The Apprentice Episode 2

Last week on The Frankie Suits Circus Parade:
Trump moved to LA and invited a lot of hopefuls to live in a mansion next door to him. The first task was to pitch a tent. Heidi was pointed out as a leader and Frankie was pointed out as a really loud person. Two teams were formed and they competed in a car wash task. Heidi's team won and Frankie's team had to sleep outside in tents right next to the mansion. Heidi's team met Wolfgang Puck for two seconds before Trump told him to go back to work like a good little boy. Martin had a lot of old Nigerian sayings, but drip, drip, drip, the BS sure seems to crack the stone, too.

This week on The Tale of the Speedo:
So this week, teams have to design a line of swimsuits for Trina Turk. They will then have a fashion show to present their creations. Buyers will be at the show ordering their swimwear and whichever team gets the most sales wins. So basically, Trump saw two of the more successful reality shows- Top Model and Project Runway- and was like, hey, maybe we should do that on our show.

Heidi remains the project manager for her team and Nicole becomes the PM for her team. The team names are Kinetic and Arrow, by the way. And yeah, what the hell? First of all, we don't see any footage of them choosing names. Probably because it was so boring, judging by the lame names they came up with. Oh, and Nicole's idea of a good team leader is someone who makes everybody else so happy and motivated that they end up performing really well or something. It's stupid. A good team leader is someone who manages skills and tasks well and inspires while staying in control of everything. That's what I think anyway. Oh, and a good leader needs to be practical and be able to forecast future problems and fix them or at least have a solution before they happen. A lot of people aren't good at stepping outside and seeing possible faults in their own work.

Anyway, they get started and the issue on Heidi's team is Heidi thinks an orange and brown woman's suit is a little boring and bland while Marisa thinks it's the hottest thing ever. It's really not a big issue in the end and they end up sticking to it. I personally agree that it's not very exciting and I don't really think orange and brown are good colors for bathing suits. Especially together. You put the ASU gymnastics team in those and it's like camoflauge. The orange blends in with their skin and the brown straps just look like extensions of their skunk-like hair. After seeing them last night, I think they might beat out Georgia when it comes down to who looks more like George Hamilton.

Back to The Apprentice. On Nicole's not-so-happy team, Carey is really excited about the task and is already sketching ideas in his notepad. Somebody wasn't skilled enough to make it on Runway, huh. He's really set on this idea of a man's speedo as one of their items. Nobody on the team really knows what to say, so they don't really say anything. Eventually, they've let it go so long that Carey's already make the suit and there's no turning him back now. He walks out and models it proudly. Most of the team compliments him, but come on, it's obvious that no buyer would risk buying this suit.

The only person to object is Michelle. She says she doesn't agree that this color or style is a good idea to use. Everybody starts talking about how Michelle isn't a team player and is hard to get along with. Keep in mind that Michelle is right. She's one-hundred percent correct here. Carey's not hearing any of it and keeps walking around in it.

When we get to the show, we have Carey and Nicole modeling for Team Trainwreck and Surya modeling for Heidi's team. Everything was boring, blah, uninspired. Except for Carey's, which was not bland, just not marketable.

In the end, Heidi's team wins by a buck fifty again and they get to go to the Playboy Mansion to met Hef.. which is hilarious because that team is all women, one gay man, and Surya, who doesn't exactly strike me as the player type. Exactly why this is awesome. Hahahaha.

So Heidi's team meets Holly, Bridget, and Kendra, The Girls Next Door. I love this reward because how in the world would The Donald think these career-driven women would like this at all? They are the exact opposite of the type of people who would want to meet Hef. They have gone through their lives, most of them, working in fields that are typically male-dominated, wanting to rise to the top based on merit rather than looks. Hahahaha. It's all rather awkward and nobody really seems like a wild party-type. Trump arrives and at some point someone does a requisite confessional about how impressive it is that Hef built such an empire from basically nothing.

Back in the Trump Trailer Park, Tim has pointed out to Michelle that she and he do not have the same interests and would not likely have friends in common in the real world. Michelle seems a little surprised that nobody likes her and says she wishes people would have told her at the time. Which ends up being twisted into her saying, after the fact, that she wished she could have been a better teammate during the task. Instead, what I got was, if you all had a problem, why didn't you bring it up when it was crucial for the team to be meshing well?

Anyway, Heidi joins Ivanka and The Donald again. It comes down to Carey had a crappy design, Michelle isn't a team player, and Nicole didn't call out Carey's design. James makes a great point in saying ultimately, the design has to pass through the PM before it goes into production. Nicole took great offense to that when James was really just pulling a Yul and wanting to be diplomatic about it. He's right, too. I still wouldn't have fired Nicole, probably, but she had much greater fault in this than she was willing to admit to.

They bash Michelle around a bit, and I really have to go back to the moment when she disagreed with the team. She was right. She was causing tension in the team because she recognized the flaws in the design while nobody else wanted to go down that road. Then, what she said ended up being true. Also, I have no problem with her refusing to pick a price point arbitrarily when others had researched it extensively and had more knowledge on the point than she had. That team really just doesn't have things in perspective.

So Trump doesn't want to touch the Speedo that Carey just recently wore. He rightly notes that nobody would purchase this as a buyer. It's target market was just too small and it was an unwise decision. Carey is fired and he leaves proudly, Speedo intact.

Next week on The Thanksgiving Episode of Top Chef:
As you might recall, on Top Chef's Thanksgiving episode, only half of the chefs cooked and the episode sucked. On the next episode of The Apprentice, only this week's losing team will compete and they will do so in two teams within their own group. It looks like James and Nicole against the rest (?) and Donald Jr. is the guest judge because Trump is sick of Heidi.