Salman Khan walked out in a cowboy avatar, danced to his old hits, and handed out TathasTwo blessings to 16 new housemates on Sunday night. That much went to plan. What didn't, according to a review published by Koimoi, is everything that came after.

The premiere leaned hard on its new hook, a lifeline called Vardan that lets nominated contestants dodge eviction through a second safety net, voted on by either housemates or viewers. On paper it sounds like a swerve from the usual weekly nomination grind. In practice, the review argues, extra lifelines in reality television tend to do one thing: protect the contestants producers don't want to lose early, which quietly drains the stakes out of every nomination that follows.

Then there's the cast itself. Mary Kom and Mahhi Vij carry the recognisable weight this season, the review notes, alongside Jai Bhanushali riding his own Bigg Boss familiarity and Amrapali Dubey pulling rank as the biggest star of the batch. Isha Rikhi, Kushal Tanwar (going by Gullu), Qazi Tauqeer, Arifsha and Scout OP round out a lineup the review calls low-key bordering on bland. Aasif Khan, known to audiences as Jijaji from Panchayat, gets singled out as the one contestant who reads as an actual person rather than a rehearsed archetype.

That word, rehearsed, does a lot of work in the review. Within ten minutes of entering the house, contestants were already sparring, Qazi Tauqeer and Mary Kom over a bed, among other flashpoints. The review's complaint isn't that Bigg Boss houses fight on day one. They always do. It's that this batch arrived pre-loaded with conflict lifted from old seasons instead of finding friction organically, which makes a launch night built to feel explosive land closer to a rerun.

Salman Khan, everyone agrees, remains the one variable holding the format together. Twenty seasons in, he's still doling out relationship advice to strangers and trading banter with a Roadies veteran like it's the easiest job in television. The review is unambiguous on this point. It's just not convinced his aura alone can carry a season if the incoming contestants don't drop the performance and get real once the cameras stop being new.

Whether that happens is the actual test now, not the premiere. Nomination week one will say more about this batch than any grand launch ever could, and so will how quickly, or slowly, the Vardan twist starts costing someone their place in the house for real.