Episode Report Card Miss Alli: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Fop till you drop
By Miss Alli | Season 2 | Episode 9 | Aired on 11.03.2004
The team leaves for the Boardroom. The sun sets, and they head off the elevators. They enter and wait for Trump, who enters wearing a tuxedo. He explains that he's giving an award later, so that's why he's rather overdressed. He asks Raj how the team lost. Raj says that quite simply, they were promised things by a contractor that weren't delivered. Trump asks if the contractor wasn't good, and Raj says that, ultimately, the contractor was bad. Trump asks who picked the contractor, and Raj says that he hired the guy in the end, and he accepts responsibility to that point.
Trump now asks Baldford whom he sees as the best natural developer, and he names Raj. Trump asks if that's true even in light of what Trump sees as the "big mistake" of making a four-bedroom house into a three-bedroom house. Trump says that he, for one, would rather be selling a four-bedroom than a three-bedroom. Baldford points out that while it's nice of Raj to take all the blame for the contractor, it's not necessarily right, because the person who pushed for that contractor was Kevin. Asked if that's true, Jen has to throw in that Ivana backed the contractor, too. Shut up, Jen. That's one of the first times the cracks in her strategy have been so obvious -- that was a remarkably clumsy effort to deflect attention from Kevin and onto Ivana. Trump asks Kevin if it's true that he picked the contractor, and Kevin says it's true that he backed the contractor. Asked if that's an offense worthy of firing, Kevin says, "Absolutely not." Well, of course he does. He only picked the contractor that lost them the task. It's not like he was trying to make a tampon commercial. Unhappy with Kevin's equivocating over the distinction between picking the contractor and backing the contractor, Baldford brings up that he wishes Kevin would just accept responsibility for having chosen the contractor, and Kevin, of course, insists that he did. Which...he didn't, quite.
Trump moves on to Jennifer "This Year's Amy In Several Different Ways" Massey, asking her how she thinks Stacie did. Jen says she thinks Stacie did great. Trump, likely feeling foolish now that he knows the women he assumed couldn't all be lying probably were, goes out of his way to point out what a good job Stacie did, and the fact that she took rather a lot of crap from the team when she left. Now, Ivana jumps in here and says that Jen came up to her at one point to tell her to take over the windows because Stacie wasn't doing them right. Trump jumps all over Ivana for how gratuitously nasty that was, and maybe it was, and she did it in a very clumsy way. But Jen and Ivana are at war at this point, so it seems at least conceivable that Ivana's point is more that Jen is praising Stacie now, but snipes and complains about her behind her back during the task, which would be pretty consistent with what I've seen of Jen -- she repeats what Trump wants to hear in the Boardroom, but is very shitty to people outside of it. I think Ivana wants Trump to know that when she's not in the Boardroom, Jen is the nastiest, most backbiting person on the team, which is true, and I think that's the point she's trying to make. I don't think Ivana's agenda is about Stacie; I think it's about Jen, because that's who Ivana is mad at. That would explain why, while Trump is chastising her for putting Stacie down unnecessarily, Ivana keeps emphasizing, "No, I agree, I said that she did a great job." But Trump doesn't listen, as usual, and hates her for it anyway, and unfortunately, Ivana is reaping the "rewards" of having been very rude and nasty on many occasions in the past, even if I'm right about her intentions. As it happens, when it comes to being an unpleasant person, I have a feeling Ivana is completely overmatched by Jen.
Trump asks Stacie what she thought of the contractor, and she says that at first, she agreed with Kevin that the guy looked like he would be great. But then? Not so much. Trump then asks Baldford what he'd do if he were Trump. They exchange some har-hars about whether Baldford would want to be Trump, who is older but has a hot girlfriend. Baldford says that in Trump's place, he would fire Ivana, whom he thinks is great at some things, and can work on paper, but not so much in management situations. Ivana makes a face. Now, Trump throws out Baldford and Stacie, and it's time for Raj to bring two or three people to the Boardroom with him. He chooses to bring Kevin and Ivana. The rest are sent upstairs. But Chris, unable to leave it at that, has to jump in and say he wants to make a point. Trump tries to tell him he's safe and might want to shut up, but Chris won't, and says what he wants to get across is important. And what is it? Basically, he just wants to say how bad the team is, and that if they stay in this configuration, he's confident they'll lose next week, too.