Task: Create a four-page deodorant "advertorial" for a sports magazine, featuring David Lee of the NY Knicks
KOTU: Joan and Jesse, led by Clint
Athena: Melissa and Annie, led by Brande
Eyes and Ears: Jim Cramer and Ivanka Trump
Outcome: KOTU wins because Athena's ad is even worse.
Fired: Melissa, for weak fund-raising. Her charity, Lili Claire Foundation which provides help and support for neuro-genetic conditions, gets nothing from this show that I know of.
Donation: $20,000 to International Rett Syndrome Foundation, which funds research for treatment of the neuro-developmental disorder.
In the suite, Athena watches Herschel get fired. Annie wonders how Clint keeps managing not to get fired. She notices that he doesn't even say goodbye to Herschel. Jesse thinks Clint let Herschel make the wrong decisions on purpose.
Jesse takes his check to his old school, delighting the shop teacher and signing autographs for kids.
Trumps transfers Jesse to KOTU. Melissa gripes to us, because now it's just going to be her and the Brande/Annie Mutual Admiration Society. Jesse tells Trump he was happy winning with Athena, but adds, "I love Joan." He's not so happy to be working with Clint.
The task is to create a four-page deodorant "advertorial" for a sports magazine, featuring David Lee of the NY Knicks. Jim Cramer will be the ears or eyes. Jesse admits he doesn't wear deodorant.
Brande volunteers to lead Athena because she has photo shoot experience and hasn't been project manager in a long time. Clint volunteers to lead KOTU because he's "been successful in the past." (Actually, the one time he was PM before, both his team and the other team lost, and it was another advertising task.)
Athena prepares
Melissa has some brainstorming ideas, which are met with silence. (Literally... no one else is talking.) Annie tells us they were cockamamie ideas that weren't right for a sports magazine and they're going to have to cut her out of the process. Then Annie has the idea to have David Lee be naked, covered only by a basketball. (Melissa had already suggested "posing naked for a photo," but I guess it's not cockamamie if Annie repeats it.)
They meet with the execs, who don't think the idea is too risque. The team bombards the execs with questions. Annie makes faces every time Melissa speaks, even cutting her off in mid-question at one point. Melissa wants to know if there are other design elements they'd like to see besides the product itself, and Annie shuts down that question too. Melissa gripes.
Brande tasks Annie with brand messaging and the presentation. Brande and Melissa will oversee the photo shoot. Yep, Annie is given two tasks while Brande and Melissa will split one. Melissa gripes.
Annie tells them her idea: the ad will show 24 hours of Lee's day, doing things and not visibly sweating. She describes the order of the photos, which I can already tell is not going to work (the naked picture is on page 3 instead of at the end, sort of like giving the punchline 3/4 through a joke). Then Annie asks for Brande's blessing and humbly says she's in charge. Brande tells Annie she's the queen of this stuff. Melissa gripes.
Annie is friends with David Lee. She scouts locations with the photographer and calls Brande to gloat that they'll get to shoot with him first so they'll have more time to put their ad together.
Melissa gripes because Annie and Brande are always talking on the phone when they're apart. Melissa confronts Brande (now that Annie is gone) and says they're shutting her out and conspiring to get rid of her. Brande denies it, inasmuch as Melissa lets her get a word in at all.
Brande says now she's irritated with Melissa.
At a location shoot, Melissa directs the models and thinks she's done her part now to avoid being thrown under the bus. Annie asks Brande if she can do anything else. Brande tells her about the confrontation with Melissa earlier, that Melissa thinks they're "coercing against her." After clarifying that Brande means "conspiring," Annie says Melissa is already conspiring against herself. Both Annie and Brande tell us that Melissa weakens the team.
When Lee shows up, Brande says he's cute and takes over photography. Melissa gripes. Annie talks to Melissa and says hey, Brande gave her all those tasks, she didn't ask for them. Annie tells Melissa that they're having opposite problems. Annie tells us she's manipulating Melissa because she wants to be in the final four.
Jim Cramer comes by. They show him their layout. Annie tells him all of the things she did and the ideas she came up with and that she was tasked with a lot. Melissa gripes. Jim tells us Annie's doing a clever job of positioning herself to take all of the credit and none of the blame.
Jim asks what's the one thing each of them would want him to say on her behalf. Brande wants to be seen as a good leader. Annie wants to be known as having worked her ass off and done amazing branding. Melissa wants to be thought to have visually told a story, and most of all, for their team, she wants to be able to say it was equal. ANNIE GRIPES!! Strenuously!
Next day, Annie does the presentation, wordily explaining their ad. For example, she explains the significance of raised arms in a deodorant commercial. Melissa gripes that Annie was too stiff. You know what, at this point I hate all three of them. I say fire 'em all plus Clint and just skip to the finale with Joan and Jesse.
KOTU prepares
They meet with the execs and ask good questions. However, unlike Athena, they also let the execs talk. They talk about their branding and their trademark orange power stripe. (This was one of the things that Melissa had tried to ask about but was cut short by Annie.) Clint asks if they can have a sexy woman in the ad. Jesse tries to poke his eyes out.
Joan doesn't know much about all this guy stuff. Clint brilliantly says his idea is that David Lee is this guy who sweats but doesn't stink. Jesse researches David Lee. Joan thinks it would be funny for him to be surrounded by tall black guys. (I'm sure that would have been hilarious in, say, the 1950s.) Or have him be naked and paint an orange stripe down his body to look like the deodorant. Jesse thinks Lee could be the new small-town kid in the big city, with the tall buildings towering over him but he's not breaking a sweat. They'll run the orange stripe along the bottom of the ad. Clint thinks this idea doesn't "meet the criteria," but his own slogan ideas are trite, generic, and very wordy. Jesse tries to commit suicide by stuffing a deodorant stick in his mouth. (I'd do screen grabs if I had the technology.)
The photographer shows up. Jesse asks Clint again if he wants to include the NY cityscape. Clint agrees to let Jesse get those pictures.
Contrary to Annie's believe that getting Lee first will give them more time to work on the layout, KOTU begins laying out the ad before Lee arrives. In the studio, they take test shots using other guys (including Clint) as stand-ins for Lee. Clint puts it all together with some of Jesse's ideas.
Ivanka comes by to check up. Joan says Clint has become a 12 to 18% better listener, while Jesse is nonargumentative and "picks his battles." Clint believes that Jesse is trying to let Clint hang himself. Joan agrees that this could be the case. Clint thinks Jesse didn't give enough feedback.
Jesse tells us they're going to lose. He has "that feeling of doom" and thinks Clint is holding them back with his lack of talent.
Clint is stuffing as much text into the ad as possible and insisting on a lot of additional visual clutter. Jesse hints that there might be too much text. Joan protests; he blows her off. Jesse notes that there are two deodorant sticks where the World Trade Center used to be.
Clint worries that he didn't add enough text. Jesse refuses to reply. Clint tells us he used some of Joan's and Jesse's ideas even though they weren't great.
Jesse asks Joan when she thinks he should start arguing with Clint. Joan tells him to speak up now, but Jesse keeps quiet and tries to choke himself on that deodorant stick again.
Clint directs the photo shoot with David Lee. Clint has him and the model squashed together at the end of a couch. Jesse thinks he's doing it wrong and finally speaks up, but Clint wants the deodorant to dominate the picture.
Annie sticks her nose in to be nosy. Joan gripes.
Jesse says the layout sucks. Joan asks him what he would change. Jesse says delete the whole thing and do it the way he said in the first place. Clint doesn't understand what Jesse wants. Jesse scolds Clint for not listening to him at the beginning. Clint accuses Jesse of sitting on it for too long and says Jesse's idea wasn't that good. Jesse calls him a pussy (the audio is bleeped, but it's in the captions) for not owning his own idea.
Joan thinks Clint is actually making great progress in terms of accepting other people's ideas, but Jesse doesn't understand how far he's come. Jesse calls him stupid, untalented, etc. repeatedly and gloats out loud that Clint will be fired. Joan says Clint and Jesse sound like her first marriage.
Next day, Clint delivers the presentation, explaining his ad, which makes it a little less confusing but not more appealing. (The ad itself is indescribably bad, but I'd just like to point out that I haven't even attempted to describe the Athena ad.) Jesse gripes.
Judgment
The execs tell Trump that both teams did well. (I take it their employer doesn't offer a vision care plan.) KOTU did good branding with the orange motif. They didn't do a good job linking Lee to his team.
Athena's pictures are good and so is their branding and the NBA thing. But they didn't like the order of the pictures. The best picture (only waist-up, naked, the ball is in front of his chest) is buried on page 3.
The postmortem
Annie and Melissa praise Brande as a leader.
Jesse says KOTU wasn't much of a team because Clint underutilized him and Joan. Clint doesn't realize what he can't do, while Jesse owns a magazine. He couldn't communicate with Clint. Clint says he used Jesse's ideas and was confused when Jesse didn't like how it ended up looking. Clint says Jesse's not a team player.
Joan says it was hard to be a team player. Jesse says that's because Joan is an asshole. Everyone laughs. He admits he's kidding, because he knew right away they'd be friends. Besides, they have crazy sexual energy.
Joan didn't agree with Clint's ideas either but tried to support him. Clint says she was helpful. She says he's dogmatic but he's come a long way. "He's changed as much as he possibly can change without deep therapy." Trump thinks people don't change.
Trump asks Clint if he ever takes his hat off (not much) and maybe Trump should wear a hat. Ivanka says his hair is iconic. Clint says a black hat makes your head look thinner. (Heh, well, it doesn't stop him from being a fathead.)
Trump asks them about David Lee. Annie pipes in that he's a friend of hers. Joan gripes and shushes Melissa who is trying to shush her.
Annie thinks she shouldn't be fired because a lot was put on her. Melissa says Brande made those decisions. Brande agrees and says Annie is the "queen" of these things. Ivanka feels that Brande is undermining herself by admitting that she delegated the most important tasks to Annie. A good PM shouldn't forgo those opportunities.
Brande doesn't feel she "forgooed" anything. (Melissa smirks at "forgooed.") Melissa says she felt shut out by them. Annie says she never lied and has never attacked any of them in boardroom, unlike Joan and Melissa. Joan says, well, not lied to people's faces, no.
Joan says Brande's not a leader.
Jim thinks Brande should not describe Annie as a queen, because Brande as PM should be the queen. Instead, she and Melissa are pawns.
Melissa thinks that Annie thinks that Melissa would be easier to beat than Brande. Annie says Brande is the stronger fundraiser.
They review the ads. Brande thinks KOTU's is better than expected, but still not better than theirs. Annie agrees. But Joan, Clint, and even Jesse think theirs is branded better than Athena's.
The execs allegedly liked both, but they liked KOTU's better. "All Clint," Joan says. Trump tells Jesse to be more gracious. Clint gets $20,000 for his charity International Rett Syndrome Foundation, which funds research for treatment of the neuro-developmental disorder.
The boardroom
Outside, Annie tells Melissa she wasn't conspiring against her. Melissa says she hated high school and this feels like high school. Brande thinks she'll be fired.
Joan and Jesse offer Clint a gracious and sincere toast. Clint is elated with his win. Jesse also toasts Joan for keeping them out of trouble.
Jim says Brande made the call as to who should do what, so she should be fired. Ivanka thinks Brande's the obvious choice too, but perhaps Annie or Melissa will hang themselves. They call the team back in.
Trump asks Brande why she shouldn't be fired. She tells them she works hard and has raised the second highest money of "anybody here," meaning Annie. They didn't tell her not to be PM.
Jim asks why Melissa didn't have much to do. (Joan says Brande's dumb. Clint laughs.) She doesn't have much of an answer. Trump asks if being pretty means you don't have to use your brain as much. Brande says it's the opposite. (Joan says both breasts can count to 10.)
Trump asks Annie who she'd fire. Annie says it could go either way, but Brande has been a stronger player overall.
Brande says Melissa has gotten too personal, and it's taking away from the task. She and Annie would do better without Melissa.
Jim is annoyed that they aren't slitting each others' throats right now. Brande says she answered their question, but Ivanka says Jim meant she should defend herself more passionately. Ivanka says she didn't say why Melissa should be fired. (I disagree.) Brande says Melissa should be fired because Brande is a better player and can bring in more money, "so how about that."
Melissa defends herself vigorously. She interrupts Trump to finish and says they didn't use her ideas and she has two ripped tendons. Brande and Annie take exception to Melissa's claims that she worked the hardest.
Ivanka notes that Annie's still not taking any heat for their loss even though she was responsible for most of the work, while Brande and Melissa are arguing with each other.
Trump writes a note and passes it to Jim.
Trump says Melissa hasn't raised much money compared to the other two. He asks Jim's opinion. Jim says he was thrilled that Brande stepped up to be PM, and maybe Annie deserves the free pass she's getting, so he'd fire Melissa. She asks why. Trump says it's about raising money; her people wouldn't put out for her. She's fired. Her charity, Lili Claire Foundation which provides help and support for neuro-genetic conditions, gets nothing from this show that I know of.
The other two lag behind and she runs away. After they leave, Jim says Brande turned it around by fighting back.
In the suite, Joan says they now have a Nazi and a follower, and she's not coming in tomorrow. She doesn't work with scum. Melissa comes up to see her mother and says Annie and Brande are "whore pit vipers."
Melissa runs out of there and screams that she wants her shit (excuse me, I mean "bleep") now because she's not coming back for an interview. (In case you didn't know, the "taxicab interviews" aren't shot right away; the fired people come back to do them.) Joan calls Brande a stupid blonde for letting Annie manipulate her, and Annie's "people" "give money with blood on it" and they don't have last names and poker players are worse than white trash.
Meanwhile, Melissa's enraged screams can be heard in the boardroom.
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