The Apprentice: Los Angeles, Week 12 Extras – “Deep, Deep Doo-Doo”

In another scene, Frank explains that they have instructed their videographers to shoot footage from a helicopter, as he feels this will provide potential buyers with the view they will enjoy once they buy one of Trump’s condos. He is smug about the fact that the other teams didn’t think of this and that it will give his team the edge. Later, we see that Frank and Heidi have only a short amount of time to get to the airport or they will miss their flight back to LA, and they have yet to collect the helicopter footage Frank feels is key to a win for them.

En route to the airport, he talks to the videographers by phone and finds out they are too far away to pick up the tape in time. Frank is understandably upset, given the amount of time and effort he has put into the video presentation. We see him hard at work with the editor and graphic designer, and as always, he’s giving it his frenetic best.

Meanwhile, Heidi is struggling with the brochure. She complains about Frank spending so much time with the graphic designer, and says she’s really frustrated. In a replayed scene later, Heidi says she’s overwhelmed, and Frank is concerned they’re not going to finish in time. In an interview, Frank says he expected more, since Heidi is supposed to be, to use Trump’s words, a “superstar”. Frank says she’s lost in la-la land, in “Heidi-land”, as he calls it. We see Frank offer to help her, and she sharply refuses. Keep that in mind for the Boardroom.

Meanwhile, things aren’t going so well in the land of Kriscole. Gosh, I love making up these Hollywood-style names. (“Brangelina” who?) We see Kristine working on their video while Nicole sleeps. Note that Kristine says Nicole wanted to sleep for 20 minutes, but Kristine didn’t bother to wake her up. She says she just wanted to get her work done, and then she could “own it.” I have to say, I was more than a little irritated with Kristine at this point. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a 20-minute cat nap, provided the napper had earned it.

Thanks to the editors, we don’t know what Nicole had contributed, but Kristine herself later said in the Boardroom that Nicole has lots of energy. This is something we’ve heard about Nicole on every task. It seems to me that despite her many faults, she’s never been accused of being a slacker. To let someone continue to sleep because you don’t feel like waking her up seems like you’re lobbying for martyrdom.

To prove my point, we see Kristine pouting alongside the graphic designer. There’s a close-up of him typing in the contact information, including the notorious wrong phone number. Rather than looking at the screen, Kristine is distracted by her irritation with Nicole. The designer asks, “Happy?” to which Kristine replies, “As happy as I’m gonna get, which isn’t real happy.”

Had she woken Nicole and asked her to check it over, perhaps one of them might have caught what ended up being a fatal error. Of course, Kristine was fired in an ambush, so the issue didn’t come up for discussion in the Boardroom. Too bad, because I would like to have heard what was said.

We see a replay of the presentations, in which Stefani is amazing as always, and Heidi has to admit she was 100% impressed. She adds that she’s not worried, but then we see her presentation and we have to wonder what she was thinking. She makes errors, stumbles over her words, and seems to forget what it is she’s supposed to say, leaving Frank holding the proverbial bag. On top of all this, Trump criticizes her team’s brochure, which as we heard her complain earlier, was all hers.

As if one bad presentation wasn’t enough, we see Kriscole give its presentation. Nicole can’t get the Power Point show up and running, and despite Trump telling her to relax, and Don, Jr. adding “no pressure,” she continues to struggle and Trump soon turns on her, letting her know he isn’t impressed. He later refers to their presentation as “choppy” and “broken down.”

Trump looks over their brochure and notices that there are two phone numbers listed. He has James and Nicole call both numbers and they discover that one of the numbers is completely unrelated to the building. He finds this completely unacceptable and feels that between this blunder and Fraidi’s horrendous brochure, he should fire four people! Since this would screw up the network’s programming, he’s reconsidering his original plan to fire one team and instead may fire one member of each team (other than the team made up of golden children James and Stefani).

This week, there was no winning team/losing team format and no PM to choose members for the hot seats, so the Boardroom was a little different, and the scenes flowed smoothly from the presentations to the firings. What we didn’t see in the network broadcast was the fact that Trump solicited opinions from James and Stefani on many of the issues, most notably who they would fire.

All the candidates agreed that what James and Stefani put together was excellent, and what Trump liked was that they had an entire campaign. In fact, Don, Jr. reiterated that they were assigned not to design a brochure, but to design a promotional campaign from which a brochure could be created.

While Kriscole had a few technical problems at the beginning, their video wasn’t bad. They had a clear theme, which was the “Las Vegas is turning gold” concept. He even liked their brochure much better than Fraidi’s, other than the fact that it had the wrong phone number!!

As for Fraidi, Trump didn’t have much to say that was positive. He felt their presentation was awful. He thought the video was terrible. When Trump found out Frank was in charge of the video, I believe he thought Frank did the actual filming himself, complaining the camera work was shaky and that Frank didn’t even show the best things about the building.

Don Jr. agrees, saying the interior shots were poorly lit, making it look gloomy and cave-like. Frank begs Trump to see it one more time, but Trump refuses, saying that they managed to take one of the most beautiful buildings in the world and make it look ho-hum and boring. Superlatives from Trump—shocking, I know.