Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: C- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Lesson Fifteen: Shed Your Personality Like So Many Unwanted Pounds
By Jacob Clifton | Season 5 | Episode 15 | Aired on 06.04.2006
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.On the final task, things are pretty awesome: everybody gets in Lee's face about assigning unpleasant Lenny to ignore the celebrity hockey players, while Andrea's Ebola turns out to be less than deadly. Things are impressively insane for Team Lee, where fundraiser Lys proves once and for all that she's pretty cool, and the entire failure of Lee's event rests firmly on his shoulders. And by "his" I mean "Lenny's," but of course that's most of the problem. Lenny freezes out Michael J. Fox in a meeting with Lys, then leaves Jason Priestley stranded and wandering Chelsea Piers, and finally gets into a bare-knuckles fistfight with Jamie Pressley. Meanwhile, Lee can't even manage to meet Donald Trump at the event, pissing him off beyond belief. The most strife the editors can come up with for Team Sean is a few minutes of "stress" about losing the pre-party music...which is immediately resolved to the gay accompaniment of a choir of actual angels. That's like the only thing that happens there.
Hollywood: lots of runaround, no talk about the task itself, bare seconds of discussion with a few of the firees, and the most uninspiring Final Two ever. The going theory is that we can't know what happened in the final task comparison because it was such a landslide in Sean's favor. Trump bugs Sean into basically proposing marriage to Tammy, of course, which is awkward, and Lenny goes on a shortish rant comparing Lee to "gold" (or possibly a "goat"). Brent is roundly ignored by every single person associated with the show. No Viceroy or Apprentot can manage even a little preference for either unattractive prospect; the live audience itself seems to muster interest only for Tarek, Charmaine, and Lenny. None of whom are in the Final Two. The last ten minutes, after the reveal, the producers randomly cut around to different camera angles in which nothing is happening. Highlights include: more humiliation for poor Pepi, Lenny's lead balloon "jokes," the insane and wonderful outfits worn by Pirate Roxanne, Haight-Ashbury Andrea, and Princess Tammy, and a few seconds of Ivanka. And of course the final decision, made with a fair amount of rudeness and not a lot of fanfare: "Lee...you're fired. Sean, you're hired." Want more? The full recap starts right below!
We start in Hollywood, live, with a full band playing the suspenseful song and some announcer guy alleging that Donald Trump is "America's Boss." George and Carolyn accompany him out through the crowd toward the stage, and everybody in the theatre cheers. Trump makes a strange, unhappy face when you're cheering for him. I don't know if he's smiling or what, but it bothers me. There are young and cheesy people either connected to Lee, or very obvious plants in "business suit" costumes, getting way too rowdy about Lee. If I could believe he had friends, they would be tools like this, but I'm not prepared to take anything on faith here. Don Jr. pats his father sweetly on the shoulder as Trump makes his way toward the stage, and the song keeps going and going like you're going to go crazy. There's a cap on excitement that the song doesn't know about, like, if you hear one car alarm, maybe you look out the window, but after a person outside your house has been screaming for twenty minutes, you start to lose interest. I really hope those dudes are getting paid to act this stupid. They have signs. This is so much like American Idol that everybody in a business suit, which is everybody, looks really weird. Less like a group of normal people in business attire and more parallel to a scuba diver's convention. Or a bunch of damn furries.
Finally, Trump finds a place to sit down, which is the clearly marked chair he's been wandering toward the whole time the song was snorting detergent-scoops of methamphetamine. Donald Trump is wearing my favorite outfit in the entire alphabet of clothes: black suit, white shirt, red tie. Except that the tie, and the suit, are so shiny and weird that they look like you could stretch them like rubber. Like his tie is made of Laffy Taffy. But if it were, I suppose it would be the most delicious Laffy Taffy ever created by the hand of man, and Laffy Taffy would suddenly be a 12 billion dollar industry. Trump explains that the reason the finale is happening in Los Angeles is actually fractionally a reason, because the next 15-week job interview will be starting in Hollywood in January. If you don't already know that, you haven't been listening to Trump screaming his ass off about it every week in front of a ferris wheel. Oh, and the screaming? In full effect. I think Trump falls under the jurisdiction of "fire in a crowded theatre" because even the words "15-week job interview" are screeched with such a terrifying intensity. Between the Trumpeting and the psychotic music I ended up in a ball in the corner and nothing's even happened yet. He calls Hollywood "La-La Land" -- Why? -- and everybody cheers for a million years. Why?