The first thing I have to mention about last night’s Apprentice episode is how very frustrating, disappointing, and seemingly pointless it all was, at least the first half hour of it. You finally get to see these people sit down for an actual interview and find out what exactly they want to do and what their experience is, and for a few minutes it seems like you’re going to find out, and then all of a sudden the cuts get faster and faster until it’s just a gatling gunned blur of open mouths and puzzled expressions and then it’s over and the four trusted executives who did the interviewing are sitting in the boardroom to report back to the Donald. Well, at least you’ll hear what went on from them, you might think, but almost everything you find out you already knew. Kelly is a proven leader (and follower) and is the obvious winner of this competition, as anyone with half a brain undoubtedly figured out a few weeks into the show. Sandy is very nice and hardworking but has no corporate experience and seems to already be doing exactly what she is best suited to do. Jennifer knows exactly how to look and what to say but to this point (and this point is the penultimate episode of the series) the only indication that she is not, in fact, Disney’s latest breakthrough in audio-animatronics is the fact that this show is not on ABC. The only person whose review really contained any new info was Kevin, as the fact the he was a scholastic and career butterfly who was building an impressive resume but seemed to have no clear idea of why hadn’t really come out before as far as I can recall. What had come out, though, at least in my opinion, is that he and Kelly were far and away the two most qualified candidates, and I have to believe that the main reason he got sent packing first was solely a television decision (not that they probably all aren’t); I didn’t see the show last season but I believe that the other finalist besides Bill Rancic was a black male and they didn’t want to repeat themselves this year. And he got fired first even though Sandy was obviously the also-ran among the four because they wanted an M&M twins catfight to liven up the otherwise unbelievably boring first half hour of the show. Which they got, though the only two things that were particularly noteworthy were 1) Jennifer’s endlessly repeated answer for why she was a fearless risk-taker: “I moved to San Francisco!” clearly and forcefully enunciating San-fran-cis-co as though any idiot should know that willingly taking up residence in this terrifying snakepit is the very definition of fearless risk-taking. I would say that I guess myself and a large percentage of the regular IAAFOTS readers are therefore also fearless risk-takers, but at some point she also started adding, for extra emphasis, “in 1999!” and given that this was at the peak of the high tech bubble when there was probably so much corporate lawyering work to be done in the Bay Area that the seals down by Pier 39 were getting inundated with calls from legal headhunters, the extreme jeopardy that an attractive young woman with a Harvard Law degree was courageously subjecting herself to truly was something to… okay seriously, what the fuck was she talking about, and this brings up one of the questions that has been plaguing me about J.M. Does she herself really believe any of the bullshit and lies that she so assertively and nastily keeps throwing at people? On one hand, it seems like she does, and that it would be hard to sound so convincing if you hadn’t also first deluded yourself into thinking that whatever nonsense you were saying was true, but it’s hard to believe that someone so composed and seemingly in control could be so divorced from reality... on the other hand, maybe that’s the only way possible to give off that appearance, because when you get down to it no one really has much control over anything in this absurd and chaotic world. A couple other examples of her ridiculous claims from this week were when Kelly and Sandy were talking at the beginning of the show about how Jenn really didn’t want to be team leader the week before and just didn’t say anything until Sandy finally stepped up and said she would be team leader and Massey overheard them and proclaimed that to be completely untrue and that of course she wanted to be team leader, why would she not, and Sandy had just jumped in and taken it? I mean, both of them and the entire viewing audience had seen what actually happened… now that I think about it there are a few similarities between Her Classiness and the Bush administration here. And another example was when she was talking about Kelly to the camera later and said how he was scared of her and had been very manipulative and underhanded “with people that I’ve become friends with”??? Who are these imaginary friends that Jenn made over the course of this show (my best guess is that they may be Not Me and Ida Know, the mischievous gremlins who are always bedeviling The Family Circus) and does Kelly see them too and how do you manipulate a make-believe phantasm and, and…? I was getting pretty flabbergasted there for a second, but one good thing about getting constantly interrupted by pie chart-creation this afternoon is that it’s given me a moment to remember the other point she was snapping at the poor overmatched bridal consultant, which was “Do you even know what a lawyer does?” Because I think that I do, and it doesn’t have much of anything to do with discovering the truth about a case, it’s about taking whatever your client wants to happen and doing everything you can to make people believe that whatever that might be is the truth. And to be able to do that successfully without constantly being racked with guilt that you are fighting for the right of some corporation to rape and pillage the planet, or allowing some actual rapist or pillager to continue walking the streets (or destroying the life of some innocent defendant if you happen to be a prosecutor) maybe you do have to completely buy into your own bullshit. It’s not a quality that I find very worthy of respect or admiration though. There was another corporate lawyer on the show this year, however, who at least had the good sense to be captivatingly adorable enough to make this presumptive underlying amorality ever so slightly bearable, and when the field had finally been narrowed down to Jennifer and Kelly this Lil’ Dollop I speak of was happily the first of six previously fired candidates to stroll into the boardroom to be divvied up between the finalists to comprise their final task teams. Making me even more fond of Stacy Rotner than I already was, the team picking went as follows: Kelly picked Elizabeth, Jenn picked fuckin’ Chris, Kelly picked John, Jenn picked Pamela, Kelly picked Raj, and Stacy brought back fond memories of 6th grade gym class to me by not getting picked at all but just getting sent over by Trump to the Massey squad by default. Before I move out of the boardroom I have one more point concerning Sandy’s firing that I skipped over before (it was going to be #2 in the two things I said were particularly noteworthy): what I think really made Mr. Trump think that Jennifer out-debated Sandy in their showdown was only the fact that Massey said that he had 15,000 employees and he likes hearing that (not that it mattered, since everyone already knew Sandy was going home before they ever walked in there and they really could have spared us the whole thing and moved right onto the task). Jenn’s task, some kinda charity basketball event hosted by Chris Webber, began with her telling Chris and Pamela to do pretty much everything and then getting up, grabbing her purse, and walking out of the room (somewhere in there Stacy also disappeared, one minute she was sitting at the table between Jenn and the other two, the next Jenn was strolling out of the room while Chris and Pamela stared at her in open-mouthed disbelief that she was apparently not going to do ANYthing and Rotner had magically disappeared into thin air (or perhaps into Massey’s purse?) As far as I could tell, she was never given anything specific to do, at least in the beginning of the task which they showed this week, and the only two things that Jenn did were talk to some corporate sponsors about some seating assignments where she basically asked them how they would do it and the puzzled representative said “Well, it’s not my project, but if it was I think I would have thought out some sort of plan?” and then talk to Chris Webber’s agent when they got last minute word that he might be canceling. My roommate Jay made two very good points regarding that: 1) it was obviously a set-up, Chris Webber’s not going to cancel out of some charity event that is being shown on one of the top-rated television shows in the country, and 2) Jenn said that she would do whatever it took to make sure that he would not cancel but her only argument was that “We were counting on him and it is going to ruin this project if he doesn’t come.” Clearly the most effective argument would have been to say that it was going to be incredibly bad publicity for him to cancel out of a charity event and if he did everyone was going to hear about it. So she doesn’t even appear to be particularly adept at the one thing she’s supposed to be good at, arguing, and really ought to have delegated that task too (to Stacy, though this scene did, I guess, contain the only line she had and I believe it may have been something along the lines of “that totally sucks”.. she would have stepped up if she’d been put on the phone, though, I’m sure). As far as Kelly’s team, his only mistake may have been to go a bit too far the other way and keep jumping in and taking over the tasks he’d given to Raj and John until they got the impression that they didn’t need to be there and went out to race up and down the polo field (oh, their task, if you’re foolishly relying on this for any kind of accurate play-by-play, was to run a polo match of some sort). The main obstacle they ran into was that it started raining, which meant that they couldn’t paint the special logo on the middle of the field that is so very crucial to a polo match that they have never painted one on there before in the history of the club and, of course, might mean they have to cancel the whole match. How Kelly can really get blamed for the weather I’m not sure, though my one thought is that if he has ever been to a baseball game where it started raining he should be aware of these things they have called “tarps”. You’d think that the grounds crew would automatically put them out if they had them, but if they don’t I’d think you could get a hold of some from a ball field or jerry rig something similar instead of just sitting around and humorously saying “What rain? Is it raining?” like Kelly was. And then the episode suddenly came to a “to be continued next week” end, and thus so do I.