On The Air

The Apprentice hits the malls to sign up Hispanics for e-mail spam. It sounds worse when you put it that way. Read it all.

Episode links:
Jacob’s recap
TV Guide review
Download the episode with BitTorrent

Previously on The Apprentice: Aaron got fired for the sins of the previous Boardroom, or for taking horse tranquilizers during the task, or for some unknown reason that Trump made up inside his own head. All are equally likely.

Currently on The Apprentice: Surya comes back from the Boardroom all full of fire and bitching about how Aaron was dishonest or something, and it really goes on for a million years. Somewhere in the middle of his monologue he proclaims himself Project Manager, a title that the others are all too happy to give him because they hate him and want to see him fail.

The next morning, the teams all gather on the airport runway so that Donald Trump can yell at them about Priceline.com and how great they are because they gave him a ton of money for the on-air plug. He’s even dragged out a couple of suits from the company, who describe the task as follows: teams will have to go to a shopping mall and sign people up for a Priceline sweepstakes, or something. I don’t know. It’s stupid, is what it is, and just a way for another big company to get your name and address so they can send you junk mail. And not only does this task, like all the others, have nothing to do with real estate, this week it also has nothing to do with “selling”, like so many of the tasks on this show purport to be about. In fact, it has little to do with any kind of demonstrable skill other than approaching complete strangers and getting their phone number, so the whole exercise is really kind of idiotic.

Kinetic heads over to their mall, the MainPlace Santa Ana, which isn’t even in LA, it’s in Orange County. It is, however, depressingly close to the house I grew up in when I was a kid. And its Wikipedia entry, for a short time, included the line “it thereby became the worst mall on the face of the planet.” I’m not even kidding. That’s awesome.

Derek goes on a tour of the mall, and finds that the clientele is 50% Hispanic. Which, two things about that: First, duh. Have you been to California lately? Second, only 50%? Have you been to Santa Ana lately? I would have pegged it in the high 80s. Anyway, remember this conversation. It’ll come up again later. Over and over and over.

Arrow, meanwhile, is trying to brainstorm under the oppressive crushing thumb of Surya, and it’s going about as well as you can imagine. Frank tries to bring up the idea of accosting people as they’re coming in and out of stores, and Surya interrupts him in the middle of a breath to ask the most inane questions ever. “Can you lead with the strategy of why you thought that?” The hell now? What kind of jackass question is that? I think Surya is one of those guys who spent so much time in business school, and breathed in so many of the spores, that now he doesn’t realize that there’s a real world out there. He thinks that we’re all just living in some kind of computer simulation and he’s still being testing for his MBA, and so if he becomes a living breathing textbook and parrots back phrases like “revenue maximization” and “strategy-led brainstorming” that he’ll get some kind of prize. It’s a Pavlovian response to the heightened sitation he’s in, like he believes that just because he’s on a television show that’s called “The Apprentice”, and just because that show has been labeled “Survivor in the business world”, that anything and everything he does actually has something to do with what he learned in school. And what he learned in school, like most of us, was to memorize the textbook and regurgitate it during finals. So that’s why this constant crap is always spewing out of his mouth, because he’s actually bought into the fiction of the show, and he thinks The Apprentice is a show about business skills, the same way some people get confused and actually think American Idol is a signing competition. None of these things are, in fact, true, so Surya is hopelessly behind the curve here.

He’s in good company, though, because you know who else has bought into the fiction of the show? Donald Trump. So maybe this will work out for Surya in the end.

Surya’s not reading the room at all, though, because while he’s droning on and on and on about this stuff, Frank and Tim and Nicole are cracking up and passing notes like a bunch of fifth-graders. And normally I’d tell them to grow up, but I think Surya has it coming so I’ll let them slide this time. Frank’s doodling on a napkin and he draws this hideous face with buck teeth and bushy hair that I guess is supposed to be Surya, and everyone cracks up. Again, mean, but deserved.

So the whole thing of this task is rounding people up and getting them to put their name and phone number into a computer. Then, presumably, they win something. Like years and years of junk mail to come. It’s like those raffles you always see in the mall where you can win a car, but they’re really trying to sell you whole-house water softening systems. So, at its core, it’s a really stupid task. But to excel at it, you’ve got to go out in the mall, intimidate people with your personality and with the cameras, and get them to come back to the computer. Frank turns out to be a genius at this, mostly because he’s loud and he’s got enough charisma that people give him the benefit of the doubt. Surya, on the other hand, is pacing the mall like a madman, and he’s perfectly willing to take no for an answer. Like, with most of the people he approaches, he backs away before they even get to say no. So he’s not getting a lot done, but at least he’s getting his exercise in.

Kinetic is wandering the mall trying to round up people, wearing Hawaiian shirts and straw hats, but they’re running into a little bit of a language barrier. Nearly everyone they talk to doesn’t understand a word they’re saying, because they don’t speak English. So they just stare back at them. No clue what they’re talking about. And even when they do get the people to the computer, it turns out the sign-up screen is in English anyway. Derek and Muna seem to have some secret reserve of high-school level Spanish they can fall back on, but the whole thing is just a big mess. And when we get to the Boardroom, there’s no surprise who the winner is. Despite Surya’s aggressive inability to deal with anything involving the real world, the rest of the team (fifth-graders all, remember) managed to pull it together and bring home the win.

Team Arrow gets to head back to the beach for their reward, this time for surfing. Mostly they suck, not that I’d be able to do any better. But there is much falling down, and then the waves start to get huge and everyone is getting swallowed up by the surf. And then we have a medical emergency, Nicole limping back to the beach with shooting pains in her foot. So she has to be rushed to the doctor (with Tim going along with her, hoping to score points by keeping her company), and finds out she got stung by a jellyfish. Ouch. And later, back at the mansion, it looks like Tim managed to score those points, because he and Nicole start making out by the pool. Which is gross, and is starting to turn me off my lunch, and it goes on far too long. Like way, far, too long. Why do you hate me, Apprentice editors? Why?

The next day, we mercifully find ourselves in the Boardroom with Team Kinetic. Aimee immediately starts to blame Derek for not telling her that everyone in the mall was Hispanic. Like, I know that shifting blame is what you’re expected to do when you’re in the Boardroom, and when you’re already on the ropes as an ineffective Project Manager you’ve got to strike back however you can. But Aimee didn’t need Derek to tell her that everyone in the mall was Hispanic. She only needed her eyes for that. And the big issue in the task turned out the be that people in the mall didn’t speak English. Which, that’s not information that Derek had. There are Hispanic people that don’t speak Spanish, and there are white people who don’t speak English, and none of that had anything to do with the little chat Derek had at the beginning of the show, which was mostly just about the color of their skin.

Derek calls the whole language thing a red herring from the start, but Trump latches onto it and it all goes on far too long. To the point where Derek, who not only isn’t responsible for the language problem but who also was one of the only ones who did anything to fix it, is on the ropes for-ever because he didn’t tell Aimee this obvious thing that she could have seen if she opened her eyes for two seconds. It doesn’t stick, though, mostly because Aimee slips up and says a couple of stupid things (one of them being “I wasn’t paying attention to who was walking through the mall”). And in the end the game of Duck Duck Goose that is Donald Trump’s thought process settles on “leadership” being the issue, and Aimee turns out the be the goose. So she’s fired. Which is kind of retroactively satisfying, after last week when she wandered around Ralph’s like her brain had been erased.

But then she gets mean in the town car, like the meds have finally taken hold and started her blood to boil, and she goes on and on about how she should have left the whole goddamn team back at the mansion and done the task herself and she probably would have won. Which would have made for some great TV, her wandering around the mall all by herself. And she loses points for calling this an “interview process”. So I guess that makes three people who have bought into the fiction of the show.

Next week? Oscars. So, no Trump. After that? A double firing in the Boardroom (way to ruin the surprise), and the return of Randall. Really? I thought he was dead. Also, you’re going to have to stay up until 10pm to watch this crap. Are they serious? Watching Donald Trump right before bedtime has been proven to cause cancer in laboratory animals. Don’t torture us like that.