There were eight candidates left at the start of this week's episode of "The Apprentice." Four of them have legitimate claims to be the winner: Kelly, Andy, Jennifer, and Kevin. One hadn't really shown much but hadn't messed up either: Wes. The other three have no chance, and I can only wonder how it is that they're still around: Ivana, Maria, Sandy. (The answer is that they're lucky, or that others were even worse.)
Just to recap the lameness of the three:
Ivana -- terrible PM, exhibited no leadership
Sandy -- her team lost the restaurant challenge because of the decor, which she was in charge of; until the last challenge, had been fundamentally useless; won a challenge for her team, but only because it was her exact line of business!
Maria -- keeps telling us how great she is at marketing, but she's terrible; lied to her teammates on two different occasions to cover up her mistakes.
This week's challenge was to create an in-store catalog for Levi's to help sell its jeans. Kevin led Apex and Wes led Mosaic. Because the teams were uneven (Apex had 3, Mosaic had 5), Trump told Wes to select one teammate to send to Apex. Personally, I would have sent Maria, or maybe Sandy, but Wes sent Kelly(?!?). I guess the "thinking" was that since Kelly had immunity for being last week's winning project manager, it was safer to get rid of him. Apex, naturally, was quite pleased to get a strong performer like Kelly.
Apex came up with a very good idea: a wheel that you could turn to see which type of Levi's jeans suited your needs best. Actually, it was Ivana's idea, and I have to give her a lot of credit. I also have to applaud her for coming up with the best line in one of the confessionals, when she mused about why it was that Chris (last week's firee) had let blonde Jennifer escape the boardroom: "He was hypnotized by her fembot ways. . . ." (while using her hands to mimic Jennifer's figure). (Some asinine bulletin board troll argues that Ivana "proves" that all Asian-American women are jealous of and want to be like Caucasian women. Apart from the idiocy of using one reality TV person to overgeneralize to about 3 million Asian-American females, I'm not even sure that the initial premise is correct. Ivana clearly does not like and does not respect Jennifer, but as you'll see, this episode gives her some reason.)
PM Kevin also had the idea of using themselves to model the Levi's clothes, on the theory that these clothes appeal to everyone, and they look more like average people than models do. I suppose, but they still look more like models than they look like average people. (No mistake in how I wrote those sentences.)
Meanwhile, Mosaic was a bundle of laughs. For us, the viewers. Maria became a total control freak, taking over the directing of the photography of the models, telling Wes to "back off!" when he tried to get her to speed the shoot up, then locking herself in the editing room with the computer geeks to produce the catalog. What exactly was the rest of the team doing?
Then, when confronted by Sandy, Maria broke down in tears . . . . Boo hoo.
Finally, in presenting the finished product to the Levi's execs, Maria actually said, "If it's wrong to be sexy, I don't want to be right." Yikes!
When Apex presented its wheel catalog, the execs were clearly taken by it. At that point, when it should have been Ivana to explain the idea, Jennifer jumped in and started talking. Now, it's possible that Ivana was flailing and Jennifer saved the team, but the way it was presented, it looked like Jennifer was trying to insinuate that she came up with the idea. And when Trump asked the Levi's exec who did the best job on Apex, he said that Jennifer did. (To be fair to Jennifer, the only thing the exec could go on was the presentation, so it may be that Ivana did not do a good job of explaining her idea.)
Apex got to go spend time listening to Billy Joel. Mosaic got to go spend time being whacked by the Donald, Bill Rancic (last season's winner, subbing for George), and Carolyn. Wes took the entire team with him to the boardroom, but Andy and Sandy were pretty safe. Trump did ask Andy why he was so quiet when he was a debating champion, and Andy responded that one thing he learned while debating was when to talk and when to listen, and that this team didn't do a good job of listening to one another. Trump was impressed by the answer.
Basically, Trump concentrated his firepower on Maria and Wes. Wes should have fired or at least benched Maria after she disobeyed him on the photo shoot and barked, "Back off!" (Here, Andy helpfully pointed out that when he was PM on the NYPD recruiting commercial, he was able to control Maria's passion, thus adding in a subtle jab at both Maria and Wes.) Who was it going to be, Maria or Wes? My wife and I could only hope that it would be Maria. . . .
"Maria, you're fired." YES!!!
But wait, there's more.
"Wes, I hate to do this, but you're fired too."
Whoa! A double firing! And they had to share the cab ride at the end of the episode, prompting Wes to say, "I wish I had my own cab."
UPDATE (11/22): Prof. Althouse wonders how I was able to write this entire blog on the episode without mentioning "ass" even once. The truth is, I had intended to title this blog entry "but(t) but(t) but(t)" but somehow forgot to do so. Mostly, I was fixated on the satisfaction of seeing Maria get fired and everything else slipped my mind.
Strong episode indeed. I even slow-moed to find your co-blogger's name in the credits.
Posted by: Matt | November 20, 2004 at 06:55 AM