Once upon a last week, the Celebrity Apprentice was only an hour. Those days are long gone and we have two hours to experience every Gary Busey outburst and every Marilu Henner memory tic. Yay?
No one is surprised to see that Dennis has been fired. Lil Jon is sad to see his friend go, but knows that Dennis’ absence will probably make Team Power stronger.
Team Power doesn’t have to suffer a numbers disadvantage for long, though. At the task assignment, Donald Trump sends Marilu from Team Plan B over to Power, even though Trace wants Penn on their team.
Their task this week is to create a 45-60 second silent film that embodies the sun care brand of Australian Gold. The executives will be judging the teams on brand messaging, product integration and creativity.
Team Plan B
Gary Busey is never the first selection for project manager, for obvious reasons that don’t even need to be stated, but since he is the only person who hasn’t stepped up yet, he is the first selection for project manager. It had to happen eventually, people.
Of course, he starts things out by being his weird and unfiltered self during the executive meeting. The female beauty queen executive looks as amused by him as she would look after the toddler she was babysitting got his head stuck in some stair railings.
After everyone feels massive second-hand embarrassment for being in the same room as Gary and the execs finally leave, they try to nail down a concept. Gary spends a lot of time shooting down good ideas from all three of his other teammates, but fails to come up with anything better. Finally, they settle on the kind-of-idea of a woman who is afraid of the sun and having Gary like a sun fairy godfather that introduces the magic of Australian Gold.
Gary assigns himself to go shopping with Lisa, while Stephen and Penn work on a shot list for the film. Lisa points out that this is a risk for Gary, who is delegating too much of the task out to other people.
At the shoot, Gary wears swim trunks over suit pants and a Bahama shirt under a suit jacket and insists that Lisa hold a stuffed Sidney the Koala bear, the Australian Gold logo, during the whole commercial. So basically, things are going just about as well as expected. And unfortunately for everyone, Stephen decides to take on a leadership role. He decides to highlight the SPF Bronzer for the commercial and names himself director. He also wants to use the phrase “Never fear, Australian Gold is here” in the commercial, which Penn thinks is 100% cliche and even more unfunny.
After they are done shooting, Penn tries to take over during editing to cover up some of the mistakes that Stephen made. Of course, Stephen takes offense because he thinks of himself as a regular Steven Spielberg and that Penn’s ideas would compromise his brilliant vision. Eventually, Penn relents for the sake of his sanity and they all are happy with the final product.
For the presentation, Gary brings in the stuffed koala to try and impress the executives, because he is unlikely to do so otherwise. Lisa is very charming in the final video, but it seems to lack creativity and they only showcase one product. But the fact that they actually manage to pull off something somewhat presentable is actually kind of a miracle itself.
Team Power
Everyone on Team Power has had a chance at P.M. already, so Trace reluctantly agrees to be in charge. Having already participated in an Australian Gold challenge on his season, Lil Jon wants to make sure they have all the information they need from the executives. Trace just gets impatient, however, and wants to start on the creative process.
Trace also gets impatient when it comes to brainstorming ideas for their movie. He wants to make their story about a caveman discovering Australian Gold and moves on as soon as possible. He sends Marilu and Brande shopping, and he and Lil Jon will work on a shot list for the movie, which Lil Jon will ultimately direct and he will star in as the caveman.
During the shoot, Marilu is hectically micro-managing just about every aspect of the shoot. Lil Jon is getting visibly frustrated, which is quite rare for him. Trace also traipses around the set as a caveman, which is highly amusing to Ivanka Trump and just about everyone else.
Brande presses Lil Jon to finish shooting so they can get to editing, but he wants to make sure they have a shot of all of the products on display for their video before they go, remembering that in the last challenge his team lost for not displaying the product enough. Then Brande and Marilu take charge editing the video.
The presentation is laid-back with Trace introducing the product in a self-deprecating manner. The video follows him as the caveman as he travels into a portal into the 1920s (for some reason) and then into the modern times of Australian Gold. The concept seems to be a little bit of a stretch, but the executives like that it displays all of the products, even though they wish they had done so earlier in the movie.
Boardroom
Gary is quite confident right away that his team has won the challenge. He says he owes everything to his teammates and refuses to name either the star of the team or who was the weakest. Everyone else agrees that Gary was at his best, and Stephen even says he was an “amazing” project manager.
Trace is also confident that his team won the challenge, and rightfully takes credit for the concept while giving credit to Lil Jon for his encouragement of product integration. The teams watch each other’s videos and each team agrees that theirs is the stronger of the two.
But of course, there can only be one winner. And the winner is Team Power and Trace, who wins $40,000 for the American Red Cross. The competition was very close, but ultimately Power won because of their display of all of the products and not just one.
In hindsight, Gary says that he would have obviously included more of the products. Now it comes down to finding out who exactly was responsible for making the decision not to do that. We the viewers know it was Stephen’s decision, but he conveniently seems to forget that upon sitting in the boardroom.
Gary brings back Stephen and Penn to the boardroom with him, but Donald almost immediately dismisses Penn, stating that the blame lies either with the Project Manager or the director. Gary does make a sane case for himself, and Stephen digs himself further into his grave by applauding Gary’s efforts.
In the end, Trump can’t get around the fact that Stephen called Gary “amazing” earlier and is proud of Gary because he, like, tried really, really hard. So he fires Stephen. While it might not have been the right decision, it certainly isn’t the wrong one.
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(Image courtesy of NBC)
Contributing Writer, BuddyTV
