The new Big Brother 18 Battle Back will finally arrive this week after a long anticipated wait for the season’s twist that’s jumping ahead of the more typical returning Juror by bringing back one of the season’s first five evictees.
Since the twist was announced several weeks ago the season’s evictees to date have likely been sequestered away and safe from details of what’s been going on in the house. But now they’re close to busting out and we’ll see how it all goes down this Friday with a special 8/7c Big Brother episode on CBS.
Right now we’ve got Glenn Garcia, Jozea Flores, Victor Arroyo, and Bronte D’Acquisto lined up for the Battle Back arena. Those four evictees will be joined by either Tiffany Rousso, Da’Vonne Rogers, or Natalie Negrotti, but right now it looks like Tiffany is the most likely candidate.
Houseguests were warned by Big Brother they’d be put on lockdown early and doing it on a Tuesday is seriously early. I suspect there’s something going on with Battle Back in this elaborate set up, but we don’t know much of what’s going on. We don’t even know if the competitions have yet to begin.
It’s entirely possible the first three “battles” will be held in advance of Thursday’s eviction then the winner of those will face off against this week’s eliminated HG sometime that night or the next morning. Considering if they wait until Thursday night’s HoH comp to start all of these they’ll have to first clean up from the show’s comp then do four battles then clean that up and get ready for the Roadkill comp on Friday afternoon. That’s a lot of things to take care of in such a short time.
While it’d be interesting to see the final round of the Battle Back involved in this week’s HoH comp, like a parallel competition similar to BB15’s, we know that probably won’t happen because CBS is going to air a separate episode on Friday featuring all four competitions. Doing anything with it in Thursday’s show would reveal too much.
Friday night at 8/7c on CBS we’ll get a (likely prerecorded) show that delivers all the comps back to back with the returning HG revealed at the end of the show. Since Big Brother episodes are generally way behind the Feeds’ we don’t know how they’ll handle potential spoilers. If we get to watch Feeds on Friday before the show then we’ll know who is back in the house. With that in mind I’m expecting Feeds to be down at some point after Thursday’s live show until the end of the Friday night special episode. But in case we get them early, download our Big Brother App for spoiler notifications.
Don’t get too bummed over extended down Feeds though. Last week the Feeds were out for nearly nine hours on Friday due to nominations, Roadkill comp, Roadkill nomination DR visits, and Roadkill nomination ceremony so it’s not like we’ll be missing that much more with this event.
Update: CBS has now confirmed what I speculated above. Feeds will be down “for longer than usual later this week,” says CBS. We’ll have to wait and see when things stop. I’ve got my fingers crossed that we’ll still get some post-eviction Feeds before things go out for the Battle Back comps.
As for how the winner will be reintroduced to the game we’ll have to wait and see. I wouldn’t be surprised for the returnee to get one round of safety, so maybe he or she will show up after the nominations, but maybe not and we’ll get a revolving door situation with that HG right back out the door next round.
So who do you want back in the game? We’ve set up our poll below and want to hear your thoughts. Then get ready to join us for Friday night’s episode when we’ll be live recapping the spoilers and results at 8PM ET right here on the site!