. “Tom is the most paranoid player in the house,” Lolo says in the diary room, noting that Ricky could still be a useful number for them going forward.

Ricky has separate conversations with Lolo and Natalie, where the ladies share with him their reservations about Tom’s backdoor plan and his general paranoia at this stage in the game. Ricky then suggests to them a plan to play nice with Tom and Kato and if one of them wins the veto, to not use it. The veto competition, “Kick the Competition,” is a football-themed game that sees the players (Joey, Kandi, Dina, Natalie, Lolo, and Tom) try to make three massively inflated field goals in the fastest time without getting them blocked by life-size linebacker cutouts; to keep the linebacker down, they’ll have to spin in place 15 times while holding a lever above their heads. The last player standing after all this overthought madness will win the Power of Veto. Lolo and Natalie are the last two left in the game and ultimately it’s Natalie who wins.

When the veto meeting comes, Natalie goes along with Ricky’s plan and chooses not to use the veto. “I think our alliance is dead,” Tom says to Kato after the meeting; he later says in the diary room that Natalie not using the veto is proof that she, Lolo, and Ricky are being deceptive. When Lolo and Natalie meet with Tom and Kato later in the HoH room, Natalie deflects and tells them that she never got a clear game plan about the veto, so she played it safe by not using it. Ricky joins in and they all try to reconfirm their alliance plans, but between Tom’s clear passive aggressiveness and all the double-crossing brewing amongst them, there’s no way “the Fun Five” will last for long. Kato tells Tom that the trio’s acting in the talk was “Razzie worthy,” and they would know!

Joey meets with Lolo, Natalie, Tamar, and Ricky in the bedroom and pitches to them a plan to get Tom out sooner rather than later. Pointing out how they all distrust Tom and his paranoid ways, Joey makes a convincing case about how he and Kato let the power get to their heads and did so at the expense of their once strong alliance. Natalie says in the diary room that maybe it’s in her new alliance’s best interest to keep Joey in order to get the “boot Tom” plan rolling. “That’s how quick s— changes in Big Brother, you guys!” she says. Despite the Fun Five’s vow to stick together, the ties that bound them together are quickly rotting. A bitter Kato smugly tries to start a fight with Natalie and Lolo, vowing to win the HoH and asking Natalie if she went to an acting academy. (A little aside: During the commercial break leading up to this, a local ad for a law firm aired with Kato as the paid spokesperson. Let’s just say he’s no Christian Bale.) The ladies laugh it off but the saltiness continues as Lolo chews the guys out for their behavior post veto. “You guys can feel however the f— y’all want to feel because I’m not for this bulls—,” Lolo tells the guys frankly as the talk devolves into a shouting match between her and the guys as she drops one truth bomb after another while all the guys can deliver are monosyllabic asides. Tom says in the diary room that Lolo’s taking the game too seriously, which is hilarious coming from one half of the Grumpy Old Men.

As the live eviction approaches, both Kandi and Joey make genial speeches asserting their respective desires to stay in the game while also making it clear that it’s nothing personal if they are to go. Ultimately, the house decides to send Joey home and he is evicted by a vote of 6-0. In his exit interview with Julie, Joey shares his initial lack of familiarity with Big Brother going in, but that he saw the writing was on the wall for him once Jonathan and Ryan were the first two evictees. He also goes into a monologue about his morning routine and correctly guesses that the Rams and Patriots are in the Super Bowl, but oddly doesn’t get asked about his Hail Mary plan from earlier. Joey may have peaked a little too late game-wise, but he exits the house on a positive note.

Monday will see another HoH crowned, another veto won, and another houseguest sent packing as we’re just 11 days away(!) from the finale. With only a week and a half left in the season, it’s still anyone’s guess who’ll be the last celeb standing but the drama is sure to keep bubbling up from here.