Biggest Loser Families – Week 4

Ahoy hoy!

Well once again we started the week at the end of another weekly cycle in the life of a Biggest Loser. Once again we see the contestants meet at the cross roads of life and the t-section of togetherness. In other words, the weigh-in, where Biggest Loser Families contestant after Biggest Loser Families contestant put their pride, their reputations, their trainers techniques and sound building foundations on the line.

At this weigh-in, the Blue Team had immunity, so no matter what their weight loss, Blue Team were safe for this week. Of course, notwithstanding that the Blues had immunity, they continued to work extremely hard at training and acted as if things were as they always were. So imagine everyone’s surprise when they lost less weight as a team than either White or Red. And not just less, but quite a lot less. Imagine! Surprise! Now, not one single viewer would have dared suspect that the Blue team “saved” their weight loss for the next week and, oh I don’t know, drank 20 litres of water each before weigh-in. That would be unthinkable! I mean, the little dance that Leigh was performing, jumping up and down and squeezing his legs together as if to stop a dam bursting, wasn’t so much a wee dance familiar to parents of toddlers the world over, but rather an endearing affectation indicative of his nervous disposition and excitement of the weigh-in. Wasn’t it?

On a side note, it was interesting that the Black team lost even less weight than the water balloon impersonators known as the Blue team, which just goes to show that a highly trained black ops assassin like Commando would be more suited to crawling on his belly through the jungles of ‘Nam searching out Charlie and poon-tang than training a bunch of girls.

But back to the main event. The weigh-in. Red began proceedings by trying to “play the game”. They thought they could fool the others by sending in a decoy, and drew a smiley face on a large sausage, sending it to elimination in the place of Joe. Unfortunately, Sharlene smelled a rat, whilst all Leigh could smell was a sausage. The game was up when Joe Sausage offered no objection to Leigh biting off his head. Now, please note that these scenes were cut from the episode that aired, for the benefit of the squeamish and fans of humanised meat products alike.

So with the cat out of the bag, soiling the carpet and hanging from the curtains, the Reds were forced to offer an human alternative to Sausage Boy and chose the other sausage, Damian, in the hope the rest of the contestants would recognise the life threatening situation that Damian was actually in and decide that if anyone needed the benefit of the highly stage managed, life threatening, over the top circus that is Biggest Loser Families, it was Damian. Some may call it playing on the other contestants sympathies. Some may call it a legitimate move to try and protect Joe from certain elimination. Some may call it a rhesus monkey. Though they’d be the mental ones.

Whatever it was, Damien was forced to venture into elimination with the svelte (or to put it more accurately, the svelte by comparison) Jodie. The reason Jodie had entered Biggest Loser Families was not so much to lose weight as to perfect her impersonation of woman with no personality. And what a sterling job she has done so far. However, it was this impersonation that seemed, initially, to weigh heavily (ha ha ha) in Damian’s favour at the weigh-in. After all, would the other contestants even remember her name?

But when the Blue and White teams saw Damian walk through that door into elimination, Jodie became an irrelevancy. Blue and White were white hot with anger. What they saw was the Red team putting up a person the Blue and White team thought that the Red team thought wouldn’t be voted out because the Blue and White team would think that Damian wouldn’t be able to survive on the outside and with that thought in mind the Red team thought to put up Damian based on what they thought the Blue and White team would think! I think.

Well, the Blue and White team were having none of it. No way were the Blue and White team going to let the Red team play games with them. After all, the White and Blue teams are paragons of virtue. I mean, clearly the Blue team only accidentally lost less weight than normal whilst having immunity by accident. Nevertheless, wondering how Damian, who needed Biggest Loser more than anyone else, could risk elimination, Lara said it best, when referring to the first time she saw Damian, noting that her “heart ached for him”, although this could have been a result of a small yet significant blood clot.

As a result of the shenanigans, Damian was voted out. Each contestant who voted for him let him know how they resented being played with. Well, each except Leigh, who said he wouldn’t mind being played with occasionally, just to, you know, relieve the stress a bit. But it was Damian, rather than Leigh, who was given an early release. As he prepared to leave, he said that he hoped he could make it on the outside. From all reports it is still a hope that Damian clings onto, although with the rather narrow doors used in the Biggest Loser house, it’s still touch and go whether he can make it too the outside, let alone on it.

Of course, the elimination of Damian sent shock waves through the house, and not just from him walking. The Blue, White and Black teams directed their anger at Joe for allowing Damian to put himself up, with the Blues and Whites neglecting to remember they actually voted him out. Joe was enraged, pointing out that Damian had insisted that he should go up, whilst Nathanial burst into tears, finally overcome by the shame of being in the worst reality television show since “Shit my Dad Says”, a look at the day to day goings on in a ward full of Alzheimer’s sufferers.

But of course, just when you thought it was the end of Damian, you discover it may not be the end of Damian. A new challenge was brought to the fore and for the winner, the opportunity to bring back a contestant of your choosing. However, the teams were split into two: Red versus the rest, in a battle of three challenges.

Joe and Nathanial divided the tasks according to their strengths. Joe was to take on all the challenges that involved a physical element, whilst Nathanial was to take on all the challenges that required someone to curl up in the feotal position and cry like a baby for hours on end. Fortunately for everyone involved, all the challenges were physical.

The first was Joe versus Leigh. Each had to hold a dumbbell over a paper line, and the first to relent and let their arms break the paper line would lose. This is a familiar dispute resolution process, and keen political observers will recognise it from the Oslo Accord, where Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin battled for hours using this same method as they attempted to decide what parts of Israel would be set aside for Palestinian occupation.

As it turned out, under all the subcutaneous fat, Leigh had quite weak arms and despite lots of yelling at each other and blown kisses, Joe won the challenge.

The second challenge involved Joe and Jarrod on opposing treadmills, each starting at a walk. Nathanial for Red and Craig for the rest were asked questions and if a question was answered wrong, the speed of the corresponding treadmill was increased. Surprisingly, some rather simple questions were answered incorrectly by both teams, which is an indication that the brain is the first part of the body to lose weight when dieting. Notwithstanding this, Nathanial came to the fore in this challenge, and showed the others where his real talents lay. Unfortunately, his real talents lay in getting answers completely wrong, forcing Joe to withdraw from the challenge before he had wasted too much energy. Although Joe came under heavy criticism from Jarrod for quitting, Jarrod’s a bit of a tool, so who cares.

The final challenge involved exercise cycles at dawn, with the first to 10km the winner. Joe, former elite cyclist versus Kellie, former slightly smaller person. The result was never in any doubt, though the producers of the show did drag out the suspense by staging the race over two nights. Michelle, trainer of the Red team did seem uncertain of the result. At one stage, she was “literally sweating bullets!” Fortunately, sweat bullets rarely cause fatal wounds, and are only used in situations where dictators can’t afford rubber ones to stop protesters.

With Joe winning two challenges out of three, red team won the right to bring back a former contestant. No prizes for guessing which one it would be, with Damian the natural choice. However, during the final challenge of the week, involving dragging bottles of water, originally destined for quake ravaged Christchurch, to and fro, Nathanial and Joe came to the realisation that Damian really was an annoying prick after all.

Cest la vie!

 

The Biggest Loser Australia: Families – Sun 6:30pm; Wed/Thu/Fri 7:30pm, Ch10.
Image sources: Channel 10.