It can be hard to keep up with all the twists and turns in the Big Brother house, and that's from someone who's on the outside of it looking in rather one of the house guests themselves. If you watch the feeds, you know there are announcements over the intercom all day, dictating what house guests should and shouldn't do, but, as an outsider, I have some unanswered questions as far as rule-breaking. People are always getting these assignments from competitions that they have to complete, and found myself wondering: what happens if you don't complete a punishment on Big Brother ? And the answer is... it depends.
Just by signing up for the game, most people have indicated a willingness to put up with whatever twists or punishments the game throws their way, so it's rare for someone to completely balk. But it does happen, and the most common place you see it is when it comes to Have-Nots. Just this season, we saw Audrey Middleton, who was eliminated from Big Brother 17 on Day 36, receive a penalty vote during the live eviction for failing to stick to the slop diet. She seems to have refused to eat the slop altogether, but, in previous seasons, people have broken that rule to lesser degrees, like BB11's Jeff Schroeder and Kevin Campbell, who were punished for their infraction by an additional day of the diet.
A penalty vote seems to be a pretty standard way of punishing the house guests when they refuse to punish themselves, but producers can also bar contestants from participating in later competitions if they fail to complete their tasks. Look at Shelli Poole for instance, again from BB17. When she was assigned to hit a series of three targets 2,400 times in 24 hours, Shelli was warned that, if she failed to complete the regimen, she would be ineligible to play for the Veto the next week. Of course, she did complete it, which probably had a little something to do with the punishment for failure being so harsh.
So, long story short, the consequences for bailing out on a punishment aren't set, but instead are decided by the producers based on the level of the infraction... and probably a little bit just how they're feeling that day. Hey, nobody said it was fair! This is Big Brother we're talking about!
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Images: CBS (1); Giphy (1)
