Big Brother 26 finale recap: Three HoH competitions and death of Ainsley determine the winner of the season

Big Brother 26 concluded on October 13, 2024, at 9 pm ET with only three houseguests remaining in the running for $750,000. Cam Sullivan-Brown, Chelsie Baham, and Makensy Manbeck competed in three HoH competitions while former winner Taylor Hale took over the jury roundtable.

As seen previously on Big Brother, Makensy won the final Power of Veto competition and took her name off the chopping block. She then cast the sole vote to evict Rubina from the competition, which resulted in her, HoH winner Chelsie, and Cam becoming the finalists.

The three finalists managed to survive for 90 days in the house and went through obstacles, including outwitting Ainsley the AI houseguest, and spending a week in Jankie World while the Power of Veto was used a record 12 times.

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What happened on the Big Brother 26 finale?

The episode started with the three finalists competing in the first HoH of the night in which they had to endure tilted and suspended robotic vessels that squirted freezing green ooze on the players. After 26 minutes, the green ooze became unbearable to Makensy and she dropped out.

Cam followed her after 37 minutes of enduring the vessels, which resulted in Chelsie winning the HoH part 1. This meant Chelsie would advance directly to the third part while Cam and Makensy would face off in the second.

In the second part of the HoH comp, Makensy and Cam had to race against each other through a maze and move three buttons to connect them to wires to shut down Ainsley’s brain forever. Makensy completed the tasks while Cam was just taking out the third button.

This meant Makensy and Chelsie would go head-to-head in the third HoH comp in hopes of winning the power to decide the last vote for eviction on Big Brother. Before the third part took place, the jury roundtable welcomed Rubina as the sixth member.

They also were not surprised by Chelsie and Makensy continuing to win competitions.

The third part of the HoH competition saw Chelsie and Makensy trying to answer multiple-choice questions. The options were based on true and false statements made by jury members.

Chelsie and Makensy were neck-and-neck in this round until Chelsie failed to guess Rubina's statement correctly. Makensy answered all the answers correctly and earned the power to vote out another houseguest.

Both Chelsie and Cam made their cases in front of Makensy. Chelsie pleaded that they had always dreamed of an all-female finale on Big Brother while Cam appealed to her by acknowledging her game.

Makensy ultimately decided to evict Cam and bring Chelsie to the final two. Cam, in his post-eviction interview, stated that he was not surprised by the decision.

The jurors welcomed the final jury member Cam and got the chance to ask three questions to the two finalists of Big Brother. Chelsie told the jury that she kept quiet and made her moves when required.

She also spoke about the influence she had on Makensy to get Leah on the block in two different weeks and pointed out that she was never in the danger zone because of her social skills.

Makensy reciprocated by stating that her decision to eliminate Leah was not influenced by anyone else and became loyal to Chelsie with whom she reached the finale of Big Brother.

She also made the case that she ousted Tucker in the AI Arena competition, which resulted in his elimination and putting her at the forefront for the rest of the competition.

The host Julie Chen Moonves finally revealed the votes made by the jurors. Quinn, T'Kor, Leah, Angela, Kimo, Rubina, and Cam all voted for Chelsie as the winner of this season with a unanimous win of 7-0.

Besides the winner, Julie also revealed the winner of America’s Favorite Player which was given to Tucker. This was the first time in Big Brother history that a non-finalist or a non-juror won.