“Being eliminated by a twist in a hamster wheel, it was really frustrating,” the reality TV veteran says.

Rachel Reilly entered the Big Brother house for season 27 as a target roughly the size of OTEV.

Yet somehow, even while playing a super-aggressive game with maximum cajoling, she never saw the nomination block.

And that is in a season in which up to four different contestants were nominated each week.

None of it mattered. That’s because Rachel was on the wrong end of the Mastermind’s Maniacal Maze — a hamster wheel competition in which one contestant has to get a ball through a maze in an allotted amount of time, and then each person who follows has one minute less to complete the same maze.

White Locust competition winner Ava Pearl chose Vince Panaro to go first with six and a half minutes.

He then chose Lauren Domingue instead of fellow Judges alliance member Morgan Pope to go next, so by the time Rachel was finally selected to go fourth after Vince, Lauren, and Morgan, she had only three and a half minutes.

It wasn’t enough, and Rachel was immediately eliminated from the game and sent to the jury house.

The hamster wheel competition was a huge hit when it first appeared in 2023 on Big Brother Reindeer Games, but that was a spinoff series in which no players were voted out and it was all about competition performance. The original Big Brother, however, is a game in which players are voted out by their peers. Until now.

How does Rachel feel about eliminated in this way and without a chance to save herself? Does she blame Ava for picking Vince to go first? Does she think she could have finished the maze had Vince chosen Morgan to go second, which would have given her more time? And does she still feel like she let everyone down? We were able to email over some questions to the Big Brother legend on her way to the jury house — no life vests needed.

Stream the best of Fiji on VITI+. Anytime. Anywhere.