Big Brother Canada couldn’t stay away for too long! Big Brother Canada 9 opened its doors to start another season of betrayals, competitions, and Canadian pride. After the pandemic forced Big Brother Canada 8 to abruptly end early, the series had been on hiatus for more than year. Now, the game is back with a new cast of houseguests ready to compete, albeit with new restrictions and measures put in place to ensure everyone’s safety (like how Big Brother 22 was run in 2020).
The theme of the new season: post-apocalyptic. The house is designed as a relic of Big Brother Canada 8, with the building left as an abandoned relic but with lots of overgrown greenery and rust taking over the house. This design showed an appreciation for the past and honored the players who came before but couldn’t finish their journey. I like how dramatic Big Brother Canada gets with its self-referential vibe and history; they inject their themes with a jolt of energy and a tongue-and-cheek humor that acknowledges its campy style. Everything from the intro video to the state of the game presented this season as a sequel to the year before. The move elevated its story and opened the door to potential twists to come.
Speaking of the main twist, the teams could pose a huge hurdle down the line. Big Brother has a problem with large majority alliances—once you’re in a majority group, you have the numbers to easily win challenges and control the flow of the game. Houseguests outside of the alliance have an insurmountable challenge to break through and survive. The Team Destiny and Team Defender twist encourages the houseguests to form this majority alliance so that it will cover the members on both sides and control the vote.
Plus, with half the house immune because their team won the Head of Household (HOH) challenge, it greatly limits the number of eligible people to nominate. Why not be part of a majority alliance to ensure the outcast houseguests get the boot? With so few eligible nominees, the twist encourages the houseguests to gang-up on the outsiders who didn’t fit in their initial grouping. The formation of the power alliances is starting to feel like Big Brother 22 all over again (and we all frustratingly saw how that turned out!).
The biggest problem with the twist, on the other hand, is that it feels too much like Survivor. Week #1 as a whole came across more like Survivor than a week of Big Brother. No HOH, no Power of Veto, everyone on the losing team was eligible for the vote … all the main beats were there. Granted, Survivor is a great game and we love its competitive nature, but even Survivor has its issues with voting blocks and team mentality. Hopefully, the twist will end quickly. If one of the teams continually wins, they’ll steamroll through the game and pick off all the outsiders leaving only the majority in power.
The trio of Latoya, Jedson, and Tychon seems like they’ll be a tough group to beat. As mentioned above, they’re split across the teams, so they can protect each other and control the vote. And, all three are physically strong competitors that can win challenges and they’ve got social pull. Case in point: Latoya pushing to control the eviction vote during Week #1. The trio could’ve stood back and let the outsiders fight for themselves, but Latoya jumped into the mix to ensure that Julie got the boot. That type of maneuvering will get her some good will as an alliance member. However, she’s making herself a big potential target in the coming weeks.
Latoya exposed one of her potential flaws in her conversations with Julie. Regardless of wanting to have a conversation or not, Latoya needed to hear Julie out and not brush her off—Big Brother is a 24/7 game, and if Julie hadn’t been evicted, Latoya might’ve burned that bridge permanently. Latoya doesn’t fake it with people outside of her alliance. She is in power now with her numbers, but once the players get deeper into the game, she might not have a handle on things once an outsider gets power or if someone gets rubbed the wrong way.
Is Josh capable of playing Big Brother? Sure, it’s an overwhelming game and it takes a while to get your footing, but he came across as a fish out of water. Josh separated himself from the rest of the group and made himself more of an outsider than he previously was. He is lucky that Latoya had a bigger plan to get Julie out because he would’ve been the obvious and easy first boot otherwise. Josh’s chances of winning already seem slim to none.
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Julie getting evicted first was a big surprise pre-season. However, after the two episodes of Week #1 aired, it wasn’t completely shocking. Firstly, Latoya made it her mission to get Julia out, so with a houseguest in power pushing the vote (and apparently holding secret sessions in the bathroom to convince switching to Julie), the numbers were already stacked up against Julie.
The other issue was that Julie couldn’t hold a secret to save her life. Spilling Josh’s thoughts only painted a bigger target on herself than turning the target on the men. Julie should’ve pulled people separately one-by-one to gauge their thoughts and see if there was an appetite to target the men. If not, she could’ve stayed with the flow to let Josh sink his ship and be the easy target. Instead, the house banded together so much that not even her Dolls alliance could’ve saved her.
Week #1 of Big Brother Canada 9 was an easy beginning to the season to restart the series. The players were hungry to compete and the cast included a great select of houseguests. A shocking eviction threw us all for a loop as Julie was sent packing. However, some messy gameplay and a Survivor-twist posed a bit of a cautionary warning. Hopefully, the twist ends soon and things pick up from here.
Big Brother Canada 9 airs new episodes on Sundays, Wednesday, and Thursdays on Global TV, and streams new episodes the following day on globaltv.com.
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