So, tonight Sarah returns to the show and the Red team is not at all impressed with her flip-flopping attitude, and I think they’re quite right to be upset, as she’s had time with her family now that they would’ve liked to have had.

Nah, she didn’t really come back, I’m just messing with you.

Or am I? Read on to find out!

Jillian and Michelle seem to be getting along quite well. They both turn up at the Mansion together to come ask the Reds about the Temptation challenge. Jillian looked a little unimpressed about some of them giving in, but in her little side-interview she confessed that she didn’t really care, since it was only 17 calories anyway.

Shannan went to the Blues alone, presumably because Bob is off trying to save Sarah. Or, as she’s now known on the official forums, the “Princess of the Tim Tams”!

Bob turns up shortly afterwards though, once Shannan has got them training again. As soon as Bob gets in and catches up on the results of the temptation, he grabs Gerard and takes him off for some one-on-one training. After pushing him for a while, Gerard sort of gives up and says he’s not doing it anymore with Bob, so Bob says okay, off you go, back to the treadmill if that’s what you want. Bob seems to have come around to Jillian’s way of thinking – if you don’t want to put in the effort then he’s not going to help you!
After a while Shannan pulls the rest of them – bar Michael who is currently training with Bob – off to do some running and passing of the medicine ball as a group exercise. A short way in to that and Gerard is starting to get shirty again and wanting to give up on Shannan’s exercise as well.
Shannan cajoles him a bunch, but Gerard is having none of it and eventually he cracks it entirely and storms off, Shannan trailing along behind telling him he shouldn’t give up, etc. At this point I’m wondering if maybe he’s going through sugar withdrawals or something. I know some people can get a bit cranky if they’ve not had enough sugar lately, so…?

Back to the Red team and Courtney is slacking off on training, everyone sort of thinking it’s because he’s got immunity.
Jillian starts razzing him for it and he tries to tell her to shut up, Michelle dares him to say it again, this time he reiterates, but says “fuck off” instead. (Assuming that’s what he said – it was bleeped, naturally.) So Jillian decides she’d had enough of his antics and takes him aside and basically canes him, pushes him tremendously hard, making him do jumping exercises and work hard on the treadmill. Eventually he tries to give up on the treadmill and Jillian won’t let him. Then he tried to use the “I need water!” excuse. And Jillian was having none of that either, telling him *she’ll* get the water!

Help! Jillian! I need water too! :-D

Eventually Courtney, too, storms off, much to the disgust of the rest of the red team, who seem to be turning on Courtney now, rather than continuing to pick on Alex.

Back to Blue and Shannan has taken Gerard under his wing to try and get him to regain some confidence in training and get him working hard. After trying him out on the resistance bikes to little success, Gerard retreats to the treadmill once more. A little while later Shannan decides to try the boxing training again, as he got a lot out of Gerard the first time doing that.
It starts out fairly tame, Gerard basically hitting like an underweight teenage girl, as Shannan easily blocks the punches with his gloves. Shannan keeps pushing him to hit harder and fire up and eventually Gerard starts letting loose, not very well coordinated punches but a lot of them, a lot harder and so on. Shannan starts taking them on his chest instead, so it was obviously still not that impressive, but at least he did start to cut loose for once.
All through this we have Shannan giving those side-interviews, explaining his thought processes behind getting Gerard out and boxing again and trying to fire him up and such. Really earnt a lot of points with me here as what he was saying made a lot of sense and showed that, even though he’s willing and able to push people hard in training, there is a human being behind it, and he does actually know what he’s doing!

And now… The Walk!
“The Walk” is out over a bridge in the bush, to a platform with four stone pedestals, each of which has a stone tablet on it, with one of the following on the underside:
“Choose a contestant to have 24 hours of exclusive training with one of their trainers.”
“Choose a blue team member to sit out of the next major challenge.”
“Swap a blue team member for a red team member.”
“Give your immunity to another contestant.”

And how did Courtney choose? He went for the pedestal with the prettiest flowers. SO GAY!

We don’t get it revealed straight away though, Courtney comes back to the mansion after the ad break, with the rock.
One of the theories about the rock was that it might get added to someone’s weight during the weigh-in? Not sure who was saying that, but it would be an amusing enough punishment. However…

Courtney sits down and explains the 4 options for everyone before revealing the result of the rock.

But as it turns out, he got the 24 hour trainer option. Perhaps the most boring one, in terms of added drama, but such is life.

Munnalita theorises that it would be best to give that to one of the guys, because they’re the ones who will lose the most weight anyway and that would be the most advantageous. Apparently she’s forgotten that everyone else will still have the remaining trainer anyway! And that the guys will most easily lose the weight regardless, so it would actually have been better, in that respect, to give it to one of the women, to get her to lose more weight than she otherwise would have.

In the end though, Courtney nominates Alex to have 24 hours of sweet, sweet Jillian training!
Both because he still feels Alex is slacking off and eating too much, but also because it means Jillian won’t be busting Courtney’s hump for at least one day. Which is pretty indicative of who the real slacker is at the moment.

And there endeth the episode!

Tomorrow night’s episode will be the Major Challenge, climbing Centerpoint/Sydney Tower, as some kind of foot race it seems. It doesn’t say what the winning team gets, if anything, but the losers will receive a 5kg penalty going into the very first weigh-in.
Which is really, really unfair. That penalty needs to be given the flick as it makes the effort a team puts in virtually meaningless. But they don’t seem to have learnt from last season so I doubt it will be going away any time soon…