Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Lesson Five: Speak Up. Or: Don't, Depending
By Jacob Clifton | Season 6 | Episode 5 | Aired on 02.10.2007
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Usually when a Project Manager wanders around like an outpatient, staring into space, licking cement, talking to nobody, and absent-mindedly scratching his or her ass -- as both Aaron and Aimee apparently did for the entirety of this task -- it upsets me. But this week? They both get the pass. I spent most of the episode doing the same thing. In a series of unrelated tasks, mistakes, narrative dead ends, and bizarre non sequiturs, the team have to...accomplish something. The steps that they must take to accomplish this thing, whatever it might be, include: wearing space suits, getting stung by bees, taking a field trip to a factory and a Ralph's, and possibly pouring honey on themselves like Ivana of the Undies.
While both teams are in the weeds the entire sales part of the task, a couple of last-minute maneuvers -- Derek in a beekeeper costume and Angela finally trading on her Olympic prowess as it, I guess, relates to bees -- put Kinetic over the top for no real reason. The music would have you believe it's a triumph. I'm just glad Kinetic is getting back in the house, because Arrow deserves nothing.
The mysterious prep, cryptic task, and uncategorizable reward all take exactly 23 of the show's 42 minutes total, so the rest is boardroom. Normally that would be good and ugly, but this week...it's more of the same: weird, bland, unending, pointless. Surya is brought back to the BR (for being kind of sucky and whiny), and is joined by Nicole (for indulging Tim's weird/moronic attempt to repeat their "bulk sales" success from last week by trying to sell jars of honey to gas station attendants) but eventually it's PM Aaron who gets the boot -- because he didn't speak up enough last week in the boardroom. Or something. I'm honestly at a loss here, guys. I know some things happened, because I laughed and pointed at the screen a lot, but it's all kind of a blur.
Stars this week include Stefani, whose apiphobia stops her from doing absolutely nothing, Aaron, who went home rightly but for the wrong reason, Donald Trump, who is out of his goddamn mind, and Derek, who managed once again to turn a few seconds of screentime, a couple of bee stings, and a Pillsbury Doughboy reference into box office gold. The guy could not love being on reality TV more if this show were still actually relevant. Next week: Tim kisses Nicole; everybody barfs; somebody probably gets fired. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Previously, Arrow finally won with Surya and Aaron's leadership; Aaron and Tim got shirtless and frolicked in the mansion pool; Viceroy Aaron didn't talk in the boardroom, and Heidi was pretty some more.
Derek stands in the yard lookin' great with Jen and Muna, and possibly his buddy Kristine, discussing Heidi's chances of making it out alive from last week's boardroom; he thinks she'll have a tough time pinning the loss on Marisa, unless she can convince Trump and the Viceroys that they lost due to Marisa's chicken-suiting madness. Angela nods. I really like her. Kristine worries that if Heidi doesn't come back, they'll be stuck with Aimee and Marisa, and Derek agrees that would suck. They wait and wait, and in the boardroom Trump says that all of Kinetic wants Marisa gone, so she's gone. In this revised version of events from last week, Marisa takes this news quietly -- just like she didn't, in reality. Aimee comes into the yard and Kinetic pretends to be excited, but then once Heidi comes around the corner everybody shrieks and surrounds her like she's Tippi Hedren. Heidi interviews how intense it was to be in the boardroom as a loser, and reiterates that Marisa is nobody she'd hire in real life, then tells her team that she's probably grown "like seventy gray hairs" during the grueling process of listening to Marisa and Aimee bitch at each other with tiny little canary feathers peeking from her lovely, smug little mouth. She notes that Aaron said nothing the entire time, as Trump pointed out a few times.
Kinetic then overhears Arrow cheering Aaron's return from the boardroom, and they yell back and forth over the hedge. That part was pretty cute. Heidi was like, "Doesn't being Viceroy suck? Aren't these rules stupid?" and then apologizes for interrupting Arrow's dinner and wine, and tells them to get back to it. Aaron talks at length about how the boardroom went down, focusing on Trump's complaints that he was too quiet, so that's three times in two minutes we're hearing about it, so the whole rest of this episode just made itself wildly clear. "You just don't wanna put your neck on the line for anything," he says, which is clearly the final nail in his coffin. Credits.
So, um, Aaron's going to get fired this week for not talking last week, I don't know if you got that memo. I can see that -- the whole yucky fusion bowl issue was really just collateral to Heidi's fuck-up, and that's how Arrow really won. And even on their side, all the good ideas were Tim and Stefani. But I like him, a lot. However much "there" is there, and I don't think it's a huge amount, he's very nice and a smart guy, and he is pretty okay to look at. And compared to the rest of Arrow, I mean...