Ground Control to Major Tom: It's Solitary Confinement Time on #BB15!

Today's Power of Veto competition involved punishments, always a fun change of pace this early in the season. We don't seem to have any crazy costumes, although Aaryn will be enjoying a change of hair, and Helen has a curfew.

More interestingly, Judd will be in solitary confinement for 24 hours in the cockpit lounge.

"How do I flush this toilet?" -actual Judd quote

Judd's game is starting to change up, as in the last twenty-four hours we've seen him moving away from the Goof Troop alliance (McRae/Amanda/Andy) and towards a possible new affiliation with Kaitlin/Spencer/GinaMarie in the wee hours of the morning. He's also contemplating the fact that this is the first-ever Big Brother season to boot three guys in a row right out of the gate, and wants a girl out this week. Judd has a lot to think about, and now he'll have time to think it over.

Solitary confinement is historically a game changer in Big Brother. Players in the house are constantly bombarded with social simulation, sleeping in rooms full of activity while gaming their days away. Cutting off human contact for a day has had interesting results in the past.

Let's review:

Big Brother 7: Danielle's Decline

Big Brother 7's Danielle Reyes took the first solitary confinement punishment that I can recall in the game, trying to solidify her Legion of Doom alliance during her Head of Household reign. Unfortunately for her, the alliance lost the competition, with Chilltown famously gobbling up prizes and hanging her out to dry.

This marked the start of Danielle's downfall in the game. For 24 hours she paced and muttered, and after she emerged, she was never the same. A legend in her own right during Season 3, Danielle crashed and burned after her solitary confinement in Season 7, culminating in her crazed doorbell-ringing meltdown on the Head of Household landing (earning her the nickname "Ding Dong Dani").

Big Brother 12: Hayden's Rise

In the first few weeks of Big Brother 12, future winner Hayden Moss seemed to be in a pickle, bouncing between his secret showmance with Kristen, a secret alliance with Kristen and Andrew, and his role as "The Animal" in The Brigade. It wasn't clear initially which direction he would go, especially because he hid each secret alliance from the other side, wisely waiting to see which would triumph.

All of this threatened to destroy his game when his alliance with Kristen and Andrew blew up noisily the night of Andrew's eviction, as Andrew called out the secret showmance, and Rachel played right into the chaos in the wake of her HOH win, targeting Kristen and Hayden to split up the showmance. Hayden initially seemed shaken and visibly upset for the first time in the game.

After Britney won the Veto competition, it became clear that he had no future with Kristen in the game. But at the same time, Hayden's strong position in the house was clear that night for maybe the first time, as the house rallied around him to keep him entertained, constantly keeping vigil at his door in alternate shifts. Kristen spent hours crying quietly in front of his door, but Hayden was more interested in his short visits with the Brigade, and in shoring up his allegiance to them. He was rarely alone, and during that time seemed to be most concerned with rattling off his resume to the live feed cameras, pleading for a job.

By the time Hayden emerged from solitary confinement, he was all-Brigade, all the time, and ready to start on the path that would lead him to one of the most solid and predictable victories in Big Brother history. 

Big Brother 13: Shelly's Flip

Shelly Moore didn't seem to be in much trouble when she landed in solitary confinement. She was in a dominant alliance with Jeff, Jordan, Rachel, Brendon and Adam, and while Head of Household Dani Donato had nominated her alongside Adam and Adam won the Veto, Brendon was clearly the target, leaving Shelly in little danger. Shelly even voluntarily took the punishment, since it was combined with a phone call home to her daughter, adorable game analyst Josie. 

 So it was no wonder that few of the houseguests felt the need to keep Shelly company - her punishment was really a reward, after all. But in the late hours of the evening, HOH Dani came to sit by the door, keeping Shelly company for a long stretch of time and reassuring her, despite having nominated her for eviction.

When Shelly chose to flip shortly after this and join Dani's team to help oust Jeff, the night of solitary confinement was cited as one of the things that convinced her that she could trust Dani. The fact that Dani chose to reach out and comfort Shelly in her isolation wound up playing a huge role in shifting the power in the game in the final stretch, leading to some of the most memorable eviction night drama ever in the history of Big Brother.

Big Brother 14: Dan's Resurrection

Do I even need to cover this one? Dan Gheesling's day in solitary confinement last year allowed him to create one of the most amazing and complex manipulations in Big Brother history, as he lay silently for hours in the hypnotic Have Not room listening to horrid music and gobbling a sheet cake, while plotting how to get out of what seemed to be the certain demise of his game.

Dan later went on to detail his thinking process in depth. Dan's Funeral was a virtuoso performance, transforming Dan from imminent game death to one of the most amazing and unexpected veto saves we've ever seen in this game. He would never have been able to come up with such a complex strategy out in the house, where his thoughts would have constantly been interrupted with the conversations and drama of the house.

Of all the solitary confinement sagas, Dan's remains the most striking achievement. 

Big Brother 15: Judd's ?

So what do the next 24 hours hold for quiet, anxiety-ridden, quippy HOH Judd? He's sitting fine in the game, but now is the time to start thinking ahead for the long stretch. Will his paranoia get the best of him, or will the lack of social interaction allow him to focus on what he needs to do next in the game?

One interesting thing to note - Hayden, Shelly and Dan were all confined to the various Have Not rooms in their respective seasons, while only Dani Reyes was confined in the lounge by the bathroom, which will be Judd's prison for the next day. (This is because there are already Have Nots assigned to the room for the week - there were no Have Nots the weeks that Hayden, Shelly and Dan all were confined.) Doesn't bode well for our Tennesseean Head of Household, since only Dani's game was negatively rather than positively affected by solitary confinement. 

Stay tuned - the one thing we know is that this has the potential to be an intense psychological game changer for Judd, one way or another. 

Why Andrew Lost

A couple weeks ago, I had Andrew pegged to win the game. What went wrong? 

Andrew will tell you it's Dan's fault. According to his exit interview, Dan got in Emmett's ear, and that was that. It's a narrative that works for Andrew and the way he defined himself in this game, which has a lot to do with why he's now chilling in a lodge somewhere this morning taunting Peter about Dan's visit. 

But it's just not the case.

The truth is, Andrew, as well as he disguised it, had one of the worse egos in this game, and it got in his way. Alec and Peter were stupid to align with Jillian and Emmett, he told himself, but it made sense for him, because he was honest, or something. 

Andrew refused to acknowledge the truth Dan was trying to help him see: that his allies had not only betrayed ally after ally of their own, but put him on the block two weeks running. Despite that, by the fact Dan got into the game, Andrew's moose was already cooked. 

Andrew was a target long before Dan entered the house, and his game may have been over the moment he aligned with Jillian and Emmett and decided that he would protect both. It got him further than he would have gotten on his own, as he was at the bottom of the pecking order at one point, but to proceed to the end, he would have had to win more competitions and also strengthen, rather than weaken, his connections to Gary and Talla. Still, the showmance held all the power at the end, and without being able to shift them (as no one really has throughout the game, they waver but never shift with campaigning), he was screwed.

Like so many others before him, Andrew's ego proved to be his undoing, leaving him in exactly the same position as Alec, ironically - $10,000 richer and off to the jury house.

So now there are four - Jillian, Emmett, Talla, and Gary. The game is practically Emmett's for the taking unless Talla or Gary manage to squeak out a veto win tomorrow. He's played a classically good game and probably deserves the win (she says grudgingly), but it would be fun to see the underdogs take him out and leave the outcome in doubt this close to the end.

I don't really expect that to happen, but at least it gives us all some minor reason to keep watching.

By the way, if you missed it, Dan has a great rundown of the houseguests left in the game, and singles out pride as the reason for Andrew's downfall.

Canadian Renegades

Dan set the house a series of challenges last night after dinner, with the goal of earning all of them an official cherry red Renegade bandana. He told them that everyone would get a challenge, some in public, some in secret. If they didn't want the bandana, they didn't have to accept the challenge.

Talla was first, with a public challenge to cannonball into the pool. She didn't know what that meant, and her form was not exactly perfect:

But the end result was the same:

Dan helped her out:

And crowned her the first Canadian Renegade:

Andrew received his challenge in the store room, for good reason: Dan instructed him to kiss Jillian in front of Emmett. In order to allow Andrew to maintain his head atop his shoulders, he promised to whip out a red bandanna the second he did it, so that Emmett wouldn't have more than a split second to be livid. Andrew was down with that.

It took a few minutes, but finally everyone was gathered in the hot tub, and Andrew announced he was going for it, in return for Emmett nominating him. Dan had the bandanna whipped out before Andrew had even finished.

Let's face it, Andrew has wanted to do that from day one.

He won a bandana for it, anyway.

Emmett got the next assignment in secret: to mimic Gary for ten minutes. This was a little confusing to him, and he asked Big Brother for a clarification. When he didn't get it, he went out to the pool area and began arguing with Talla in a loose approximation of a Gary accent, with a few Gary-isms thrown in ("motherfucker!")

This was so effective that it resulted in Talla leaping to her feet and yelling back at him, not unlike her fight with Gary a couple of weeks back. No one except Dan seemed to realize what Emmett was doing.

Dan blissfully spared Emmett after about two minutes of this, presenting him with the bandana and revealing the task, resulting in a quick make-up hug between Talla and Emmett as he donned his Renegade garb.

For Jillian's challenge, he lured her into the storeroom for help changing his battery pack...

...then asked:

"How comfortable are you dancing?"

"I don't like to dance," she replied.
"Okay, perfect."

The task? To carry a full bottle of juice to the pack porch and dump it over her head while dancing. Dan had to secure permission from Big Brother before assigning her this one.

"I hate my life right now," Jillian was overheard saying after Dan left her alone in the store room with the bottle of juice.

Look at Jillian dancing.

Aaaaaaand Jillian's in the club.

For his final trick, Dan instructed Gary to dump cold water on the first person to fall asleep, who happened to be a drunken Talla. It should be noted that one of Gary's punishments is to stay awake for 24 hours himself, which added to the fun of this one.

Talla did not think it was so fun, drunkenly filling a pot with cold water and stumbling up to the HOH room to try to find a target for revenge.

The upstairs group hid out long enough that drunk, half-asleep Talla either forgot or failed to care why she was hauling a pot of cold water up the steps. 

Mission accomplished.

And, with Gary's induction, all of the final five Big Brother Canada houseguests are officially Renegades.

It's been a fun visit - with no game to play himself and no chance of being buzzed in to do so, Dan is having nothing but a good time. As a viewer of the show himself, it's got to be surreal to step into the game and get to probe them on their game thoughts and manipulate them into having one of the best nights of the live feeds this year.

All in all, not bad work for Big Brother Canada, to keep things hopping near the end of the game.

I will be mostly unavailable for a few days, so I will be leaving you all in the capable hands of Ash. Follow her on Twitter if you don't already, especially since updates may not go out over my Twitter until I'm back at a computer.

The Moose is Cooked

Sure enough, today's Veto was the How Bad Do You Want It Competition. Andrew and Gary both wanted it, with Andrew getting a mohawk courtesy of Dan, and Gary getting slop for the rest of the game and a prisoner costume:

Gary wanted it more

Dan's influence on the game continued after the feeds came up, with Emmett finally opening up to Dan and deciding that it makes sense to boot Andrew now, and Gary and Talla making a quiet pledge not to nominate each other next week.

Meeting Marge

With the competition over and the backyard opened, Dan took a trip out to see the hot tub with Emmett and Andrew. He was very interested in Marge the Moose, asking if they talked to her, but didn't quite get it when they said no.

A tribute to Peter (RIP)

Back inside, he continued to grill them about who had talked to the other moose in the Diary Room hallway. Talla is the only one who has, for her talk show task the other day - no one else knows the secret of Marsha the Moose, who has only spoken to Talla, Peter and AJ. It took Dan a minute to realize his goof, as Talla played dumb and Jillian grilled Dan about why on earth he would ask about talking mooses.

Jokers reacts

Dan's goof went over the heads of most of the houseguests, but it didn't go unnoticed by the internet, or by Production, who called him into the Diary Room and elicited an apology a couple of minutes later (so as not to arouse suspicion). 

So the secret of the mooses remains (mostly) safe, and Dan is free to continue wreaking havoc on the house and entertaining the internet for the rest of the night. 

How, Dan, Do You Want It?

Late this morning, a letter appeared under the front door accompanied by the ring of a doorbell.

The source of the letter was revealed on Twitter minutes earlier: Dan Gheesling, 7-0 underdog winner of Big Brother 10 and 6-1 controversial runner-up of Big Brother 14 was standing just outside the entrance, waiting to make one of his own. 

The final five houseguests gathered in the living room and Talla read out the announcement: a visitor was coming who was familiar with what they were going through, and could be used as they wished. The speculation began immediately, with Peter being at the top of the list, but they quickly and correctly moved on to the stars of Big Brother US, with Will, Janelle, Dan, and even Hayden and Mike Boogie making their wishlists.

Andrew insisted that he could care less, that he wasn't interested in anyone else's strategy, and he just wanted to play Veto and get it over with. He and Gary are nominated, with Andrew possibly being the target, not that he knows that. Andrew has vocally said multiple times that he's a Jeff fan and couldn't stand Dan, something to keep in mind as we revisit the next series of events.

After a bedroom lockdown, the houseguests emerged to find a mysterious clue in ketchup. This one baffled me for a few minutes, because all I could think of was Eric and the America's Player mustard task in Big Brother 8, but then I remembered the hypothetical bottle of ketchup that Britney Haynes repeatedly said would have beaten Dan in the Big Brother 14 finale. 

Talla confirmed that yes, it was ketchup.

Finally, the doorbell rang again, and as the houseguests sprinted up the stairs, Dan Gheesling made his grand entrance.

Talla was not excited in the least. (She was the only person to name Dan as a player she wanted to meet today in all the speculation, and after over an hour of flitting around the house chanting "Oh my god!", she was more than ready to take flight for the payoff.)

Dan feigned like he hasn't been watching the show the whole time, pretending like he needed to be introduced to all of them. Once introductions were complete, Talla mentioned his funeral, and he immediately leapt up, donned a red headband, and announced that they all had to tell him why they deserved to stay in the game, because he would be selecting one of them to leave that night.

Emmett, who at this point is sick and tired of twists messing with his game, was even less impressed with this latest one. He's been complaining all week about the twists, especially Gary coming back, and how they're interfering with his otherwise perfect game. Emmett hasn't watched enough seasons of Big Brother US to understand that this is fairly typical when someone's on a dominant win streak like he and Jillian have had.

Dan finally revealed that he was just kidding, to (almost) everyone's amusement. Don't miss Andrew the Dan hater bum-rushing him there. Despite complaining about Peter playing a Dan game for weeks, for most of the time they were greeting him, Andrew was more or less the closest person to Dan. He also made a somewhat awkward remark about Dan's wife being with him for the celebrity. Andrew, that's why you're still single.

Note Andrew's proximity to Dan once more, on the house tour.

And again as the houseguests explained to Dan what's been happening in the game that he's been watching over the internet for the last two months. They were kind enough to gloat over the evicted Alec and Peter as Dan fans, which was in fact inaccurate - Peter is the Dan fan, Alec was actually a Dr. Will fan and didn't particularly care for Dan.

Eventually, the houseguests began to take Dan up on his offer to provide pre-veto advice. Talla babbled her way through her incredibly one-dimensional strategy to Dan, who gently started to alert her to the fact that she may not want to put all her eggs in the basket of a four-person alliance where two are in a showmance and three are from the same region. 

Gary similarly took Dan up on his advice, and Dan Socratic Method-ed him until he finally saw the Power Move that Peter missed last week: getting Talla to win the veto and pull one of them off the block to force Jillian up. It's a pretty weak hope for Gary, and Dan didn't push it hard, but he did make Gary really start thinking through his options and the power he has in the game. It was a fascinating conversation, since Gary has been quiet since his return, but he is thinking. Dan was able to latch on to that deeper, more complex Gary and wrest him out from under the immature, impulsive Gary. Was it enough to get him through this week? Hard to say.

The subtext of both conversations was that Dan thinks Gary and Talla should align, which is absolutely correct, but he was able to get both of them to voice why they're uncertain about doing so. With a few more hours in the house, Dan might still be able to get an underdog alliance going before he leaves.

If only he'd had a couple hours with Alec, Peter, and Topaz. Anyway.

Emmett was far more reserved, only talking Dan through his past game moves, not his future. He doesn't trust Dan, voicing later to some of the others that he's afraid info given to Dan could be leaked. 

Andrew and Jillian for their part scorned the offer, since neither one respects Dan's strategy - Andrew, despite fame-whoring it up around Dan, was later heard complaining that Dan was just lucky.

A feed leak revealed that today's Power of Veto competition may be How Bad Do You Want It, so Gary's pre-game strategy session with Dan may play to his advantage. Gary knows that winning himself is his only hope, and he feels that he owes it to Canada to try to survive in the game, since they voted him in. 

So, how, Dan, do you want it? Looks like if Dan has his way, it might be a slightly more interesting endgame than we'd been anticipating. 

Canadian Mist

So to shake things up a little during this weekend's rerun, Big Brother Canada has recruited a special guest:

(Mississauga is the site of the Big Brother Canada house, which Dan is of course preparing to enter.)

Now Peter's really going to kick himself for not saving Topaz with that Veto.

Not sure what Dan's entry time is, but it may be as early as tonight. He's also planning on running a screencap contest during his time on the live feeds, so hopefully the Big Brother Canada Production team will be Misted into keeping said feeds on for at least some of his visit. Check here for details on the contest. I'm readying my screencap trigger finger as we speak.

Updates have been a little slow today, seems people are more interested in breaking news, but as best as I can tell, Emmett is targeting Andrew, and putting up Gary as the pawn. So the only hope of getting Jillian out is a Talla veto, which means it's going to be highly unlikely. And Andrew's only hope of staying is another veto win himself, or more flip-flopping from Jemmett, which isn't entirely out of the question.