Over at Mosaic, Kelly is still feeling awfully put-upon because he has to tolerate Andy and how much he sucks. This time, he's upset that Andy, having come up with their concept, might actually want to pitch it. Either Sandy or Maria says that Andy needs to have some role in the presentation, first because he wants to, and second because he's a national debate champion, and she suspects that "this kid can talk." Kelly says, "Excellent points, both of them." And then, talking from behind his hand, all deadpan contempt, he says, "Except for the first one, because it doesn't matter if he wants it, and the second one, because this isn't a debate." God, what a raging prick. HATE! I don't know how I didn't get how much some of these people sucked ass until this week. You will be shocked -- shocked, I tell you! -- to hear that Kelly actually thinks that he is the best person to give the pitch. When Andy arrives at the meeting, Kelly brings up the issue of who's going to pitch, and Andy says he's going to do an introduction. Kelly smirks smugly. He gets up and says that the only time he ever heard Andy pitch, it was "debate-sounding." Whatever that means. Kelly claims that he has "actually done it," because apparently, being in the military and being a New York City police officer are exactly the same thing. Kelly answers Andy's opinion that there's not really sameness there by insisting that there is, and that it's "generally accepted." HA! Does anyone not know that anyone who has to explicitly tell you that his opinion is "generally accepted" has absolutely no argument? I'll tell you who does know it -- Andy, the national debate champion. Seriously. I think the kid sees right through that, because he immediately says, "Okay, I'm going to go ahead with the introduction." So, in other words, "Thanks for your input. Consider it rejected." He does give Kelly a role walking the guys through the media stuff, voicing over that he did this to "placate Kelly." As they try to divide up time, Andy says that he's going to do a minute or a minute and a half, and Maria's like, "So Kelly, you'll do..." "The rest!" he says emphatically. "The rest." Oh, another person with absolutely no idea how he's going to come off.
Skyline porn! Yay! I really needed that in this week of suckitude. Now, in an interesting development, when Elizabeth shows the team one of her print ads, "No More Input" guy Kevin, who just thinks she needed to make a decision and go with it, says, "I oppose this," all with his providing input and stuff. Imagine that. Raj then yells at her about how the ad she chose isn't part of their "general theme," and she calmly says, "It is," and he completely loses his shit, waving his arms at her and whisper-yelling, "It's not!" See, they can't have this both ways. It can't be her fault for failing to make a decision when every decision she makes, they sit there and yell at her about. You can wash your hands of the whole thing and say she needs to make the decisions, or you can participate, but you can't wash your hands of it and then kibitz, because that's bullshit. Carolyn, in an interview, faults Elizabeth for -- listen carefully -- "her inability to take over a leadership role," because this has led to "animosity and so much disorganization on the team." I roughly translate that to, at least in part, "She needed to yank on the leash and tell these people to heel a lot sooner." Which is exactly what I think. Elizabeth didn't need to make creative decisions sooner, so much as she needed to get over her need to please everyone and tell some of these asshats to step off. ["Or, as the lovely Wing Chun has put it, 'This is the part in the prison movie where the new fish needs to break a chair over someone's head.'" -- Sars] At any rate, the rest of the team checks out again and leaves Elizabeth to handle it herself -- again.
“ That's good stuff, and it comes a lot closer to the reasons the NYPD wants people to join than the whole 'join now, because otherwise, we're all dead' thing that Raj wanted to do. Or, you know, 'Join now; chicks dig sirens.' ”
Trump's plane approaches. He lands, and then he is in his limo, on the phone, telling Rhona that he just got in from the Miss Universe pageant. (LTG: "That phone isn't connected to anything." Me: "Of course not.") He tells Rhona to connect him to the Deutsch-bag when he calls.
Apex heads in to present its campaign. Chris tells the ad guys that the cops they talked to "all had the same message: they are on the front line." He goes on about how you have to want to protect both the city and the country, blah bling blah. Elizabeth shows the first of the print ads, which shows the rappelling helicopter guy, with white lettering over it, saying, "You Don't Have to Be on the Other Side of the World to Be on the Front Line." It's not a terrible idea, but it's horrifically executed. The design looks horrendous, the letters are partially obscured by the picture -- no good. Very much no good. The ad says, "Fight Crime on New York's Front Line." It's a close shot of a cop's face, looking very menacing, in that he's shot from under the chin. Always a great angle, sure to inspire fear.
And then, the TV ad. It is indeed highly military in tone, with very scary music, columns of motorcycles...worst of all, this time, it says, "To be on the frontline," rather than "front line." Not only is that wrong, but it's inconsistent, because they did it right every other time. Ew. In other weird news, the last screen initially comes up as, "New York's Finest Looking." That's before it adds, "For New York's Finest." But the first part kinda sounds like wordplay from an ad for a strip show about cops. Which I think is not actually the idea. Deutsch makes some alarmed faces, but eventually tells them, "Good job," which he doesn't mean, and sends them on their way.
And here comes Mosaic. Andy introduces the pitch. "We are going to ask them a question: When was the last time? When was the last time that you protected the world's greatest city?" He says they believe the answers to these questions will be a call to join the NYPD. The first print ad is totally gorgeous, a low shot of a police helicopter, with lots of open sky above it. And as with some of the phallic ads last year, the credit for the visually arresting nature of that ad belongs to the photographer, not the team. The ad asks, "When was the last time you took a leap of faith?" The one, I like even better -- it's a black background and a badge, and it says, "When was the last time you showed your true colors?" Very clever. Cheesy, but clever. Kelly is pitching now, and says that the question is personal. But not as personal as porn, like he wanted. And now, their TV commercial. Granted, the music is unbelievably corny, and these cops are not actors. But the words -- "When was the last time you saved a life?" "When was the last time you fought terrorism?" "When was the last time you made your family proud?" "When was the last time you were fearless?" -- that's good stuff, and it comes a lot closer to the reasons the NYPD wants people to join than the whole "join now, because otherwise, we're all dead" thing that Raj wanted to do. Or, you know, "Join now; chicks dig sirens." Deutsch likes it, you can tell, and he sends them out. When the teams are gone, Deutsch and his folks talk. They all think the Apex commercial is entirely too scary, and will actually turn people off. And -- what do you know? -- it lacks the emotion that they were asked to make part of the campaign. One of the women seems to acknowledge that the production on neither ad is what you would want to see, but Mosaic's has promise, if you did it right.
The teams are brought back in, and Deutsch gets Trump on the phone. And calls him "Big Guy," which...just, no. Trump asks how the teams did, and basically Deutsch tells him that Apex made New York look like "a police state." "You can't do an effective recruiting campaign and at the same time freak 12 million New Yorkers out." Heh. He then turns to Mosaic and says that they followed the task, and were very effective without being scary. Not even close, Deutsch says -- Mosaic by a landslide. Elizabeth looks ill. Trump tells Mosaic that they will be picked up at 9:00 AM tomorrow for their surprise reward. And oh, losers? One of you will be fired.
The morning, Mosaic takes the Trump limo out as Andy crows in an interview that the rest of these fools now know that they were led to victory by the kid they all wrote off. Which is a moment he's basically entitled to, considering how they treated him. The team gets out of the limo in Times Square. And when they look up at the big...whatever, Jumbotron...they see that their commercial is running. And it never will again, because it really is not professional-looking, but good for them anyway. Maria, of course, takes full credit for the entire thing, and for how rewarding it was to see her work -- by which she means Andy's work about which she fought him every step of the way -- up there on the big screen. I think she still wishes it had more tight asses.
Wes and Elizabeth talk back at the suite later. He tells her to "curse as much as possible" in the Boardroom. Heh. He also tells her that her best shot is to be opinionated and strong, and to hope her opinion is the same as Trump's. It's actually spot-on advice, which kind of surprises me, since it's...you know, Wes. As Elizabeth works on the computer, she says she fully expects to have the finger pointed at her in the Boardroom. And then Jen -- determined to keep up the trend of everyone I once liked totally sucking ass -- actually pulls Wes aside and lectures him about how he shouldn't have given Elizabeth any Boardroom advice. Excuse me? What fucking business is it of hers? He can talk to whomever he wants, you buttinsky! For crying out loud, what has come over the formerly sane? "It's not fair," she whines. Wes insists that all he told Elizabeth was, "Don't be a pussy." And that was on the air! Unlike "JAPs," which was censored in my time zone. Oh, what a world.
“ He never said, 'We don't have anything better.' He said, 'Any concerns you have about my idea are wrong.' So this is bullshit. ”
Raj and Elizabeth talk on the balcony. She says that it would have been more helpful if people had offered to help, rather than just endlessly complaining and ultimately walking off the job. She tells him that what they saw as waffling was her effort to get them off the military approach -- which, you'll remember, Deutsch absolutely despised. Raj snots to her that she'll probably pin that whole thing on him, what with it being...his idea and everything. Raj interviews that he expects to "come under fire" for having "supported" -- no, shoved, dear -- the terrorism angle for the ad. "Look," he says, "at the end of the day, if everybody had thought that was such a bad idea, we wouldn't have gone forward with it." Dude. At least in Elizabeth's case, she told you about a zillion times it was a bad idea. You refused to hear the reasons. You can't share the blame with everyone when you berated them for disagreeing with you about it. I tell you, it's a world gone mad. It's like nobody remembers anything they did even, like, earlier the same day.
Apex visits the Boardroom, dragging suitcases behind them. When Trump gets into the room, he asks Elizabeth what went wrong. She says that they didn't have a good idea before they had to start shooting. Trump asks her if that's her fault, and she says it's the whole team's fault, really. Trump asks her if she thinks she was a good leader, and she says she thinks a good leader is a person who "stands by their convictions." She says that she chose not to go forward with "a generic campaign [she] didn't believe in," and she doesn't do that. She says that she "swung for the fences," borrowing shamelessly from Deutsch's speech to the teams last year about how he likes to see campaigns done. Unfortunately, her campaign was far, far too wishy-washy for that argument. Nice try, though. Heh. Trump pumps up the pain by screening the ad in the Boardroom, which...yeah, it still blows. "It's pretty bad," Carolyn says. Another bad Trump voice-over (can we do anything about that? Is it possible at all?) says, "Wow, based on that, I feel I live in a police state." He then makes a dumb-ass comment about how this will keep the wives from telling their husbands to join. Trump asks if it was really Raj who wanted this approach, and if he "shoved it down [Elizabeth's] throat." Raj jumps in, saying that he advocating going full-on with whatever they did, and Trump says, in a quote I suspect of being lifted from elsewhere, "I love what you're saying, because if you believe that, you should say it." Raj goes on to say that his idea was the only idea available, and that was the reason he advocated it. Which is bullshit, because when Elizabeth expressed reservations about it and wanted to keep talking, he told her all about how unfounded her concerns were. He never said, "We don't have anything better." He said, "Any concerns you have about my idea are wrong." So this is bullshit.
“ 'Other than that, you thought she was great,' Trump says sarcastically. 'Other than that, I thought she was terrible,' Jen says, totally unnecessarily, because obviously, Trump got it. Now, she's just being a bitch. ”
And then Jen, setting a record for zero-to-hate in one week, jumps in about how Raj did a great job with the task, and "actually took a position," and blah dee blah. Of course, the bad blood between her and Elizabeth goes back some weeks, so there you go. Chris jumps in as well, arguing that this was the only direction available. He leaves out the part where he said the thing about the tampon commercial. Ivana, parroting someone else as she does every single week, says that she would "commend Raj for actually taking a position." "Is she weak and ineffective, or is she just weak?" Trump asks. I don't even understand that question. Is there "weak but effective"? Is that a choice? Ivana says that Elizabeth was both weak and ineffective. Wow, surprising. Jennifer, asked for her opinion, just parrots what Trump just said, calling Elizabeth "weak and ineffective" (original!), as well as indecisive and some other stuff. "Other than that, you thought she was great," Trump says sarcastically. "Other than that, I thought she was terrible," Jen says, totally unnecessarily, because obviously, Trump got it. Now, she's just being a bitch. Trump asks Elizabeth why everybody else seems to think she's incompetent. Elizabeth tries to answer, but he just turns back to Jen to ask her if she would say "incompetent." Eventually, Jen says yes. When Elizabeth points out that she tried to come up with something better, Kevin jumps in to tell the story of helping her come up with something better, and her changing her mind again. The Trump VO returns as he lectures Elizabeth about not letting her team change her mind for her in the middle of a task. Trump then says how everyone thinks she was so bad, and she -- correctly -- says that obviously, that's what they're going to say, because every one of them backed what turned out to be a terrible idea. "What the hell's missing with you, Elizabeth?" Trump asks her.
Wait, I think I know this one: Confidence. And that's the difference between Elizabeth and Andy in this task. They were both right, and they both led teams that were wrong. Not just slightly wrong, but egregiously wrong. Had Andy let his team do a sex ad, it would have been just as gross as the police state ad. The difference was that they both reached a point where they had to be prepared to gamble that they were right. That's what Andy did -- he gambled that he was right. If he'd been wrong, he knew that he would be screwed. But he was sure he was right, so he went with what he thought was right. Elizabeth, on the other hand, is so fundamentally lacking in confidence in some way that even when she's right and she knows she's right, she can't stand to say no to everybody else. It's basically the willingness to bet on yourself. And if you aren't willing to bet on yourself, you're completely screwed. Elizabeth choked when she was put in the position of gambling that she was right, and as much as the rest of her team did indeed undermine her and bat her around in a way that doesn't speak well of them, she still deserved her firing. There is no way you can lead people if they know they can browbeat you into changing your mind, because you ultimately are scared to bet that you're right and everybody else is wrong. Even if she couldn't come up with anything herself, if she had just been confident enough to say, "No, the terrorism ads are not in keeping with the assignment; I expect you to come up with something that is," it would have been better than what she did.
“ So she's learned...nothing, and that's pretty much typical, so...well done, Elizabeth! ”
Now, Trump asks Elizabeth who she would bring to the final table, and she says Raj and Chris. Trump stares at her for a minute, and then he says, "Honestly, Elizabeth, I just don't think it's necessary. You're fired." She looks a little taken aback at the sudden change in the rules without any notice. "I don't want to waste a lot of time," Trump says. He throws everybody out. They all get on the up elevator, except for Elizabeth, who gets on the down. When they're all gone, Trump tells George and Carolyn that it was a "no-brainer," and he just didn't want to waste time.
Unsurprisingly, in her exit interview, Elizabeth feels like it wasn't fair, people ganged up on her, she stood by her principles, they were all mean to her, and so forth. So she's learned...nothing, and that's pretty much typical, so...well done, Elizabeth!
week: Stacie! Jenn C! Bradford! UmRob! Carolyn gets mad again. Demolition happens.