Last night on the finale of NBC’s “The Biggest Loser,” host Alison Sweeney mentioned that this is the longest season in Biggest Loser history. Since it began shortly after New Year’s Day, I can see the math adding up. There were also 22 contestants this season.

The live finale of the show is always a big event, probably why “American Idol” decided to move its performance show to Tuesday this week–to compete head-to-head. Of course, I blog about both here, so that was annoying to me. Anyway, the first order of business was to bring out Jay and Irene, and find out who America voted to compete for the $250K grand prize along with sisters Hannah and Olivia. The winner was…Irene! So there would be three women competing for the grand prize, and Jay was relegated to compete for the $100K “at-home” prize.

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For a reality show that changes things up frequently, “The Biggest Loser” can get a tad predictable and formulaic at times. That’s why I was fully expecting the final four to have to run a marathon as they have done the last few seasons. But alas, they did not. Maybe they felt they had proved their point. Anyway, here is how last night’s episode went down….

They had the final four–Jay, Irene, Hannah and Olivia–sit in a post-eliminating-Austin pow-wow with host Alison Sweeney and kind of feign fist pumps that they were in said Final Four. Okay, we get it! But seriously, who saw this coming? Tell me you had any of these folks in the finale.

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Last night’s episode of “The Biggest Loser” exposed who the Final Four would be, but not before some weird “final exams” administered by the trainers–Bob, Jillian, Cara and Brett. Of course, the prize was not weird–a cool $10K. They would have to show the trainers how much they learned by either showing them how to ride a spin bike, offering advice, boxing Cara, or answering questions about nutrition. The second part of that was that they would be competing in a Biggest Loser video game using their own avatars. Ha! Olivia won the overall challenge, edging out her sister Hannah by a hair.

The main challenge was stacking sandbags up colored flights of stairs or something (can you tell how much I actually watched this?). Austin won the challenge and had a 1-pound advantage at the weigh-in. Then, there was more final exam stuff–Brett took them all to Subway where they had to guess the exact calorie count of a sweet onion teriyaki sub. Hannah won that and a $500 Subway gift card.

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Last night’s episode of “The Biggest Loser” on NBC was overshadowed again by “The Voice,” and that’s fine because it kept the show to one hour. It was also, finally, makeover week. “Project Runway’s” Tim Gunn rode in on a horse and buggy to the Biggest Loser ranch and announced that it was not only makeover week, but that he had two surprises.

So the five semi-finalists–Austin, Hannah, Olivia, Irene and Jay–were treated to makeovers, and most of them looked great. Hannah’s hair was dyed blonde and looked borderline hideous. Then they had their family members waiting for them back at the ranch for a celebration, including Gunn’s hiring of the band One Republic. Well, I know he didn’t actually hire them, but you get the drift.

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Don’t you just love it when reality TV hosts, judges and contestants are “shocked” at something obvious? I am exaggerating, sure, but not a whole lot when you think about how things went down on “The Biggest Loser” last night.

First of all, thanks to the show NBC is pimping hard, “The Voice,” which premiered last night, they chopped “The Biggest Loser” down to an hour, a way more reasonable amount of time to expect us to devote, DVR or not.

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