BL Recap: Game Play

So last night was the third week of the new season of The Biggest Loser. Here's what went down ...

The temptation was as follows: Each team member was left alone in a room for five minutes with an assortment of food. Not healthy food -- we're talking pizza, peanut butter cups, donuts, you get the picture. The team who ate the most calories combined would get the opportunity to take their trainer home with them and train for 24 hours with their partners. Everyone on the ranch refused to eat anything ... except for the yellow team member. (Mandy? I think that's her name ...) She ate one piece of pizza "for the boys." She's a mom and misses her family and wanted to see them. And she cried after she ate it.

Two team members at home ate food: blue team and silver team. The silver team member at home, you may recall, is Carla. Joelle, the silver team member on the ranch, almost ate but decided not to at the last minute. Regardless, Carla consumed more calories than anyone else, so Joelle and Carla were going to bring Bob home to Detroit.

Joelle was excited about going home, and everyone was pissed off at her for it, because Mandy wanted to go home so bad and they thought it was mean of Joelle to rub it in Mandy's face that she wasn't going home. Personally, I think that everyone was just pissed at Joelle and were overreacting a little bit. And if Mandy REALLY wanted to see her kids that bad, she would have eaten more than one slice of pizza.

Well, Bob gets to Detroit, and sooner or later you know it's going to come out to Carla what a big baby Joelle has been for the past week. Carla, as expected, flips out. They fight. They cry. They make up ... kind of. Carla tells Joelle that she BETTER do her best to bring Carla back to the ranch.

(Meanwhile, Dan's orange teammate, whose name is escaping me and I'm too lazy to look it up, has been eating things like hot dogs and fried chicken back home. I'm worried about Dan. Their "couples" relationship is best friends, and if Dan does really well and loses a bunch of weight and his friend can't get a handle on his relationship with food, his friend could end up sabotaging Dan's success.)

Anywho. The challenge this week was a massive jump-rope challenge. Green team's Tara took it home ... but I found myself actually rooting for purple team's Kristin, just because she probably has never won anything like that in her life, and I felt like it would really mean a lot to her. She came in second.

Then came the weigh-in. Tara, of course, got immunity, and Dan, my other favorite, was safe. So was Kristin, whom I also like now. Below the yellow line were ... Joelle. Duh. And Damien from the red team.

It seemed like a no-brainer. But, of course, there was a twist. What happened was this: Damien and Joelle were both on Bob's team. Last week, when Dan and Jerry (Jillian's team) fell below the yellow line, Bob's team came to Jillian's team and asked Jillian's team how they were voting, as a matter of courtesy. This week, Jillian's team did the same. Of course Bob's team was sending Joelle home. Everyone thought that Jillian's team would follow their lead.

But. Jillian's team has apparently started game-playing already. Here's the issue: Damien is a stronger player than Joelle. So strategically for Jillian's team, it makes sense to send the stronger person home; then they still have to compete against Joelle, but it's not like that's as difficult as competing against Damien. Even though Bob's team all assumed they were going to vote for Joelle. Of course they didn't; they voted for Damien. And since the score was tied, and Damien's percentage of weight lost was lower than Joelle's, Damien went home. Joelle managed to sneak through by the skin of her teeth.

Pretty amazing stuff. I bet this starts some serious competition between Bob and Jillian's teams ...