Big Brother 28 Week 10 in Review: The Week the Newbies Ate Themselves

Seven houseguests left — five newbies and two Icons — and the five spent the week eating each other. Yash won Head of Household and put up three of his own. Drew answered by standing in the Pressure Cooker for fourteen hours to save himself, cut a deal at two in the morning to do it, and left Taylor holding the seat he vacated. Barrett spent the back half of the week asking the two Icons he nominated last Friday to keep him. Week 9 ended with Barrett putting all three Icons on the block. This one ended with the Icons deciding which newbie survives.

• Evicted Thursday: Angela, 3–2 — the first Icon out and the second juror, after Lala.
• Head of Household: Yash, his second of the season.
• Nominees: Drew, Melody and Barrett — every remaining newbie except Yash and Taylor.
• Veto: Drew won the Pressure Cooker after 14 hours 19 minutes and used it on himself.
• Replacement: Taylor.
• On the block now: Taylor, Melody and Barrett.
• Tonight: the BB Blockbuster, then a double eviction. Seven houseguests become five.

Thursday: an Icon finally goes, and Yash takes the room

Barrett’s petty masterpiece finally paid out. Having nominated all three Icons and watched Yash decline to use the veto, he got what the maths promised: Devens won the Blockbuster for the second time this season and pulled himself off, leaving Angela and Dee to face the house. Angela went 3–2. Two weeks ago the Icons were running the season. Now one of them is in jury.

Then Yash won Head of Household for the second time this season, with the feeds blocked from 7:35pm to 11:40pm. Taylor got to him in the storage room before anyone else did, and what she said was less advice than a script.

Taylor: “You’re not putting Devens up because you guys made a verbal agreement and you shook on it.”
Taylor, handing him the line to use: “I shook on it. I’m a man of my word.”

Which is how a deal Yash made in a moment of weakness became, by Thursday night, a principle. Melody understood immediately what it meant for her side and took it out on Drew, telling him he was the idiot who fell for their persuasiveness and to wake the f— up. She told him she was going to crawl into a ball and cry the rest of the night. She was not really wrong about any of it.

Friday: Yash nominates three of his own

With seven left and two of them protected by handshake, Yash did not have many doors. Drew saw the shape of it before it happened and said so out loud.

Drew: “Let’s have Yash nominate half the house.”
Devens: “And with the renom — literally more than half.”

Taylor set the target — “Drew is the name at the front” — and made the competitive case for stacking the block: “Barrett and Drew, they’re the best competitors. So more likely to win the veto and they can only take themselves down.” It is a good argument and it turned out to be exactly, precisely right.

Drew, Melody and Barrett went up. The reactions are worth keeping, because none of the three behaved the way you would expect from people who had just been nominated by an ally.

Drew: “We’re going to stay this week. Manifest it!”
Barrett, hugging Melody in front of the screen: “We did it!”
Melody, more clear-eyed: “I wish it was two noms. It would just make everything easier.”

Yash came to apologise afterwards and Melody let him off with the most generous sentence anyone said all week: “I know, but what else were you supposed to do.” Elsewhere she was considerably less generous about Drew, who had signed the five-newbie ceasefire on Saturday and been working against it by Saturday night. How many times, she wanted to know, do you have to learn your f—ing lesson.

Saturday into Sunday: fourteen hours and nineteen minutes

Dee and Devens both drew in, which meant all three nominees and both Icons were playing. Then the Pressure Cooker started at 12:28pm on Saturday and simply would not end.

Dee went at 6:05pm. Melody at 7:31pm. Devens shortly after 8:10pm. Barrett held on into the night and eventually fell, and by midnight it was down to Drew and Yash — the Head of Household who had put him up, and the target he had aimed at, standing in a box together in the dark.

They talked for hours. Somewhere in there Drew produced the line of the season for a man negotiating his own survival at two in the morning: “East Coast, West Coast, bro. Sea to sea. That could be us.”

It worked. Yash stepped down in exchange for two promises — that Drew would not nominate him if Drew won the next Head of Household, and that Drew would not vote Taylor out if she ended up on the block on Thursday. Drew won at 2:47am: fourteen hours and nineteen minutes, past a Pressure Cooker mark that had stood since 2005.

Then the ceremony did what everybody knew it would. Drew came down. Taylor went up — the houseguest Drew had just promised, in writing as far as this house is concerned, that he would not evict. Yash had built a block where the swing vote was already spoken for.

Sunday: the house gets ninety seconds of home

A day after a fourteen-hour endurance competition, production handed out family videos, and the house stopped being a house for an hour. The detail everybody seized on was Melody’s mother miming a phone call — confirmation, as somebody put it, that she has been getting every one of Melody’s calls all summer.

It is the one hour of the week where nobody is playing, and this season it landed in the middle of the week the alliance died. The Wall’s two busiest days of Week 10 sat either side of it.

Monday to Wednesday: Barrett goes looking for the people he nominated

Once the block was set, the week became a straight count, and Barrett came up short in every version of it. So on Monday he went to Devens — a man he had put on the block six days earlier — and opened with a line that deserves credit for knowing exactly how it sounded.

Barrett: “I know it sounds crazy as somebody who put you on the block last week.”

Devens did not say no. He said the thing you say when you want to keep an option without paying for it: “I would never ask you to put that on anything… But I appreciate that. That is appealing.” And then, flatly: “I certainly haven’t closed any doors. Don’t want to burn any bridges.” He also told Barrett he expected him to win the Blockbuster anyway, which is a generous way of declining to commit.

The Icons, meanwhile, were doing arithmetic of a different kind. Devens to Dee: “I don’t think anyone wins against Yash with this jury.” That is the sentence that should worry the other five. Neither of them is Head of Household, neither holds the veto, and they have already worked out who wins if nothing changes.

By Tuesday the count was settled enough that Drew was saying it out loud — Barrett does not have the votes — and the others had reached the same place by a different route. “Drew would still be mad at us and all we have is Barrett. If we saved Barrett, so he’s unsavable unless he wins.” Unsavable unless he wins. That is the whole week in four words.

And Yash told Barrett to his face how the room would break if Taylor came off the block: he had asked, and the answer was that Barrett goes. Barrett spent this week discovering that a house full of people he helped build is a house full of people who have run the numbers on him.

What the Wall says about Week 10

Readers rate every houseguest out of ten on the OBB Wall, every day. Week 10 drew 1,248 ballots, down 39 percent on Week 9 — and for the second time this season it has produced a perfectly clean result.

Every Icon up. Every newbie down. Seven for seven.

Change in average Wall rating, Week 9 to Week 10, for the seven houseguests still in the house. ◆ marks the Icons.

No overlap, no exception: the two surviving Icons are the only houseguests who gained ground, and the five newbies fill every negative slot in order. Angela rose too, up 0.29, though a departing houseguest’s numbers are always partly a farewell.

Week 8 was the mirror image: every Icon down, everyone else up. What changed in between is that the newbies stopped being a bloc and started being five people who nominate each other.

Everything moved on Saturday

Daily average Wall rating out of ten, 3 to 16 September. Wall data through 16 September: 1,248 Week 10 ballots.

The weekly numbers hide when it happened; the daily lines do not. Nothing much moves through Thursday and Friday. Then the Pressure Cooker starts and every line in the house steepens at once — nobody reverses, but all seven move by at least three quarters of a point in the days that follow. Devens goes from 5.22 on Friday to 6.63 on Saturday and keeps climbing to 7.14 by Monday. Melody falls from 5.69 to 4.11 across the same night. Barrett, who had peaked at 7.24 on the Wednesday of Week 9, gives back more than two points in four days.

Drew stood in a box for fourteen hours and bought himself two points

He is the exception inside the exception. Week over week Drew is down 0.36, filed with the rest of his side; the daily line says something else entirely. He closed Week 9 at 2.82 on 9 September, his worst day since the start of the month, after a week in which he cried at a nominee, broke a ceasefire he had signed the night before and said nothing at all at the veto ceremony. Then he won the Pressure Cooker, and by 13 September he was at 4.70. Nearly two full points, recovered in four days, for the crime of refusing to sit down.

It is the clearest thing the Wall has said all season about what this audience actually rewards. Not strategy. Effort.

Who is the most popular houseguest left?

Devens, and it is no longer close — 51 percent of Week 10 ballots scored him 8 or higher, the only houseguest above half. Barrett is next at 44 percent, and he is probably leaving tonight. At the other end it is Drew despite the Pressure Cooker: 49 percent score him 1 or 2 and only 17 percent score him 8 or higher, the widest gap between effort and affection in the house.

And the audience got smaller

1,248 ballots is the quietest week the Wall has had all season, below even the Week 8 blackout — and the fall is not gradual. Thursday and Friday ran at 277 and 293, ahead of Week 9’s pace. Then Saturday came in at 141 and the week never recovered. Saturday was fourteen hours of feeds pointed at people standing very still — a thin day for a ratings widget.

Where Week 10 stands going into tonight

Taylor, Melody and Barrett are on the block. One comes off in the BB Blockbuster and two face the vote — and then a full HOH, nominations, veto and eviction cycle runs inside the same hour. Tonight is a double eviction. Seven houseguests will be five by the end of it, and nobody gets a night to think about the first one before the second starts.

Barrett is the one everybody has counted out. Drew is bound by a two-in-the-morning promise not to vote Taylor out. Yash has a handshake with Devens and an alliance with Taylor and no obvious way to serve both. And the two Icons are the only two people in the house whose stock is going up — and the only two who have already said out loud who wins this thing if nobody stops him.

Barrett spent his week of power being petty on purpose and said at the time it might be his only one. It probably was. The question tonight is whether the house takes the free swing at him or whether somebody notices, finally, that the people quietly climbing in the audience’s estimation are the two nobody is bothering to nominate.

BB Blockbuster Results

Updating tonight after the live show.

Who was evicted in Big Brother 28 Week 10?

Updating tonight after the live show.

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