The new BBAI Arena twist fully arrives tonight on Big Brother 26 as the three nominees step into battle for a chance to secure their safety in a last ditch effort before the live vote. There’s plenty we don’t know but enough that we do and let’s discuss what we expect to happen tonight.
What is the BB AI Twist?
You’ll remember Ainsley from the season premiere who quickly became A.I.N.S.L.E.Y. (or something close to that with the forced acronym) and revealed herself to be an Artificial Intelligence force that would be invading the Big Brother House for the season whether the HGs liked it or not.
Now that hologram technology is pretty cool but using a fake generated graphic from the early aughts is kinda lame when they showed us preseason that they had a great replication of Julie Chen Moonves in there too. Would have been way cooler to use the real actress for Ainsley than this blue, bald creepy thing but nothing we can do about that! And then with the actual readily available AI platforms we could have seen production letting the AI make some game move decisions within certain parameters of course, but that doesn’t seem to be happening either and if it were I think they’d want to show that off. You know, like let the AI be an actual “threat” with its digital indifference. Ah well.
Instead, production will most likely be setting tonight’s AI Arena action themselves where the three Noms enter and one will escape the danger of a possible vote. The two remaining HGs will then return to the nominations couch and face the live vote.
Why this BBAI Arena?
Since CBS has start routinely bumping the next HOH comp to Sunday’s show they were left with a long hour to fill with just a recap segment of post-Veto meeting events, a live vote, and an interview out front with Julie. Now they’ve got a regular Thursday night competition to include, it’ll just be at the beginning instead of the end of the hour.
There’s also the added benefit here for keeping the HGs on their toes for the vote. In nearly every past season when the two noms are set on Monday everyone can quickly decide “we are all voting out HG X.” Now instead there’s at least a little bit of uncertainty. Sure, this week the HGs know which target they want out but there’s still the unknown for which one will happen. I like it!
How long will BBAI Arena last?
Often these Big Brother twists fizzle out and that could definitely happen, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see this run for at least four weeks and if it’s good for the flow of the Thursday live shows then it could keep going well into the season. I can’t think of anything that would force it to stop on the headcount side of things until we’re deep into the evictions.
Whatever happens tonight on Big Brother 26 we’ll be here to recap it live starting at 8PM ET (note the time moved up an hour!!) so join us back here then. In the meantime, download our Big Brother App and join us on Facebook & Twitter!
