Biggest Loser, Season 9 - Episode 7

Oh boy! Bye-bye Olympics and hello Biggest Loser! How I missed you! When I was starting to teach my class an associate pastor showed up, sat down and said “I’m ready for your class.” I knew he was joking so I waited while he paused and he goes “haha, nope, I’m going home to watch the Biggest Loser!” Even though I knew I was recording it, I was still jealous.

Just when I thought I was done with seeing anything Olympic-related for the next two years, the show opens up with a review of what happened during the last episode. I’m all for short reviews. Anybody who knows me knows that I have bad short-term (and probably long-term) memory. A little refresher never hurt anybody, but this refresher was kind of annoying. Two weeks of Olympics is enough for me.

Remember what happened at the end of the last episode? Orange n Black was battling it out for the spot to stay on campus….and they were both in trouble. Crooked torch versus tense pain in the knees – who will prevail? Orange made it when Black dropped the torch in just under 10 minutes. I don’t think I could even do it for 5 minutes.

Yay! Next came the Temptation Challenge… my favorite challenge of them all, mostly because I get to see Jillian and Bob freak out over who ate what. Food challenges always come with a very nice reward – and that never ends well. This challenge involved eating chocolate chip cookies. Sunshine commented on how much she loves chocolate chip cookies…. who doesn’t? However, too much of one thing can never be good for anybody. Ali announced that now everyone would be split into black and blue. Surprise, surprise – winner of the temptation chooses who’s on black and blue. This person would also choose who gets immunity, even themselves, and there’s a catch….

Ali announced that before they know what the game is, everybody’s gotta decide if they’re in or out. Ali counts to three and only two people decided to play. Michael and Drea (white and black) were the suckers who decided they wanted the power – how nice. The game is Memory – match up the artery-clogging treats that are behind each square. Inside there somewhere, there are two golden cards to match up – the “pick the teams” card. If you match any of the treats, the other person has to eat a cookie and you keep playing. If you don’t get a match, you eat a cookie and 100 calories that goes with it. Once someone matches up the golden cards, the game’s over.

If you have played Memory before, you’d know that like any game of memory you don’t get a match during the first few turns unless you’re extremely lucky. I figured that they’d be going at least 3 or 4 turns before they even start to see the 2nd match of anything. This is funny – my roomie is sitting with me playing right along with the contestants and pointing to where all the matches are. It might be easy on this side of the screen but imagine all the pressure that’s put on you to choose the right squares.

Lance (red) pointed out that he was extremely happy he didn’t volunteer to play because of all the cookies and food that Michael and Drea are eating. Yeah – duh. Anytime there’s a temptation challenge, you do not play! All those calories aren’t worth it. About 6 or 7 rounds in, Drea is whipping Michael’s butt and has found 3 matches. She has also found one of the golden cards that give the power to choose teams.

Michael finally gets a match and Drea ends up eating a PB&J sandwich. The game still hasn’t ended and at this point, Michael is just praying that Drea finds the ticket just so it’ll be over. But then he says that he has to find the ticket or otherwise this would have all been for nothing. Yeah, you think? After all those calories and after all the matches Drea has made – Michael found the last ticket and matched them up.

There might be lots of but kissing now….or maybe not. Michael said he wanted to be fair but at the same time he needed to protect himself. He hasn’t done anything off the charts thus far; he did have great power in the past and was fair.

Now came time for Michael to announce who is going to be on what team. First order of business: splitting up Koli and Sam. Whoa – splitting up Tongan cousins. Smart if you want to play the game but not smart if you want to stay friends with them. Next, he split up the orange team. Drea mentioned to Michael that she wanted to stay with Bob but Michael put her with Jillian. The only thing he honored was putting red with Bob like he wanted. At least he has one ally. It seems that he’s building one team up against the other … strong versus weak. Did he even think that after the losing team loses a contestant that he’d be joining them (IF he chose himself for Immunity)? Most likely he’d be stuck with the weaker team. Not smart. Or maybe he’s betting that he’d lose the most out of everyone each week and have immunity each time (if they still do immunity for person who lost the most for that team). My head is spinning with all these different game tactics. So many ways to do stuff – and so many ways to make enemies.

Michael kept pink together. I figured he’d keep yellow together and give himself immunity. Right? But wait!!! Michael didn’t give himself immunity. He gave it to O’Neal (yellow) and put himself on the blue team. He’s betting that black will lose weigh in and that O’Neal will end up there and thus Sunshine up from her father. That’s horrible. Black looked so tiny versus the blue. There’s no way that they’ll win the weigh in… however, Jillian was faced with that challenge before. She was given a black team back when there was a red and blue team. Jillian got stuck with the outcasts and eventually the outcasts kicked red and blue’s butts. I really hope this is what happens this time around. This would make for excellent TV!

Enter Jillian. One pissed Jillian. Sprinkle in a little bit of peeved Bob. The end result: a lot of yelling. Jillian was yelling at Michael about giving everybody a fair chance. Why can’t everybody stay based on hard work and not manipulation? Michael said that he couldn’t make it even and increase the risk of sending himself home. Well maybe if he made it all even, he’d kick himself into overdrive and lose all that weight.

Bob tells blue that regardless of them being stacked against black, there’s still no time to slack. It would be funny to see Bob say “you know what? I don’t agree with how the teams are set up” and just walk off. Michael had the gall to tell Miggy “if you don’t lose weight for my team, you’re gone. You’re no use to me.” This isn’t the Michael that we came to love. Greed will get the best of anybody, huh?

Here comes the first challenge for the black/blue teams. This is their first test of seeing how well they all work together. The task was to pull your banner up a tall building by pulling them up from the roof. Blue had a strong start but eventually, they started to fall apart and black was creeping up on them. I’m rooting for the black – I’ve always liked the underdogs. In the end, blue won and they received letters from home. At least black gave up a good fight.

At the weigh in, Michael felt that he needed to lose a lot of pounds to prove himself to his team. He ends up losing 15 and breaks Rudy’s record from last year of 101 pounds in 7 weeks. He lost 107. Way to go… I guess… I like Rudy a whole lot better and would have liked him to keep his record.

Lance’s personal record was to get out of 300 and he needed 6 pounds to do it. He lost 5 and got to an even 300. Hopefully he’ll break through that wall next week.

Blue team pulled two big numbers (13 and 10) and the rest were average. Nonetheless, they put up a big number for the blue team to match. They need to lose a little more than 39 pounds. It came down to an average of about 6 pounds each person. I’m hoping that if a few of them fall below 6 pounds, that Sam could make up for the difference. But it just might be too much of a job to carry. Drea played the food temptation game and lost so she was the first up for the blue team. She only lost 5. Cheryl only lost 4. Sherry lost 6. Sam loses 8. Stephanie pulled 8… it was the first time she lost that much since week 1. Ashley needs to lose 9 to keep her team safe….do I feel a commercial break coming on here? Yep. Go figure….After the commercial break; we saw that Ashley lost 10! TEN! Eat that, Michael! I’m taking an early bet that Michael would be the one to go home, but let’s see.

I spoke too soon. Ali announced that Michael has immunity because he lost the most percentage of weight out of everybody on the blue team. What a bummer.

I’m curious, who decides the order that they sit in at the elimination? Before and during the elimination, Michael kept saying that it shouldn’t have been them. Uh, right. Hey Michael, that’s another backfire. Maybe you should have learned your lesson after that big backfire during the string challenge. Playing games isn’t working out for you, you should stick to just losing weight and staying on campus by pure heart and determination.

In the end, it came down to Miggy and Lance because they were the two lowest percentages. Miggy ended up going home because everybody figured that Lance would be a better asset for the challenges (they have O’Neal coming in and he can’t do challenges). By now, everybody has learned the challenges could make or break your week. How sad for Miggy – but she won’t be missed. She tends to be stressed out a lot and she passes that on to the people around her. I have a good feeling that she’ll do well at home. After all, she’s got that fire in her that we saw during the first episode.

I’m up for another exciting episode of the Biggest Loser. Why must we wait another week!?