Tonight’s episode features the first major challenge of the series so far. As far as challenge concepts go, it was really not that exciting. But for interpersonal dramas, it was quite the doozy!

Has Courtney pulled the stick out of his butt and become a team player? Will Gerard give up on some more exercise? Will Jillian jump up and down some more? Read on to find out!

Very dramatic opening as the Fatties head away from the mansion before dawn in a procession of cars, which it turns out are taking them off to their first major challenge.
Ajay tells them that they’re in Hyde Park, surrounded by tall buildings, but one towers above them all – Sydney Tower. Much blathering about how tall and impressive it is follows, all of which is just a delaying tactic to avoid telling us what the actual challenge involves!

The winners of the challenge have a choice between a nice lunch at a local restaurant, or an intense training session with the national dragon boat team…
The losers will have 5kg added to their team’s weight at the first competitive weigh-in!

Due to the team number imbalance, the Blue team needs to sit out a member. The means to decide this was to guess the number of calories in a cheese and biscuit snack.
Red team guessed 125 calories, Blue team guess 220 calories. The snack is a mere 86 calories!
Red team wins the mini-challenge and decides to have Mel sit out the major challenge, since she is “light on her feet”, apparently. I guess compared to some of the other Blue teamers, like Damien, that is true. I think sitting the generally very determined Kelly out may have been the better choice, however.

They finally get their butts up to the top of the tower and we find out that Michael is, well, terrified of heights. He was completely freaking out, but to his credit he sucks it up and is determined not to flake out and essentially lose the challenge for his team.

The challenge involves performing 50 laps of the tower, and every 8 laps the leader of the group must change. The team as a whole can not start a new lap unless everyone is together.
At some point during the race, Damien cuts a fairly nasty gash in his finger, but he doesn’t utter a word of complaint, just gets it wiped off and gets back to powering through his lap. And surprisingly, Gerard is the other one to really power through his laps in the lead.
Kelly starts to get pretty shirty with Gerard, as he’s going much too fast for Sam and some of the others to keep up. She made a good point, that the team needs to stick together to be heroes together, not individually.

The much bitchier and backstabbing Red team is going to have a bit of trouble in that regard. Not to mention Courtney’s tendency to just give up when things get a bit tough!
Ajay explains the challenge to the Red Team and only Greg seems unfazed.
When told that the team would only do as well as its weakest link, Alex confessed in the asides, that that made him very nervous.
Red team have an interesting game plan for this challenge – go as fast as they can, as long as they can, until someone gives out, when they’ll take a break.
Once it was Marty’s turn, he heads off much too fast and almost loses them the game for not waiting for his whole team to be back on the starting platform.
At one point someone calls out that Alex can take a break if he needs to, but Alex refuses calling out “No! I won’t let down the team!”
A couple of laps later, someone else says we can take a break, “We don’t want you to kill yourself!” “No! I’ll die for the team!”
Alex is virtually killing himself trying to keep up with everyone, and what does that kind old soul Courtney have to say? He’s worried that Alex is going to lose them the challenge! The poor fella is literally screaming in agony as he goes up the stairs, but he’s pushing through it.

When it’s Alex’s turn to sign his name to the roster and take the lead, he adds “For the kids” to his listing, because it’s all for them.

Bit of a mixed reaction from his team. Some of them were clearly appreciative of the enormous effort he’d put in, but some were clearly still unimpressed. After they got him back down off the tower, he was so stuffed he actually had to go on oxygen from the medics, so it was pretty clear that he’d done it pretty hard for his team.
It remains to be seen whether the team will repay his loyalty with their own, though. If they were smart they’d be dumping the clearly negative influence of Courtney at their earliest possible opportunity.
With immunity from elimination, that could be a tall order, though.

Red Team’s time: 1hr 10mins 12secs
Blue Team’s time: 1hr 6mins 29secs
Blue team wins!

Marty and Courtney both blame Alex for their failure in another disgraceful display of the Red team’s lack of solidarity, rather than admitting they chose the wrong strategy for winning the challenge they’ve picked on Alex yet again!

And now Ajay finally tells us that the losers also get the winners rejected “reward”. Since the Blue team chose the “wrong” option once again, by picking food over exercise as so often happens. You’d think these people would have learnt by now that food is half the reason they’re there in the first place.
The Red team get the intense workout on the dragon boat, since the Blue team will be off gorging themselves. Probably not what they really wanted after all that exercise atop the tower, but with a 5kg weight penalty in the weigh-in it’s probably a good thing for their chances.

Overall this episode really highlighted the difference between the Red and Blue teams. Red is continuing to splinter as a team, instead of working together, while Blue has their squabbles but ultimately pulls together as a group. Blue really had no business winning a speed race, since Damien is by far the largest person on the show, and they also have the second largest on their team, Michael. Now, Damien probably has great lung capacity, due to singing for his band, but it can’t be easy to lug 200+ kilos around and around at a fast walk for an hour?
Alex is certainly quite large as well but with the support of his team I have to wonder whether they might have gone a bit faster overall by adopting a more slow and steady approach.

Sunday’s episode will be the first competitive weigh-in and there seems to be a mixture of very very happy and very very sad looking people in that room. Look for Damien to put up an impressive number, as there’s not been any complaints from Bob or Shannan about his efforts so far, unlike some of the much smaller folk on the show.