Episode 6 Recap (or How I Stopped Enjoying "The Apprentice" and Learned to Love Ivanka Trump)

NOTE TO READER: If you've never seen Stanley Kubrick's brilliant "Dr. Stangelove" with Peter Sellers, you will not understand the title of this Post. Shame on you....

Episode 6 of "The Apprentice: Los Angeles" was on last night from 9-10 pm (switches to 10-11 pm in two weeks). I watched with a significant amount of skepticism because the show has just gotten so boring (i.e., it clearly jumped the shark this year).

Anyway, this was a much better outing than last week's horrendous "honey" episode. Setting up a mall kiosk for Priceline.com (full disclosure: Priceline is a defendant in one of my consumer fraud cases) was a good task for a show like this. The candidates got to actually show off their business acumen (or lack thereof).

Kinetic is self-destructing right before our eyes. The goal of each member of the team is to gang-up on one person to get them fired. That's about it. I used to think the ringleader was Heidi, but not anymore. It's Derek, without a doubt. The guy simply has no character. I cringed when one of the Priceline execs told Trump that Derek did a great job for Kinetic. Oh well, it shouldn't matter in the end. Characterless people inevitably don't fare well in life, and I predict that Derek will get his just desserts sooner rather than later. But, in this episode, Derek was able to pull the rest of his team together to gang up on Aimee in the Boardroom, who has shown nothing but poise and spark since Day One (even in Marisa's boardroom - sorry, Maris). So, in the end, Trump fired Aimee for the same reason he fired Marisa - because the rest of her team blamed everything on her. Aimee's closing remarks in the limo were (no pun intended) priceless. She kicked ass.

Arrow, on the other hand, has remained an exciting team to watch. They are smart, energentic, open-minded, and fun. They want to win and don't try to get a leg up on each other just in case they lose and have to face Trump in the boardroom. Whether Surya was a good project manager is an open question for me. He took Trump's concerns about him from the prior boardroom too much to heart and ended up becoming somewhat of an anal retentive, micro-managing nit-pick as a PM. Relax, Surya. You're just pissing off your teammates. I predict that Arrow will gang up on Surya once they lose again, and Trump will boot him. I'm just not sure when Arrow will lose, because Kinetic is a mess.

Finally, I threw up in my mouth when not once, but twice, Kinetic people criticized Aimee for not being more like "Heidi the Perfect." Blech! Anyone who has watched the show from the beginning knows that Kinetic won because of other people, not Heidi. Do we really think Kinetic would have won the swimsuit design task if Heidi's idea to nix Marisa's bikini was accepted? The question is whether Trump will continue to let Heidi slide by each time Kinetic loses? I sure hope not.

Anywho, two weeks until the next episode. I'm not sad about it. I'm glad Marisa isn't on this piss-poor show anymore.

Peace, out.

Stu

P.S. If you really want to watch good TV, check out "Heroes" (http://www.nbc.com/Heroes/), "Lost" (http://abc.go.com/primetime/lost/index), and "24" (http://www.fox.com/24/). Good stuff.