The Donald – subtext-free for more than half a century.
(BTW, Melania’s preggers. Her momma didn’t raise no fools.)
The main thing of interest to me was Carolyn’s mid-task comments on the men’s cockiness – although we’ve seen her make faces before (damn can that woman roll her eyes!), I’m not sure she’s ever actually said anything while the tasks were in progress. Both she and George seemed a lot more, uh, “proactive” this time – George’s minirant in the Board Room was particularly entertaining, I though.
No foolin’. Both Carolyn and George were absolutely spot-on. The men’s team was just too in love with the idea that “morphing” the car in their video was so cool that it’d win hands down, so they just didn’t do anything else. And it showed: the women’s ads weren’t all that good, but they were obviously much better than the men’s.
And, in other news, I am so, so tired of advertising tasks. The teams ought to be judged on planning and coordination and allocation of resources and overall marketing strategy and so forth…management decisions, in other words. Instead, the teams are ultimately judged on…graphic design. Sheesh.
Granted, Chris messed up, in the context of the show. IRL, however, he showed maturity, loalty, and morals. Which are valued in most places, no matter how “cutthroat”. If I knew of a real company that had fired Chris and kept Marcus, I’d be short-selling their stock in a big way. For Donald to say that a bad creative decision is worse than being a total disaster is just ridiculous.
I seem to recall a similar argument way back when Bradford was fired. I don’t think your view is wrong, but think of it in the context of the game: the point isn’t to fire everyone in order of suckiness. The point is to have the single best person left standing at the end, and provide the viewer withy some entertainment along the way.
Trump has already determined that neither Chris nor Marcus are the best choice, so from that sense, it doesn’t matter who’s fired first. So off goes Chris, leaving the sad-eyed Marcus as easy pickings the next time the men lose.
I don’t think Trump wanted to fire Chris but he felt he had no choice after he wouldn’t take a hint and place the blame for the loss where it belonged. Trump told him it boiled down to Chris making a personal, emotional decision rather than a rational business decision. The creative decisions were the reason the men lost the task, not Markus’ suckiness. Sometimes when you’re the boss, you’ve got to blame the guy you like instead of scapegoating the guy you don’t like (and the fact that Markus is a jackass is something that Trump does not deny in slightest, he just wasn’t the reason they lost). Bringing Markus into the boardroom showed poor management skills. I think Chris’ complete inability to get the message after DT had done everthing but put up a billboard saying “If you bring Markus I will fire you” sort of irked the Donald as well. Why should he hire somebody who won’t listen to his advice?
I haven’t watched the series, since the first one. I caught the last 20 minutes of this, and didn’t manage to turn away.
For someone who just jumped in the middle of a series, the guys seems way too cocky. The guys seemed too chummy. If someone told me that Mark Burnett had to edit out 3 hours of high fivin each other and ass pattin’, I would believe it.
Marcus did seem like a fish out of water, but their shunning of him seemed so high schoolish. If Marcus was fired, I would have watched next week to see what they do now that they don’t have a whipping boy.
I would say it’s more than just a bad creative decision. “Don’t take it personally, it’s just business” Chris ignored Marcus’ good advice, only because he didn’t like him. He went with the other guy’s stupid ideas because he was part of the clique.
If you have an asshole of all assholes on your team, but he gives you a great idea or good advice, you take it.
Well, if you only caught the last 20 minutes, then I can see why you might think that his shunning was childish. Markus was largely ineffectual in the previous episode, and on this latest task, he was pretty disruptive as well.
George accused the team of marginalizing Markus, but frankly, I think they were right to do so. He wasn’t marginalized without reason; rather, he was shut out because he wasn’t a very good contributor.
Having said that, they should have at least heeded his advice when it came to the ad connotations.
It’s hard to know about the relationships, with the necessary editing to get each task down to what, about 20 minutes? All we’ve seen is Markus’s bullshit, none of his brilliance. Maybe there isn’t any, but we’ll probably never know.
We did see Markus ignore Chris’s specific request not to propose a slogan at the meeting with the ad people, but to wait and see what they were looking for. Didn’t Chris tell the team he wanted to avoid cliches? Or was that in an individual shot? Anyway, Markus didn’t listen.
I think Markus marginalized himself when he ignored Chris and again when he spoke out against his team’s idea in the presentation.
Usually I feel some sympathy for an underdog, but not with Markus. He’s just too smarmy and self-serving. I like his hair though.
Yea, but you never know. He gave Chris a lot of rope last season. Markus is entertaining enough that Trump might keep him around for a few more episodes.
I don’t think Markus is entertaining at all. He’s annoying, and not in a fun-to-hate Omarosa sort of way. He’s annoying in a mosquito kind of way. And gah. Chris could not have been more stupid. I agree with Diogenes that Donald seemed truly disappointed. He had expected so much more of him.
I got the impression that George was hammering away at Chris to get him to admit he had marginalized Marcus early not because there was anything wrong with doing that, but to try to get Chris to see that since he admitted he’d taken Marcus out of any responsibility for the task early on, he couldn’t then turn around and blame him for their loss. Chris might well have been able to get rid of Marcus if he’d allowed him to make some decisions that he would presumably have screwed up royally; but as it was, by marginalizing Marcus, he was removing him from contention in the boardroom for that week.
Markus is that guy—the one who is so clueless and awkward in every social interaction (and, in this case, business interaction) that it’s painful to watch. He sees all the other guys high-fiving, and puts up his hand just as they are all walking away and moving on. Guys! Hey, guys? High five, guys? Movies and sitcoms and SNL skits have been built around that guy, but in this context, it’s just terrible.
I’ve gone from loving this show in the first season to detesting it now. It’s rank commercialism for products that Trump is getting a kickback on and the “contestants” are annoying, whiny, bitchy rich kids who need a big break like I need a second asshole. I made it through about a third of this episode and turned it off - forever.
