This is all meant to be for fun and not to be taken seriously. Just curious what you all think! Plus I love discussing game mechanics.

“Til Death Do You Part”or something like that.

I… actually don’t hate this twist. Forcing players together for arbitrary reasons as we see in later seasons just never works out in my opinion. Not to say it can’t be done, but Big Brother is at its core an individual game. And to make a pairs/teams twist actually meaningful, you have to give them a reason to actually care about each other. Otherwise, the players just ignore their teams, and play the game as usual. I say all this to say… this twist actually kind of did that? I know I know, make up your mind already. Look, I’m just laying down the groundwork for future posts okay?

Unlike future teams twists, these pairs are actually tethered together. They play as one, they go home as one. So, they actually have a legitimate reason to care about each other, for better or worse. For richer or poor. Was it fair to the houseguests? Probably not. But it was quite unique, and offered something unlike anything else we’ve seen in Big Brother. So I appreciate this twist for that reason. But alas, it was just not executed well in MY opinion.

My Thoughts:

For starters, the house started with 16 houseguests. Since they were all paired together, there were technically only eight houseguests. Not a whole lot if you intend on capitalizing on the “love” theme and making the twist last at least a little while. (Personally, I do, because these twists are the one thing that makes a season stand out to me). So tell me, with so few numbers, why are we instantly evicting a couple from the house? Just for yet another couple to be evicted later on that week? So now we’re down to just “six” houseguests, and no surprise the twist was abandoned shortly after. The twist was just unsustainable.

Also, to make things more complicated, in addition to the couples twist, there were actually two preexisting relationships in the house! One pair were exes that were forced to be a couple in the house, and the two ultimately became the victims of the instant eviction twist. And the other pair were already a couple outside of the house who were promptly separated into different pairings once in the house. I didn’t like this, and only served to make things way more complicated than they needed to be. On top of that, it screwed over pretty much everyone involved. On a season with a twist that already screwed over the players to begin with.

My “Fix”:

How I would“fix” this twist. Step one: We’re gonna have our biggest cast ever with 18 houseguests! 9 pairs total for season 9. If we want this twist to last, we need more cannon fodder. Since two people will be going home each week (no instant evictions this time, plus I found that to be unfair), the numbers will dwindle fast anyway. Step two: I’d keep the couples twist around for about 4 weeks? So we’ll be down to just ten individual houseguests. Since they were still only doing seven member juries at the time, throw in an extra week before jury to send one more person home, and boom! Nine houseguests left. Jury can start. Step three: Lastly, either no preexisting relationships, or all of them are preexisting relationships (that enter as couples). No half stepping! I know the exes provided some good entertainment for a couple of episodes… well, one of them was certainly… something (*coughs* worst player in Big Brother history). But we just had a pair of exes the previous season and a whole season dedicated to exes in season 4. I’m over the exes. Just let strangers start drama organically on their own for a change.

My analysis of Big Brother 8

https://www.reddit.com/r/BigBrother/s/hA6hN6RydL