Big Brother has taken its sweet, sweet time forming the jury of its 25th season. Evictions that mean nothing! A full week with no competitions! Seven jurors instead of nine! It’s been a journey, folks.
Thankfully, after a whopping 72 days (!), the CBS series has finally identified the first juror who will help crown the winner of Season 25 in a few weeks. But before we could find out whether Cirie, Felicia or potential backdoor nominee Cameron would become this week’s evictee, Big Brother took even more time to get to the eviction itself, instead wasting 30-plus minutes of Thursday’s episode with the kind of filler usually reserved for Sunday’s installments.
Sure, there was some strategizing: Jag did use the Power of Veto to save Felicia, and Cameron was nominated alongside Cirie. Cameron tried to whip up the four votes he’d need to stay in the house, though getting Cory and Felicia to flip in his favor was a pretty useless endeavor. And as the week rolled on, Matt and Jag — aka The Minutemen — unquestionably emerged as the game’s biggest remaining threats, leaving Cirie, Blue and Cory to start plotting their next moves against that power couple.
But we also got a moving segment about Matt’s ongoing struggle to hear whispered conversations as a deaf player in the BB house, as well as a not-so-moving segment about Cameron’s love for Kevin Costner. No coincidence, I’m sure, that a commercial for CBS’ Yellowstone reruns aired in the very next ad break.
Eventually, we did reach this week’s eviction, and Cameron was booted — for real this time! — by a 6-0 vote, becoming the official first member of the jury. And just as he did the first time he was evicted, Cameron handled the ouster elegantly, hugging everyone and telling Julie Chen Moonves (who went librarian chic with her style choices on Thursday) that he took much of the responsibility for his own eviction.
Meanwhile, a Head of Household competition was not played live during the episode, but the remaining eight houseguests were welcomed to BB Comic Week, by way of a glittering blue object — not unlike something you’d find in Superman’s Fortress of Solitude — that was deposited in the HOH bedroom.