Episode Report Card Miss Alli: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT The [Pepsi] Edge of Reason
By Miss Alli | Season 2 | Episode 12 | Aired on 11.24.2004
The Trump motto of the week is "Form Your Own Opinion," illustrated by Trump conducting a meeting in which he contradicts someone about something. Brave! It must be hard to stand up to people when you own their asses like that. Then, he tells us that people who are in charge and need to be popular generally are not going to make it. And I cannot tell you how much I agree with that.
We look down at an idyllic river running through a world of trees, and then the sun happily shines, because we are no longer in Manhattan. Mosaic is in fact pulling up at the Pepsi headquarters, as Jen continues sucking up by telling Andy and Sandy how much she looks forward to working with both of them. Jen recaps the task for us, and then we watch as Mosaic enters its workroom. The workroom is stocked with all sorts of food and, especially, Pepsi products. Wow, there's Slice. I didn't know they still made Slice. And there's Pepsi Twist, which isn't nearly as good as Diet Coke with Lime. (But then, what is?) And then Sandy explains to us what, exactly, Pepsi Edge is. You see, there's Diet Pepsi, which is made with artificial sweetener. There's regular Pepsi, which is made with sugar. Pepsi Edge -- like C2, if you're aware of that, which you might not be, considering that the world has responded with a collective shrug, as far as I know -- is in between, and is made partially with sugar and partly with sweetener. (Incidentally, my personal view is that they should also mention the fact that it's not just "in between," it's also made with Splenda, which is a sweetener I consider far superior in taste to NutraSweet, which is what's in Diet Pepsi. I know there are people who believe the opposite, but I secretly suspect that they're all NutraSweet employees.)
As Mosaic chats about the "in between" concept, Sandy and Andy come up with the concept that Pepsi Edge is "on the edge of both worlds," or, as Sandy writes on the white board, "the best of both worlds." Sandy rattles off ideas for a promotional game where you would collect caps, and the caps would have the name of a country. When you collected all the countries on a continent, you'd get a trip to that continent. It's not a completely horrible idea, although it has some major flaws. Andy figures out what Sandy is suggesting, and notes happily that Antarctica is an instant winner, but...is Pepsi going to send a winner to Antarctica? I'm not sure they want a frozen corpse on the cover of the quarterly report. Sandy tells us that Andy was getting pretty hyped up while they were working, and among other things, he was bolting Pepsi every time she turned around. Well, that'll do it. We then see a montage of Andy fast-talking, improvising, brainstorming, walking around the room...your basic design-a-bottle-in-one-day stuff, as far as I'm concerned. I'm not sure I see anything out of the ordinary there. The team is working on an "Are you going to the edge?" tagline, which isn't entirely without promise. Sandy interviews that she thinks Andy might lack a little bit of maturity and experience that might have been relevant to his spazzed-out performance during this stage of the task. You can see on the white board that they're already planning a bottle in the shape of a globe, so that idea seems to have emerged early.