Big Brother Finale Recap: Did The Right Houseguest Win Season 28?

It's been 86 days since Rachel Reilly was tossed into a volcano by a vicious velociraptor, and there are three people who have spent every single one of 'em inside the "Big Brother" house.

Taylor Brown, Drew Campbell, and Rick Devens made it all the way to the finale of the CBS reality competition's 28th cycle, and one 90-minute broadcast on Thursday night stood between them and the $750,000 grand prize. Earlier this week, TVLine asked you to weigh in on not only who would win Season 28, but who should win Season 28, and both polls heavily favored Devens. But after having his "Survivor" torch snuffed out twice, could Devens indeed pull off a "Big Brother" victory instead?

Before we could find out, there was much business to attend to on Thursday, including all three parts — all three! — of the pivotal final Head of Household competition. Let's dive in one last time, shall we?

We pick up right where we left off, at the start of Part 1 of the final HOH competition. Devens and Drew have already made a side deal that Devens will throw this part to Drew, so he plans to fall off the spinning log a few minutes after Taylor does. There's one problem, though: Taylor never falls! Despite the rain pouring down, the randomly timed lightning shocks, and the constantly changing direction of the log, Taylor keeps her cool for nearly an hour and outlasts both Drew (who falls first) and Devens.

In the Shakespearean second part of the competition, Drew and Devens face off in multiple rounds of gameplay, each one requiring them to use a slingshot to knock down cutouts of their former fellow houseguests, until only the houseguests that fit each round's theme are left standing. Drew takes an early lead, beating Devens handily in Round 1, but the next three rounds just don't go Drew's way; Devens catches up nicely and dominates the rest of the game, taking the Part 2 win after four rounds.

(We take a short break from the competition to visit the jury house, where Dee joins her fellow jurors and they all debate — with the help of "BB26" winner Chelsie Baham — the merits of the Final Three. If there are any surprises here, it's that the jurors don't seem nearly as bitter about Drew's gameplay as I suspected they might.)

Then, it's time for Part 3 of the HOH competition — a round that, per usual, asks players to reflect on the season gone by and identify false statements from the jury about nitty-gritty game details. Taylor misses two questions, and unfortunately for her, Devens misses none; he wins Part 3, and he's the final Head of Household of the summer.

Devens' Head of Household victory might initially seem like great news for Drew, who's played side-by-side with his in-game "dad" all summer and had long established that he'd take Devens to the end if the roles were reversed. But, oof, Taylor bent Devens' ear the night before the finale and told him that if he took Drew to the Final Two, Devens would lose not only Taylor's jury vote, but Lala's, too; combine that with the jury votes that Drew would almost certainly get from longtime friends Melody and Barrett, and those are the four keys that Drew would need to clinch the win. That conversation seemed to linger with Devens overnight, and when the time comes to cast his final eviction vote of the season, an emotional Devens goes through with evicting Drew. ("This is a total betrayal, and I know that," Devens tells Drew, and Drew fights back tears throughout his post-game Q&A with Julie Chen Moonves. Poor kid!)

The rest happens quickly: Drew joins the jury, and the jurors grill Taylor and Devens on how they played the game. Taylor's answers are admirable, but even if we're only using the jurors' vigorous nods during the interrogation as a metric, it seems pretty clear that Devens has got these votes all locked up. That's even more obvious when each juror approaches to cast their vote, all of them alluding to "the person who deserves it the most" or "the player who was an absolute shark" when they put their key in the box. This game has long been Devens' to lose, and it sure doesn't seem like he's about to lose.

Let's make it official, though: When Julie removes the keys from the voting box, the winner of "Big Brother 28" becomes... Devens! He ultimately wins by a vote of six to one, with Taylor earning Lala's vote. And it's actually quite the lucrative night for Devens: He's also crowned America's Favorite Player, which gets him another $50,000. Between that win, the big win, and the $10,000 he got from the Pharaoh's Curse, he's walking away with a cool $810,000. Not a bad summer job.

And though it's always hard to say goodbye to another season of "Big Brother" — well, except Season 15 — viewers aren't saying goodbye to the show forever. As Julie confirmed at the end of the finale, "Big Brother" has been renewed for two more seasons, ensuring it will be on the air through at least Season 30. 

Your turn, "Big Brother" (and "Survivor") fans! How do you feel about Devens' triumph? If you were rooting for Taylor or Drew, how did you react to the events of the finale? Tell us below!