Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: B+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Lesson Twelve: The Customer Is Always "Right"
By Jacob Clifton | Season 4 | Episode 12 | Aired on 12.07.2005
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.The Final Two task starts off promisingly, with Rebecca and Randal at a hair-raisingly intense dinner with Carolyn and George in which they pick their teams for the event management task. Seriously, it's a reptilian-level display of cold-blooded aggression and gentleman's-agreement negotiation, moving toward what's generally the best part of every season, awkward-wise. Not so much, this time around, as they choose their three favorite past candidates with about ten minutes of weirdness and then embark on a whirlwind tour ofâ¦uninteresting efficiency and politeness.
Rebecca, representing Capital Edge, negotiates Randal out of Chris and James, misses out on Josh, and then pulls a kind of foreseeable whack move by selecting Toral. It would appear that Randal does not have a problem with that. The task is an All-Star Comedy Benefit for pediatric AIDS in conjunction with Yahoo! The most troubling bit here is the inclusion of '80s comedian-turned-creepy steroid case Joe Piscopo as the event's emcee, but he drops out due to "union conflicts," which is completely shocking in that it happens every season. Toral does a great job picking up on some Yahoo! body language, reading a room for once in her life; James is as nice and helpful and unmemorable as ever; and the rampantly proud Chris blows the other boys' minds w/r/t his outstanding and sudden gayness.
Excel, consisting of PM Randal, Josh, Marshawn, and Mark, gets a baseball event in coordination with Outback benefiting Autism Speaks. Randal gets a weird, weird edit where he: drags the entire team to a party supply store where they count pieces of irrelevant plastic crap for five hours; misses a promotion meeting; forces Mark to set up the entire event single-handed while the rest of them watch and marvel; and causes it to rain through the power of the jinx. Josh makes a sweet connection with the charity rep, and Randal not only ticks her off, but is also raked over the coals by the oily Outback guy. Marshawn and Randal spend most of the episode in that strange Marshawn lacuna place, doing nothing and being invisible, and Mark does everything. Everything.
To review: Rebecca must combine the concepts of internet portals, hilarious comedy, the absence of Joe Piscopo, and the always-cheerful pediatric AIDS. Meanwhile, Randal will be synthesizing the concepts of baseball, fake-Aussie overpriced cuisine, and autism. In the rain. Without tents. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
My, my. The whole formula here is completely wacky! We start back in the past, with a redux on the glorious Alla/Felisha meltdown from last week, and jump back and forth from that to Randal and Rebecca hanging out against the ugly abstract expressionist painting that greets you on entering the suite, talking about how clearly it will be Alla that comes back, Felisha having found herself under a bus. They're watching the door like hawks and there is much discussion and interview footage about the whole Alla-Is-The-Winner thing. It's nice as an editorial nod to Alla's rocking awesomeness, but because the narrative is a bit less sophisticated than one might think, Burnett-wise we're actually gearing up for the hilarity of neither of them coming back. That's it, and underscored one hundred times. The flashback footage is mostly about how horrified Trump was by Alla's openly abusive takedown of Felisha, and by the boner it gave him.
Alla licks her lips and tiptoes out just like she's on Scooby Doo and you can hear that squinkly-squinkly sound effect, and then Trump informs her she is too vile to be a part of the Trumpanies, and then gets all excited about getting to go inform Rebecca and Randal about this latest turn of events. He goes about it in the less normal fashion of heading back into the chthonic depths of that secret door of his in the Boardroom that he always comes out of, and you always expect like steam or smoke or Halloween screams or a scary red glow or whatever. If that creepy black room leads to the suite, it's through some kind of icky secret passageways and that makes me so scared I might cry, like, you're going to see paintings in the suite with the eyes going back and forth and creepy suits of armor or whatever, bookcases that swing open in the dead of night when you twist the candlesticks and the Heir of Slytherin and whatnot.
The door opens, and Rebecca and Randal smile gorgeously at the creepy sight of Trump walking in, and he's like, "You're expecting…who?" and they admit it's Alla. He makes a funny Martha noise, like this oh mm-hmm sound, and then congratulates them both. They already know what's up, since it's obvious, but pretend to be all, "What? What is it, Mr. Trump?" so he can blow their minds with a fake surprise, which is very sweet of them. "I fired them both," he says, and there's a weird snake rattle sound, and they are both astounded to learn that they are the Final Two. You guys, they look so tired. Like they haven't slept in weeks, which is exactly the case. I want to cuddle them both in my lap and sing until they go to sleep because that shit is not good for your skin. I think a good lullaby for Randal would be "Superman" by Five For Fighting due to its quiet yearning. I think for Rebecca I would sing "The Official Ironmen Rally Song" by Guided By Voices so she would learn about sophisticated, intellectual tunes, or maybe something from the Belinda Carlisle oeuvre.
Rebecca -- neither of them are all that coherent at this point -- interviews that she "wanted to laugh, like WHAT?" and they both laugh and shoot finger guns at each other and blow up their cheeks like Dizzy Gillespie and make inappropriate Redskins sounds and then they start crumping, which is hard with crutches, and they don't say anything that makes sense, and Trump watches them, thinking, "Yes, this is exactly what I wanted." He reminds them that this process began with over a million candidates, and now there are just two of them, and they giggle and smile and breakdance and make origami.