Big Brother Recap: Who Went Home in the Season’s First Double Eviction? And Will They Stay Gone?
It’s the most thrilling evening of the season for any Big Brother devotee: Double Eviction Night!
On the heels of last week’s news that Big Brother is reverting to a seven-person jury this season — instead of the usual nine — the CBS series took the opportunity on Thursday to boot its last two pre-jury evictees in the same hour, by way of a double eviction.
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For those unfamiliar, a double eviction is as straightforward as it sounds: After the episode’s first eviction takes place, the houseguests then play out an entire week of Big Brother in about 40 minutes, including a Head of Household competition, nominations ceremony, Power of Veto competition, Power of Veto meeting and, ultimately, a second eviction. It’s an adrenaline-pumping event, to be sure… and yet, historically, these episodes have skewed toward the anticlimactic, with the same two houseguests getting evicted that you would have expected to get the boot in any regular week. Back in Season 22, the show tried to mix things up with an unprecedented triple eviction, but even that resulted in three essentially unsurprising exits.
Did Thursday’s live broadcast offer anything truly unexpected? Well, yes: Julie Chen Moonves got bangs! But keep reading for the night’s other developments:
EVICTION NO. 1 | Ahead of the first eviction, it’s clear this episode will have its share of twists: Julie opens the show by asking, “Are the two evictees’ games really dead for good?” And later, the houseguests receive a transmission from the Scary-verse — but it’s broken, with letters missing and in the wrong order.
But not even the arrival of Scary Week — seven days full of “horror-filled competitions and terrifying twists,” Julie says — is enough to throw the houseguests off their plan to show Cameron the back door, and Cameron is indeed booted in a 8-0 vote. (“I vote to evict Cameron and his hair,” Cirie quips in the Diary Room.) And yet, it’s still not completely over for Cameron, after all these weeks: He’s now a Big Brother Zombie, which will be defined for us later in the show.
THE ‘WEEK’ IN REVIEW | In the meantime, a new Head of Household competition is ready to be played, and it’s a knockout-style game that pits pairs of contestants against each other in rounds of trivia until only one player is left standing. In this case, that player is Cory! (Editor’s note: Yay!) As is tradition on Double Eviction Night, there’s lots of frantic strategizing in one corner of the house, and Cory must decide which combination of Jared, Blue and Cirie would be best for initial nominations.
Blue is visibly upset at the idea of going on the block at all; Cory argues that he can’t risk not nominating Blue, in the event she wins the Power of Veto and uses it to save Jared, thus rendering Operation Jared’s Gotta Go meaningless. (Cirie would likely be evicted in that case, though, which is still quite the resume-builder for Cory!) Blue promises Cory that if he spares her from the block and she wins the Power of Veto, she won’t use it to save Jared. Cory says he trusts her, but in conversations with the others, Cory is skeptical. When the nominations ceremony comes around, Cory does choose to nominate Jared and Blue, describing the decision as “a shot I absolutely need to take.”
Next up: veto! This one’s a physical competition, requiring the six players — Cory, Jared, Blue, Jag, Matt and Mecole — to race up and down their respective lanes, digging through messes at the end of each aisle to retrieve three key items in addition to the Power of Veto symbol. Matt dashes through the competition at lightning speed and wins the veto in what feels like seconds…
EVICTION NO. 2 | …and he opts to leave the nominations the same. Again, we have some hurried whispering around the house, and Cory’s on the living room couch looking nauseated — but his plan to boot Jared comes to fruition, after all, with Jared getting evicted in a 6-1 vote. (Cirie, of course, is the lone vote in Jared’s favor.)
Well, scratch that: Cory’s plan to boot Jared may have come to fruition. Right after Jared sits down with Julie, she skips her interview questions entirely and brings Cameron back out, revealing that their stint as Big Brother Zombies means going right back into the house later this evening. They’ll continue to live in the house all week, and next Thursday, one of them will be able to completely resurrect their game. That’s enough to horrify all of the remaining houseguests, but there’s something even more frightening in store: During Scary Week, there will be no Head of Household, no nominees and no Power of Veto competition. To quote Cameron’s Diary Room session from earlier this episode: My, how the turntables have turntabled.
With that, I hand it over to you! What were your reactions to Cameron and Jared’s pseudo-ousters? And which one — if any! — would you like to see come back into the game next week? Tell us below!
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