Episode Report Card Miss Alli: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Puttering around
By Miss Alli | Season 3 | Episode 7 | Aired on 03.02.2005
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Oh, mini-golf. This week's assignment is to design and operate a mini-golf course for the day, and the entire episode revolves around the drama of Net Worth under the direction of a fairly spazzy Audrey, who opens with a dissertation on her painfully awful childhood that does nothing to endear her to her team, really. John goes into I Kind Of Am Right But Still Manage To Be A Complete Dick About It mode as he tries to put the brakes on Audrey's nuttiness, but does it in a way that's condescending and obnoxious and that you can tell is pushing several major buttons inside her head. So she's on the defensive, and then she decides on an ill-advised clown theme, against which John decides to revolt. Because he can, because let's face it -- the only people getting fired right now are project managers, so what's anybody going to do to you for sabotaging your team? Anyway, Audrey and John are sort of both stupid and obnoxious, and she probably over-delegates marketing to him, but then he also under-assumes responsibility, and when the team loses, it's fairly clear that the Boardroom is going to be ugly and result in her ouster. When was the last time anything that happened in the Boardroom surprised you? Yeah, I don't remember, either. Anyway, Audrey (who, you will be told several times during this episode, is extremely beautiful) takes her beautiful leave in her beautiful cab, leaving her less-than-beautiful team to head into next week's apparent merge in something of a mess. Over at Magna, things seem pretty happy, so there's not much to say about that. Oh, and really, the best thing that happens in the whole show is that the week's NotGeorge lets on that in a real corporate setting, being condescending to women is kind of not cool, even with people other than oversensitive women. Imagine that! Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Previously on Adventures In Neighborhood Stereotyping: The teams put together graffiti ads for Gran Turismo 4, a PlayStation game involving the mysterious, ultra-modern concepts of "bling" and "props." The candidates made their very own halting, awkward attempts to reach out to "urban" and "hip" Harlem, and Net Worth PM Tara maybe reached out a little too much, to the point where her ad seemed to be an ad sponsored by PlayStation rather than an ad intended to make you feel obligated to purchase anything. Net Worth took the loss, and when Tara's best argument for self-preservation was her own lack of awareness regarding the basics of the product she was supposed to be promoting, she took it on the chin and was sent home, even after several team members took the opportunity for shots across the bow at Audrey. And I missed Carolyn, because NotCarolyn just is not the same. Eleven candidates left. Who will be fired tonight?
Manhattan. Trump Tower. Aspiring Corporate Weasel Death Watch. For some reason, we come in on an extreme close-up of a rose -- do I smell the most dramatic task ever? -- as we hear Tana and John explaining how they differentiated for Trump between Tara's failure on the task in particular and Audrey's level of suck in general. Stephanie tells the stressed-out Net Worthingtons that perhaps this will be the day a "weak link" takes the hit. "Everyone was waiting in suspense to see who was going to walk through the doors who had survived the Boardroom," interviews Kendra, in what seriously has to be the most pointless sound bite of all time. It's like sticking a sound bite in the Boardroom that says, "So then we all waited for the part where Mr. Trump, a rich billionaire, would turn to one of the best and brightest in the country and declare that person to be 'fired.'" Just then, Audrey and Craig return, and everyone says, "Ohhhh," as they always do, pretending that they care one way or the other. I believe it's still Kendra who tells us that the first person they saw was Audrey, and that she looked like she "felt abandoned by her team." Poor Audrey. She shouldn't feel so bad. You can't really be abandoned by people who have been trying to destroy you since the moment you met them.
Craig tells the tale of the Boardroom, and makes the truly ridiculous claim that Audrey should understand she shouldn't "take it personally," which is quite a statement from someone who took slapshots at Audrey's marriage, of all the ridiculous bullshit, as a way to upset and disparage her. There may be somebody who has credibility in saying it isn't personal, but it sure as hell isn't Craig. In her room, Audrey quietly interviews that she was very hurt that her team described her as "a weak link." She goes on to talk about how she thinks she's just as much of a person as anyone, and she doesn't need anyone to "pull [her] weight" or "do anything that [she] can't do." She describes herself as "sick to [her] stomach." Back out in the living room, Craig says, "Keep it away from the personal issues." Nice try, asshole. Next time, leave the lady's husband out of it.
Angie wonders where Audrey went. She interviews while sitting somewhere looking dejected and totally on TV that the team is "dysfunctional" and "completely crippled," and explains that the team needed to have a talk. Out on the balcony of the Love Palace, Angie smokes as she and Audrey have a chat. Audrey talks about how she was embarrassed about things that "had nothing to do with anything we were talking about," so I suspect that's about the business with her husband. Chris comes out onto the balcony, interrupting while saying he doesn't want to interrupt. I love it when people say that. It never means anything except, "I want to interrupt." Literally. You could put "I want to interrupt" in place of "I don't want to interrupt" in every case in which the latter has ever been used, and you would get more honest results. Audrey angrily says that she didn't come to have anyone treat her like a child. She then launches into a painful speech in which she tearfully explains that her parents both went to prison and she wound up on her own, living in a car when she was 17. "I am where I'm at today because I have crawled and begged." She goes on to talk about how girls hated her when she was little because she was so pretty, and she wanted to scar her own face. Ohhh, boy. See, of course it makes you sound full of yourself to talk about how beautiful you were, and of course she's immature, but...I mean, she's screwed up over it, is the thing, so it's very hard for me to chalk it up to a high opinion of herself. I don't think she's lying when she says that about having considered scarring her face, and if you assume that's sincere, then there's more going on in this scene than should ever have been introduced into this show, really. People who are open wounds from a psychological perspective really don't make entertaining television, to me, because I feel like I shouldn't be looking. (See: The last episode of Married By America.)