On The Air

Surya finally loses a task and gets fired, although it’s just because he’s a dink. And Trump starts to come into the 1920s when he realizes that women really can golf. Hey, at this rate they’ll be voting soon, too. Read it all.

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

Previously on The Apprentice: Trump hates white trash! Except when it’s Wrestlemania!

Currently on The Apprentice: Surya has gathered Arrow for dinner inside the mansion. Everyone is wearing pajamas, or sweats, or track suits, or t-shirts. But Surya is still dressed in a full suit and tie. And, for some reason, he is kissing Arrow’s ass up and down. Like telling them how he had wanted to switch teams because he saw that they were such hard workers, and such great people, and he’s like going around the table, one by one, telling everyone how great and fantastic each one of them is, and how he wants to marry each of them and make little Apprentice babies, and it’s all just talking for the sake of talking, and Frank gets sick to his stomach and has to go outside and interview about what a fake bullshitter he is. Which, really. About five people from Kinetic volunteered to switch over to Arrow that time, all those weeks ago, and they all did it because they wanted to impress Donald Trump, and because Arrow was such a team full of jagoffs and losers and you, Surya, wanted to be the one to whip them into shape and turn the team around. And you did it, you actually did it, but you did it by just being yourself and setting an example for everyone to follow of the way not to be. Arrow’s winning streak is entirely because they have united in their hatred of Surya and are doing the opposite of everything he does, so I guess in some way he was the one who turned the team around. In any case, Frank goes to bed because he’s had enough of Surya. As have we all.

After the credits the Apprenti meet Donald by some lake, and he’s got Bill Rancic and an executive from GNC with him, and the executive, during this whole and entire show, has this look on his face of being simultaneously bored and super scared and pissed off, like he really doesn’t want to be doing this. Like the CEO of GNC made everyone draw straws to decide who would have to be the one to actually go work with Donald Trump on this deal, and this guy lost out and he’d really rather be anywhere else. The task turns out to be designing and performing a halftime show, advertising GNC, at a local soccer game. It’s way stupid, but we get to make fun of people in costume, so I guess there’s a bright side to everything.

Arrow is brainstorming in a van, and they come up with exactly one idea. Just one. Surya tries to get them back on track to come up with more ideas, but he’s got two things going against him. First, he’s Surya so everyone hates him. And second, he’s Surya, so his idea of brainstorming is to have five minutes of silence where everyone creates a inner monologue of ideas and then presents them to the group after the timer has run out. Preferably with flowcharts and markers and big boxes with arrows leading to smaller boxes. This is Surya’s world, this is all he knows. So due to the second reason piling on top of the first, nobody does the actual thing he wants them to, which at the core is a good idea, and instead they just ridicule him forever until the end of time. Frank announces, “Ladies and Gentlemen, we have two minutes left.” Tim is like blowing kisses at Frank, and everyone is giggling at each other. It’s like a van full of kindergartners, but because their authority figure is Surya, you don’t mind seeing them act out like this. If it was anyone else they were doing this to, they’d all be assholes, every last one of them. Of course, if it were anyone else they wouldn’t be doing this. So again Surya is creating his own problems just by being, the fact of which he’ll never grasp.

Kinetic is also brainstorming in the van, but because they’re all adults and none of them is Surya, it’s actually productive and boring. Both teams finally come up with the idea of putting people in big foam costumes out on the field. Kinetic will have big vitamins running through an obstacle course of lethargy and heart disease, while Arrow will have a boxing match featuring a ninety-pound weakling who turns into Popeye when he takes his vitamins. Yeah, I already said it was stupid.

On the day of the game, Arrow is sitting around in the locker room writing the “script” for their presentation. They’ve got this huge, convoluted plot revolving around the stupid idea of a boxing ring, and there’s five minutes until they go on the field, and they’re arguing about what to call “Mr. Vitamin”. While they’re still doing that, Kinetic is taking the field with four people in round vitamin suits running through an obstacle course while Angela screams something unintelligible into the microphone. It’s good to see that someone here learned the lesson of Aimee and made all their props bilingual, because a soccer audience in Southern California is probably going to be even more heavily Hispanic than a mall crowd. But still it brings up the point: if your props have to be labeled, like with words, your idea is probably too high concept for a halftime show. Especially in the nosebleed seats. They can’t read the writing. They can’t hear Angela shouting. All they see is these little foam dots running around, up and over and past other little foam dots. They actually have a pink heart as one of the props, which is probably the only one that doesn’t need to be labeled, but it’s a tiny gesture if the rest of it doesn’t make sense. It ends with one of the red dots crossing a finish line, and the tape doesn’t even break. All the while Angela is screaming, and even here at home I can’t understand her.

But that was high Shakespeare compared to Arrow’s presentation. Frank comes out wearing a suit, all “Let’s get ready to rumble!” Except he’s reading from a script that’s longer and more convoluted than most Broadway plays. He goes on and on about “Joe” (a very scrawny-looking Tim) and how he doesn’t feel his best. Then he yells “Here! Is! Mr Vitamin!!!” And the crowd…doesn’t respond. It’s so funny. Surya is talking about how people really got into the story, but we see a shot of a whole group of people just staring off into space. Like they’ve put PBS on the Jumbotron, that’s what this crowd looks like. There’s no cheering. There’s no life. The line at the bathroom is probably reeally long. The executive from GNC looks like he’s doing his taxes in his head, rather than pay attention to anything that’s actually happening around him. Some backup dancers in black shirts are following “Joe” around the boxing ring, but then when Mr. Vitamin comes out they change into white shirts. And there is no boxing! I don’t know who “Joe” was supposed to be boxing, but he keeps hugging Mr. Vitamin, who is standing outside the ring, and these other guys are just walking around, like in circles, and for all the fuss they put into building a boxing ring, where’s the boxing?

“Let’s hear it for Joe!” Frank yells. The crowd chews their gum. I don’t understand what just happened. Surya jogs down the field, smiling like he just won the World Cup. This show is so weird.

Everyone gathers on a balcony overlooking the field, before the game is even over. So the arena is noisy as hell, but Trump and the GNC executive are there and everyone’s standing fifteen feet apart, and nobody can hear anybody else, so everyone’s screaming like Donald Trump to be heard over the noise. And the executive has to decide who won the task, so he stops daydreaming about his upcoming trip to Hawaii long enough to tell Kinetic that they are the winners. Then immediately checks out again.

Kinetic’s reward is to go golfing with Trump, and once again, I’d rather be on the losing team. But it turns out all the girls are pretty awesome at golfing, or at least awesome enough that Trump’s mind is blown. Like completely blown. I’m sure Trump’s golf course only started allowing women on the links just last year as it is, because golfing is a man’s sport, of course. The only thing worse than a woman who can golf is a gay guy who can golf. If Carey was on the golf course? In his pink bathing suit? Donald Trump’s head would just pop right the hell off his shoulders, and the next time you’d see it would be in orbit around Mars.

And of course the most distracting thing about this segment is Donald Trump’s outfit. Holy hell. Golf is a thing I’ll never understand.

The best thing about this show is still the transitional shots. This time we have time-lapse footage of fluffy clouds moving across the sky, reflected off the glass of the downtown skyscrapers. I seriously could watch an hour of just that, and it would be better than having to see Surya do his thing. But the bliss only lasts a few seconds, and then we have to see Surya talking to his former team Kinetic through a hole in the hedge. And while just scant minutes ago we saw Surya telling Arrow how great they are and how much he wanted to join up with them because they’re wonderful people, here he’s telling Kinetic that going over to Arrow was a complete mistake. “I should have never left,” he says several times while the sad music plays. A single tear runs down his cheek.

In the Boardroom, everyone starts piling it on Surya, saying that he’s different from the rest of them, he doesn’t get along with the team, and not only did he suck as a Project Manager this week, he also contributed nothing the two weeks they did win. All true, from what I can see. Surya’s rebuttal is that “his record” is 5-2, better than anyone else on Arrow. And that’s only because he was on Team Kinetic back before they started to fall apart, so he’s kind of riding on their success here. Remember that we didn’t even see Surya until about episode 4, except for fleeting glances of him in the back of the room. So the amount that he contributed to any of those “five wins” he’s touting is questionable.

Surya just keeps talking and talking, digging his own grave, about how horrible the team is and how they don’t respect him and how they’re all just covering their own asses. They don’t have any discipline, and he regrets even joining the team. Which goes against everything he said right to their faces at the beginning of the show. So it’s no surprise that, one-by-one, all down the line, everyone else on Arrow thinks Surya should be fired. Surya’s eyes start to bug out, and his hair gets even frizzier, and his voice gets more frantic. And the arguments go around and around in circles until finally Surya is admitting that he sucks at being Project Manager, and he’s better off as a follower than as a leader. I don’t even know how we got there, but we’re there, and once he says it Trump’s super sense picks up on it, and it’s all over for Surya. There’s usually a point in the boardroom where something clicks in Trump’s brain, and the rest of the show is pointless because his mind is made up. And that happens here, so Surya is fired.

Surya’s still trying to bring up his record. “Five and two, sir,” he says sadly. Like the numbers are all that matters. Like he single-handedly brought each of those victories down from the heavens himself. In the car ride home he’s still talking about his “record”, and still saying he wishes he had never switched sides. That’s not the problem, you dink. The problem was that every word out of your mouth came from a textbook somewhere, and you preferred diagramming and flowcharting to actual useful tasks. Arrow is a bunch of immature children, but their hatred for you united them into a cohesive whole, and that’s a real accomplishment.

Next week? Arnold Schwarzenegger. Feel free to start practicing changing the channel now.