Maybe it’s just as well I waited, for a couple of reasons. One week and one more episode later, I have cooled off a bit from my initial reaction, plus I’ve gotten more of the overall story. Such as it is. Sort of.
The November 10 episode felt weird right off the bat. First came the announcement that there would be a double-elimination that week, which made all the contestants super-grim. The person who lost the lowest percentage of their body weight that week would be immediately deported from The Ranch. (They don’t call it deportation; I kinda wish they did.) The next two lowest percentages would be up for a vote. And at this point in the season, there were eight contestants left divided into two 4-person cliques: the kids and the oldies. Whichever side lost a member to the red-line-no-vote elimination would be at a significant disadvantage in the voting elimination.
Then Bob and Jillian were informed of the double-elimination and a long – really, ridiculously, uncharacteristically drawn-out long – scene of hand-wringing ensued between the two trainers. Jillian repeatedly stated “I know it’s not politically correct or whatever, but Shay HAS TO stay” and Bob vacillated somewhere between agreeing with Jillian in theory and being willing (or able) to actually, you know, do anything about it.
Shay is the contestant who showed up at the ranch weighing 476, the heaviest ever. She’s also only 29, which puts her in the kids clique (even though she’s married and has two step-sons). By week 9 she was still tipping the Crazy Roulette Scale at 376, great progress for her but still hella-unhealthy. I confess that it took me a while to figure out why Jillian saying that Shay needed to stay on the ranch as long as possible was politically incorrect. She’s morbidly obese, which is both obvious at a glance and undeniable. Is calling a fat person fat, or not even that, just saying that a fat person needs to be in the most favorable environment for losing weight, somehow politically incorrect? Or was it the fact that Jillian was taking sides and playing favorites, which doesn’t make sense either because she has done that in previous seasons, too. (Finally it hit me – Jillian was leaving unspoken that Shay needed to stay on the ranch because Shay is poor and can’t afford to go and join a gym and might not even be able to afford meals healthier than junk and fast food. Which I guess isn’t very PC but, in all likelihood, it’s probably true.)
So the contestants work out and then there’s a circus-themed challenge, which at least got a chuckle out of me as everyone talked into the camera about how magical and wonderful the circus is, except Rebecca who matter-of-factly claimed “I hate clowns.” Right on, sister. Creepy MFers. Anyway, the challenge goes down and right before it starts Rudy and Shay are talking/plotting/strategizing … or are they just joking around? The cliques pick away at each other in the challenge until Rudy and Danny are left against Shay and Shay loses her shit because now Rudy is working against her and she thought they had an understanding which Rudy now denies and it just gets ugly and acrimonious and uncomfortable. When Rudy finally wins the challenge, his victory is accompanied by the most bitterly ironic confetti-cannon in the history of circuskind.
Then it’s weigh-in time and Daniel – Shay’s original partner – is in last place below the red line and is immediately booted. Shay and Amanda are the two below the yellow line who will be voted on. So not only has the kids clique lost one vote in Daniel, but it’s not even a vote between an oldie and a kid, it’s two more kids up for elimination. Rebecca and Amanda are BFFs, so Shay’s fate totally rests in the hands of the other clique. And, call me naïve-o-supremo, but I honestly thought the grown-ups would vote Amanda off so that Shay could stay because, PC or not, she did need to stay. And yet Shay gets voted off. Rudy actually cast the deciding vote and completely failed to justify it with a rambling monologue about the importance of setting goals which made no sense in the (highly edited?) context of the episode whatsoever.
I was stunned. In the back of my mind I believed that, if nothing else, when Bob and Jillian left the weigh-in they would, in saying their ritual goodbyes, explicitly instruct everyone how to vote (again, a tactic they’ve used before) and that would save Shay. But it didn’t happen. And to top off the depressing sundae of doom, they didn’t even do a post-show Shay segment, focusing instead on Daniel, though really focusing on Daniel’s old partner from last season who has apparently let himself go and undone all the good TBL once did him, which Daniel called him on to no avail. Holy crap-sandwich. (Apparently I could have seen how Shay was doing now by watching Leno immediately after TBL, but … I’d rather stick a hot branding iron in one eye and an electric cattle prod in the other.)
All this past week I was looking forward to last night’s TBL because the TBL formula is as follows: every episode ends with an elimination vote. The next episode opens with some reactions from the remaining contestants about how tough the vote was and how much they’re going to miss the eliminated player. Then the trainers come in and ask the contestants to recount what happened at elimination. I was really looking forward to that last bit, and the trainers going ape-shit on everyone who voted Shay off. Petty, sure, but I anticipated it eagerly.
And then last night’s episode was all kinds of misshapen. It started at 8:30, the prior half-hour given over to the Merry Madagascar Christmas Special. (On November 17th? Srsly?) And it started with the contestants meeting Tim Gunn and Tabatha for Makeover Week. No remorse about sending Shay home, no furious vengeance laid down upon them by Bob and Jillian, just moving on to the makeovers, which are supposed to be a reward to the final six for making it that far but seemed really superficial (I mean, moreso than your usual fashion-and-hair makeover) and borderline inappropriate compared to what immediately preceded them. The lack of fallout from last week was a glaring omission, and made me wonder if maybe there was a secret missing half-hour of the show, cut in the final editing process for being a way too depressing revelation as to just how venal the remaining competitors are, and replaced at the last minute by a poorly-timed holiday cartoon. I know that sounds like the paranoid tooth-gnashing of an unrepentant conspiracy theorist, but there it is.
Meanwhile last night the elimination came down to Liz versus Rebecca and unsurprisingly Rebecca was sent home. Rebecca always seemed down to earth, like someone I would have hung out with in college, and I ended up liking her a lot and was pulling for her to win it all. But the oldies clique was too much for her. Bizarrely, Rudy once again was the deciding vote and once again he gave a nonsensical speech about why he voted the way he did which caused Rebecca to absolutely break down. I wanted to reach into the TV and explain to her that we now have an established pattern which shows that Rudy lies at elimination. He just makes shit up, as if for some unknowable reason he is incapable of owning up to his true motivations. He didn’t send Shay home because of “goals”, he did it because she pissed him off. Similarly, it was never about Rudy “not trusting” Rebecca, it was about the fact that Rebecca stood a much better chance of beating him for the grand prize than Liz does, so he eliminated the threat, case closed. Fortunately, from the follow-up segment it looks like Rebecca did just fine off the ranch and has a good shot of being the runner-up at-home winner.
There’s one more elimination to go before the finale and I don’t much care who gets booted now. Amanda is dull as dishwater. Liz has always had a bit of a mean-old-lady to her, but Rudy is emerging as a late-swerve villain. Allen is almost as dull as Amanda, but probably has the best reason to hang tough beyond everyone’s standard “stay healthy for my family” (he’s a firefighter and needs to be in better shape). Okie Danny used to be a lot more fun when he was bug-eyed yokel crazy, but he’s been taking himself distressingly seriously since having some kind of breakthrough a couple weeks ago. I guess if I had to pick someone to root for to win it all now, I’d be torn between Allen and Danny, which just about guaran-damn-tees that one of them will get eliminated next week.
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