Episode Report Card Miss Alli: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT The no-sell motel
By Miss Alli | Season 3 | Episode 2 | Aired on 01.26.2005
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.This week's task is to renovate a couple of Jersey shore motels, and Net Worth makes its first mistake by putting Brian in charge. Brian, who thinks that motel guests would rather have a brand-new toilet than carpeting. After junking much of the plumbing and not even investigating the budget in advance, Brian finishes off the alienation of his team by pitting himself against John, who has, for good or ill, the team's respect after last week's showing. He also gets into a series of screaming matches with Kristin, who manages to both be right and suck, which is always irritating. Magna makes the surprising decision to rely on their pleasant personalities, which works out surprisingly well when they throw the equivalent of a keg party out on the balconies to the delight of their guests. Verna, however, is in the office, melting down. And melt down she does, to the point where, the next morning, she walks off with her suitcase. Only the reappearance of Nicer, More Balanced Carolyn (who seemingly knows that she went a little over the top with Mean Snappy Carolyn last season) calms Verna down, and she returns to the fold. Her team pulls out the victory, which saves her from an uncomfortable Boardroom situation, and Net Worth begins jockeying back at the Love Palace. Brian makes like he's got no regrets, but in the Boardroom, he tries some kind of triple-deke fake-out on Trump by saying, "Why yes, you should fire me." Um. So Trump's like, "Okay," and there's not even a final table, and then Brian sits in the cab trying to figure out how it all went so wrong, not counting the part where he was like, "Fire me." Because it surely couldn't be that. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Previously on "Smarts" Is A Relative Term: An entire episode that this episode takes about five minutes to recap. Suffice it to say that it ended with the departure of Todd, who graduated magna cum knob from the School of Blah. I will not miss him.
When we return, it turns out that this show is taking place in New York. I know! I was surprised, too. We return to the kitchen of the Love Palace, where there is a lot of discussion about who's likely to be sent home as between Todd and Danny, assumed to be the two most likely candidates since Alex is just kind of drippy and skinny and not all that offensive. YET. Bren is telling Michael and Brian that he thinks Danny will go, given all the time he was having to put in defending himself in the Boardroom. Bren adds in a voice-over that he thinks Danny is a "loose cannon" (DRINK!) who can't respect authority. Of course, when the authority is Todd, what's to respect, really? His hair? Bren and his crooked tie tell us that they simply don't see Danny as a CEO. Oh, he's so going to wish he'd had a mirror before that interview. You don't want your tie to point to 1:30 and 7:30.
The door to the suite opens, and...what do you know? It's Alex and Danny. There is a lot of noisy welcoming of people back to the L-Pal, just like everyone would do if they totally cared. Danny opines that his team underestimated him, although he acknowledges that Trump did characterize him as "a disaster." Still, he thinks that Trump likes him. No, really, that's what he says: "I think that Mr. Trump likes me." Oh, and he calls him "the Donald" in saying that Trump can totally relate to what it's like to be a socially inept guitar-playing hippie. Well, sure. That's what Trump did before real estate. Still, Danny acknowledges that "disaster" is not necessarily the impression he was looking to make right off the bat. "Going forward, I've got to really prove myself more," he says. "More"? Did he see himself last week?
The next morning, a group of birds flees in terror as another of Trump's redevelopment projects threatens another piece of their critical habitat. In the L-Pal, others are sleeping while Danny pedals on the oddly apropos Exercise Bike To Nowhere. The Rhonaphone rings, and Kristen goes to answer it. Rhona tells her that Trump will meet them across from Trump International on Central Park West. In my favorite development, we don't see Rhona actually give Kristen a time for the meeting, but we do see her admonish Kristen not to be late. Awesome. Don't get there after Mystery Time! Trump will be really angry! And then, in the development that tells you once and for all that I have no friends working for this show, shirtless Danny is paraded across the screen and burned onto my brain.
Trump International! Look, look! It's Trump International! On the street across from the building, the candidates gather on the sidewalk. You can't have them inside the building, because they make the carpets all muddy. Apparently over in the building, Trump is harassing some Trump International lady about how business is. She, employing acting skills that make Donald Trump look like Laurence Olivier, tells him that "business is fantastic." He tells her menacingly that it had better be, and he's all Big Rich Asshole about it, like it's hilarious and you're going to laugh right into your bourgeois bowl of Cheerios, and then he and George and Carolyn leave, and the plastered-on smile falls right off the lady's face, which is pretty funny. She's like, "Man, I'm glad those dipshits are gone." And she's doing it on TV, too. Sorry for calling your ass out, Trump International Lady. I actually side with you. I hope you don't lose your job.