Big Slasher

If the Big Brother house were literally a house of horror whose eponymous owner wears a grimy ice-hockey mask and carries a sharp and deadly weapon, how would Hollywood handle the sequence of bloody departures?

And who would be left for the final confrontation? Last man standing is actually most often a woman, but so far over the years BB has failed to consistently reproduce this trope.

Saskia appears to have some of the necessary Sigourney Weaver/J-LO gutsiness, but her (current) male lead is a low-rent knife magnet.

Most screenwriters would find ways for her to end up in the arms of Italian paratrooper Roberto, the only housemate apparently capable of dealing with any situation more challenging than getting out of bed. (But then most screenwriters could learn a lot from watching how the people you expect to be drawn together in BB actually aren't, and how the eddies of controversy that pass through the group foster surprisingly multi-dimensional bonds and resentments.)

Makosi is a possible alternative amazon, but something tells me she's being stalked by a come-uppance that will catch up with her sooner or later.

Thus far at least Derek and Science have avoided the terminal logic of "the brother always gets it" convention. My suspicion is that Mary, the much-abducted witch bitch would have merited a longer stay in the story, while Vanessa sports the kind of basic thickness of intellect and thinness of personality that predictably delimits life expectancy in these circumstances.

Craig and Kemal - there's room for one of these in the final reel, but not both. The unlucky one can be expected to last long into Act 2 before going down spectacularly.

As we saw recently in House of Wax, a large group of post-teenager anti-victims can be effectively divided into two to increase their points of cull-ability. Something similar seems to have occurred 'naturally' in the BB house.

From Anthony and Octavian to Hitler and Stalin, two large power blocks usually collaborate to finish off the minor competition before addressing their own more fundamental quarrel. And so the two candidates for the cool group in this year's BB could have been expected to focus on removing the marginals for at least another week or so, but instead I suspect that the nominations announced later today will show that Makosi's clique have launched a sneakily preemptive Operation Barbarossa of their own - and the first target lying just over the border in this case is Anthony.

Ay, or is that Aieeeeeeeeeeeeee.