As Big Brother Season 27 zooms ahead to Week 2 with a new HOH and all sorts of powers saving Houseguests from eviction, Isaiah "Zae" Friedrich is now on the outside looking in. The Week 1 evictee didn't initially seem destined to go, but a fight with mystery returning Houseguest Rachel Reilly more or less sealed his fate. That's what I thought, anyway, but Zae told CinemaBlend he had a different perspective on his eviction.
I had a chance to speak to Zae after he arrived back home, and we talked about a variety of topics. During the chat, I asked if he thought his argument with Rachel factored into his eviction. While he talked about the impact it had on his exit, he also noted that he felt it was an unnecessary fight that made Rachel look bad:
Yeah, I think it might have helped a tiny bit. I think people started seeing how crazy she was in that moment. Anyone who was there for the whole conversation was like, ‘Whoa, like what is she doing?’ I think my fate was already kind of determined at that point. If I was on the block, I was going to go home.
I would generally agree with Zae's assessment that he was sunk in the game, though I would add that Rylie Jeffries' big motivation in flipping to get his ally evicted was rooted in a desire to work with Rachel. Perhaps had Zae done more to try and align with the veteran, he'd still be in the house getting up to all the things Big Brother Houseguests do during their downtime.
In the end, Zae obviously wasn't able to get the votes to stay, and I'd argue had a better chance at staying had Kelley Jorgensen not won the BB Blockbuster. The evictee told CinemaBlend that his last-ditch strategy was to lean into the fight with Rachel and try to get the support of others who wanted her out of the game:
I was really, really fighting for those votes, and I think I had a decent chance. There were a couple that were kind of in the middle that were kind of playing both sides a little bit...I wanted to try and play that [Rachel drama] to see if I could even get a couple extra voters [who] want to see the feud play out, you know, and want to see me take her down because you know, like a lot of them were scared to take a shot and they admitted it to me. And so that was kind of my goal going into that, but obviously didn't work out for me because I'm home.
In fairness, Zae had the right idea. The issue was that while there are Houseguests who saw Rachel as a threat and someone who knows how to win Big Brother, the twenty-something jacked dude in the house felt like the bigger target to worry about by comparison. No one wanted to miss an opportunity to knock out someone who could be a big competitive threat, especially this early in the game.
Ironically enough, Zae has been in contact with someone who also was evicted in Week 1 of Big Brother after a fight with an older woman Houseguest, Matt Hardeman. Hardeman continues to taunt Angela Murray and keep their feud alive to this day, or maybe it's her stoking the flames.
Regardless, I can't help but wonder if the Zae and Rachel feud will continue outside of the game, or it'll be a flash in the pan that is largely forgotten by the end of the season. I'd like to think the latter, as anyone watching the live feeds with a Paramount+ subscription would know this has been a weird start to the season. Every alliance in the game currently is on shaky ground at best, so it really wasn't a surprise that Zae couldn't rally the votes to stay once the tides changed.
Big Brother airs new episodes on Sundays, Wednesdays and Thursdays at 8:00 p.m. ET. Keep with CinemaBlend as we keep tabs on all the events of the game, and try to predict who will come closer to that big grand prize.
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