Celebrity Apprentice, 3/28/2010 (#3): Clash of the Olympians

4/11: Corrections/updates are in red.

Rocksolid: Rob Blagojevich, Bill Goldberg, Bret Michaels, Curtis Stone, Darryl Strawberry, led by Michael Johnson, who was nominated by Strawberry.

Tenacity: Selita Ebanks, Maria Kanellis, Cyndi Lauper, Sharon Osbourne, Holly Robinson Peete, led by Summer Sanders, who volunteered.

Task/Sponsor: Create a four-page advertorial for LifeLock and Norton 360.

Outcome: The executives feel that neither ad was quite right. RockSolid's ad provides too much info, while Tenacity's provides too little. Also, both ads include information that isn't accurate. However, they agree that Tenacity is the clear winner.

Boardroom: Though it's clear that Johnson was responsible for the decisions that led to RockSolid's loss, Darryl Strawberry volunteers to be fired. Most of his teammates try to talk him out of it, but it's clear that Strawberry just wants to go home.

Fired: Darryl Strawberry, who tells us earlier in the episode that celebrities and professionals are "different" and don't function as well as "normal people," is let off the hook and goes home, where he can do nothing on his own time. His charity, the Darryl Strawberry Foundation which promotes global awareness for autism and other developmental disorders, gets nothing from this show that we know of.

Donation: $20,000 and a cut of the LifeLock/Norton 360 profits for Summer Sanders's charity, Right to Play, which uses sport and play to improve the lives of disadvantaged children in developing and war-torn countries.

Remarks:
This episode's recap for the previous week portrayed the team ganging up on Bret Michaels and blaming him for their loss. I didn't write it that way last week because that's not what I saw! Certainly they included Michaels in their blame, but there was plenty more to go around, and Sinbad rightly bore the brunt of it after providing no leadership at all.

Cyndi Lauper continues to be openly disrespected by some of her teammates for her apparent lack of focus. At one point, Sanders sends her out on an errand just to get her out of the way. Osbourne and Kanellis find the disrespect unreasonable and counterproductive and feel that Lauper should have been the art director. In the boardroom, Sanders complains about Lauper almost immediately. Johnson-Peete chimes in eagerly. Johnson jumps on that bandwagon as well after Lauper criticizes his ad.

Similarly, Bret Michaels continues to annoy some of his teammates, especially Johnson, with his enthusiasm to contribute, desire to ingratiate, and flair for sulking. This week, he drives Johnson up the wall in his efforts to please. Johnson doesn't like Michaels's design for the ad and wants something wordier. Guest eye/ear Gavin Maloof (who later agrees with Lauper in the boardroom) also politely suggests that Johnson's idea is too wordy, and Michaels says he wants to do something "more creative," but Johnson shuts down all dissent.

Later, in the boardroom, Johnson claims that no one voiced any objection to the wordiness, and that he picked Stone rather than Goldberg to be the frontman for the ad because he thought that using Stone would be... wait for it... "more creative."

Nevertheless, in the boardroom, Michael Johnson admits that Michaels "could have been worse."

At one point, on the women's team, Osbourne attempts to break the ice by acknowledging the team's internal struggles for creative power. Even though she is stating the obvious, not everyone appreciates her candor.

In this episode, we learn that Blagojevich can't use a computer to save his own life.

Lastly, good news: The next season of Apprentice will be non-celebrities again. I'm glad to hear that, but as I recall, the last few non-celebrity Apprentice seasons were pretty high on drama as opposed to business skill. So, getting rid of the celebrities doesn't guarantee that it'll be like those first couple of years I enjoyed so much.

This episode was dedicated to D'Marco Ray, an audio professional who had worked on the show's crew, and died of kidney cancer earlier this year.