Celebrity Apprentice Smackdown: Season Two Finale, Part Two
digital frames. Ready to be shocked? Clint volunteers to do every commentary and thus appear on every last frame. I love that he’s actually bad at presentations like that, and he just keeps doing them. Meanwhile, Joan and Melissa edit Melissa’s boring-ass photo montage.
Annie gives Tom the task of editing a Refugees International-themed spot for their digital frames. She gives him timecodes and micro-manages him and Tom pretty much just ignores what she has to say. He gets irritated and walks away from her. It’s so bad that he goes off and vents to Dennis Rodman. Dennis, for his part, is filling gift bags. Finally, Tom explains his editing choices, and he and Annie actually argue over whether his edit shows enough starving children. Tom sulks and tells her that it’s perfect, and that there are plenty of starving children in the final product. Annie actually likes it when she watches it, so there you go. (Not that she apologized or anything.–Myndi)
Joan is alarmed to see dozens of digital frames showing video of Clint Black. Joan decides to just get rid of every third frame. That’s right, she’d rather just leave out item descriptions in exchange for a 33% reduction in Clint-levels. By the way, one of the items up for auction is, no kidding, an oil painting of Clint Black. I can’t say for sure, but the signature could certainly read “Clint”. So he either owns an oil painting of himself, or he actually painted it. You know Being John Malkovich? When Malkovich himself goes into that tube, he ends up in a world where everybody is John Malkovich, and all they say is “Malkovich”. Welcome to every day of Clint Black’s life.
The drag queens start to show up, and frankly, they don’t look all that convincing. I mean, I’m not an expert on female impersonators, but I know what Bette Midler and Cher look like, and the people on my screen do not look like that.
Tom shoots some behind-the-scenes footage for the limited-edition Celebrity Apprentice frame. I still don’t really get what that means. Is that something I can go and buy? Because I sort of think I would. Oh! I have a birthday coming up. Maybe if everybody chips in…
We get a look at Joan’s final set-up. She does a good job with the branding, to the extent that you seemingly walk into a Kodak frame when entering the room. But to me, it looks like the prize tables at an elementary school’s Family Fun Night. Somewhere, the digital image of Clint Black describes the Chinese finger traps you can get for just twelve tickets.
Annie’s event space is coming along a little more slowly. Tom asks if he can help with the set-up, and Brande Roderick tells him to “look pretty”. Annie clearly decided early on to freeze him out as much as possible, which worked wonders for Scott Hamilton. Her space looks classier than Joan’s, but it’s a little stiff. Also, there are pictures of refugees everywhere, which is a total buzzkill. There’s a montage of Annie yelling demands at various people, and then throwing everybody out once they’ve finished all their hard work.
After the commercial, we get a scene of drag queens in their dressing room, talking about how great Joan is. Once again, it’s obviously completely natural and they’re very lucky the cameras happened to catch this interaction. They’re killing me here.
The Kodak buses arrive, full of all the people who’d been kidnapped earlier in the day. Joan’s party has a red carpet with a Joan Rivers impersonator doing interviews with the crowd. See, if I went there, and one party had a dude dressed like Joan Rivers who wanted to talk to me about my outfit and the other didn’t, I’d got to the party that didn’t. Even if it was hosted by, say, Stalin. There is a group of women posing in their underwear. I assume they are either the Pussycat Dolls or a gaggle of prostitutes.
One of Annie’s friends actually thinks the fake Joan is actually Joan Rivers. Dude is not too swift. Annie’s team shows up at her party, and Dennis Rodman is, yes, wearing a dress. It’s blue with lace protrusions and sort of a bodice, and it could almost be ignored if it weren’t for the giant hat. I can not even begin to describe the giant hat he is wearing, except to say that Aretha Franklin’s inauguration hat was all like “There’s such a thing as too much.”
Annie explains that she’s striving for class, and then immediately asks one of her poker friends how much money he brought along. All the big poker names are there, as well as Bernard Hopkins, who appears to be a boxer, Joe Frazier, who is wearing the same hat as Clint Black, and Oksana Baiul, who seems to be wearing a neck brace. (as well as some horrifying plastic surgery–Myndi) Annie pimps her auction items, most of which appear to be “experiences”, where you hang out with a celebrity. Of particular note is the Annie Duke Las Vegas Experience. I assume it is the polar opposite of the EJ Feddes Las Vegas Experience, which involves mostly visiting the hotels that have live animals and taking pictures of penguins for a solid hour.
Dennis thinks their party wasn’t enough fun, and could have been more extravagant. Well, his hat’s certainly doing its best to up the ante. And then, the Cirque du Soleil performers show up. You know, some of the stuff they do is awesome. And some of it is just hideously unfunny clowns making faces and gallivanting with creepy fake animals. These performers fall in the latter camp. Yes, somebody is in a dog costume, and it’s weird to look at and makes me want to never see a live performance of anything. On the bright side, the inclusion of the fake dog means I can reference Tartuff the Spry Wonder Dog without much effort. You see, what you’re really saying is that there is a dog that’s as smart as a boy.
The performers then go to Joan’s party where, and I swear I am not kidding, a clown dressed like the love child of the Hamburglar and the Riddler dry humps Herschel Walker. Joan chats up the crowd and once again mentions that she doesn’t have rich friends like Annie. And once again I wonder how many bridges she’s burned that she’s got nobody to fall back on here. Joan mentions that everybody got to have their picture taken with a celebrity. There’s a quick shot of Kathy Griffin – I wonder which celebrity she got her picture taken with… We also see Kyle MacLachlan, who looks a hundred years older than he did in Blue Velvet. American Idol reject Constantine is there, and I assume that I would hate him if I knew anything about him. (Sadly, you must now refer to him as Tony nominee Constantine, since he’s the star of a big Broadway show these days. Still, he’s gross.–Myndi)
A small child tells us that she took a picture of Kathy Griffin “and it was just the best moment of my life”. My heart is breaking right now, you guys. Joan admits that she didn’t raise much money, but it was fun.
Donald and the Trumplings arrive. You can tell it’s the finale when Ivanka brings her cleavage out of storage. Trump interacts awkwardly with drag queens, then gets the hell out of there. Over at Annie’s party, he geeks out over famous boxers and talks to Annie about Dennis Rodman. Good to see he’s kept his focus. (The man lives in such a bubble world, doesn’t he?–Myndi)
Kodak Jeff visits Joan’s party, and Melissa Rivers treats him like he’s been recently lobotomized as she explains how his digital frames work. At Annie’s party, she talks to Kodak Jeff about refugees.
A regular person gives Joan $50,000 because she lost two uncles to AIDS. That’s heartbreaking, but I can’t help but wonder how you get two uncles with AIDS. I guess I have six uncles who are ministers, so these things happen. Also, and I am not belittling Joan’s charity at all, wouldn’t it make more sense to give that to an AIDS-centric charity in their honor? I mean, they’re all good causes and bless here heart for giving, but I guess I’m just confused. (Her charity started out helping homebound AIDS patients.–Myndi)
After the parties, everybody gets on their respective buses and heads off to see Cirque du Soleil. We some clips of really cool performances, including the Riddler guy bouncing off a giant ball in a way that almost had to have caused spinal damage.
Boardroom time! Both teams assemble in the real Boardroom, as opposed to the fake one that appears in the live segments. Trump calls everybody in the room a winner, and specifically congratulates Dennis. You have to love the way that Dennis has lowered the bar to such an extent that all he has to do is not kidnap a gay couple in order to turn in a praiseworthy performance.
Joan says her team was “interesting” and that they “got it done”. Wow, Joan. Be careful about going overboard with the praise there. Trump asks Melissa what it’s like to be such an awful person (I am paraphrasing here.) Melissa doesn’t exactly cover herself in glory as she attempts to retcon her tantrum, though it provokes the fantastic Trump line: “So, you don’t really think they’re whores. You might think they’re bitches. That’s OK.”
Trump tells Joan that the drag queens gave him the creeps, and that the fake Joan Rivers wasn’t very good. Trump then asks Annie if her contributors were “degenerate gamblers, or just gamblers”. Wait, was Trump actually funny just now? I don’t know what’s happening. Dennis mumbles an answer about whether or not Annie was a good leader. Trump thinks the show has done Dennis good, and that the public will have a much different opinion of him now. Well, sure. Before I thought he was kind of weird. Now I think he’s kind of weird, mumbly, sullen, given to fits of unprovoked rage, and drunk.
Now, if you read the last recap, you saw the whole bit where Joan pissed off her decorator, who pulled the entire company out of the show and left the both of them without decorators. Annie then mentions that his happened, and Joan vehemently denies it. Remember how Joan’s decorator called her and said that he quit? Clearly Joan doesn’t. So it’s unreasonable for her to say that none of this happened. She knows that she dumped on her decorator and he quit. It is, in fact, very weird that she’s denying that this happened. Joan seriously freaks out that Annie would even suggest that the decorator even quit.
Joan even admits that she had a fight with her decorator and that he subsequently quit. But she angrily denies that those two facts are related. I mean, she is actually yelling at Annie for suggesting that it’s a possibility. I’m really frustrated watching this, which is insane. Even more frustrating is that the live audience is cheering for Joan and booing Annie, despite having actually seen the verification for what Annie is saying. Are they watching the same show I am? (I could actuallty see Joan’s points with the decorator, and he was being kind of a dick to her. That being said, she pissed off the wrong guy, since he owned the company and that killed the whole relationship with the show. So, in her mind, she’s justified, and I really don’t think she knew who she was pissing off, nor did she care. Annie was correct in calling herself “collateral damage.”–Myndi)
Trump tries to reframe what we just saw by saying that the designer might just have been overwhelmed. Man, I can’t even recap this part. It’s all Joan and Melissa denying the thing that we just saw, and the audience booing every time Annie says that we just watched the tape showing exactly what she’s been saying happened. And since Trump loves applause more than anything that isn’t money or boobs, he takes Joan’s side so that the audience will love him. Suffice it to say, it’s the most frantic attempt to rewrite history since Jack Shephard got his hands on a hydrogen bomb. Oh, also Joan says that all of Annie’s money is “Mafia money”. I’m not a huge fan of Annie, but Joan’s getting more shrill and unpleasant as the season goes on. And Trump actually supports the remark, because “you don’t know if your friends are in the Mafia or not”. I don’t think the Mafia employs a lot of professional gamblers.
After Joan has gotten mad at Annie for attempting to refute insane accusations, it’s time to bring some math into it. Joan’s team raised $150,000. So a third of their total came from a single donor? Wow, Joan does not have any friends. Annie’s team raised $465,000. Joan says she’s happy for Annie’s charity, but she says it through such clenched teeth that you can tell how much she hates refugees.
Annie also won on charity integration, what with the way she had actual refugees walking around. Joan won for product integration (Kodak), celebrities (which I find baffling, since she had mostly celebrity impersonators), and overall experience. So that means Joan wins on three points, Annie on two. However, four of those are unquantifiable. On the only one that can really be measured, Annie more than tripled Joan’s total. That’s it for the taped footage – it’s all live from here on out, baby.
Trump welcomes back the non-winners who participated in the final task. Naturally, he talks to Dennis first. “We’ve been reading a lot about you. How are you doing?” Where have we been reading about Dennis? Unless Trump is talking about my recaps. Dennis mumbles for a while, and it gets kind of sad because a friend of his died during the week, but I can’t really make out what he’s saying about him. I hope Dennis didn’t give the eulogy…(It was Chuck Daly, his former coach with the Detroit Pistons. I’m pretty sure they had someone other than Dennis to do a proper, intelligible eulogy.–Myndi)
Trump asks if Dennis still has hard feelings toward Jesse James. Jesse makes a funny face in response. Dennis is apparently mad that Jesse called him out on his drinking. There’s a sort of beautiful moment of Dennis Logic where he acknowledges that he had a problem years ago, but now he knows that he doesn’t have to be embarrassed about it. That’s right, for Dennis, a “drinking problem” means “feeling guilty when people point out your drinking”. No shame, no problem.
The sound cuts out on Dennis when he starts talking about Sandra Bullock, and since it happened both times I watched the episode, each time from a different satellite provider, I have to think NBC cut the audio. By the way, everybody says that Sandra makes $20 million per movie, and I really don’t think that’s true. But it’s the figure that everybody agreed on, so there you go. Also, I don’t know what Jesse’s rich wife has to do with Dennis being drunk. Jesse says “If you weren’t so stupid, you’d realize the only reason I said anything is I care about you.” Trump actually berates Jesse for calling Dennis “stupid”, like he’s a third-grade teacher. (Trump is such an a-hole, isn’t he?–Myndi)
Trump asks Melissa if she’s embarrassed about her meltdown. She is not. She is also wrong. She actually defends herself by saying it was outside the Boardroom. So then it didn’t count? When Trump thinks you should be ashamed, sister, you should be ashamed. Brande jokes that she and her friends quote Melissa and call each other “whore pit vipers” now. Hee. My friends and I actually go with “poker player” complete with the contemptuous tone and hand gestures. “Dude, you’re being a total…. Poker player.” Claudia Jordan says that it was really embarrassing for Melissa, and you can tell that she totally loves it.
Next, we talk to Clint. Sort of. “You took a lot of abuse, but you were a star and didn’t get credit for it.” Did Clint threaten to sue the show if somebody (besides himself) didn’t say that he was awesome? Because frankly, he’s the guy who wrote the masturbation-themed ad and then lost a songwriting contest. He was the only person to fail twice as project manager this season. Anyway, that’s all anybody has to say about that, because Donald goes on to thank Kodak. Weird.
Time to bring out the Finalists. By the way, the fake Boardroom is set up so that Annie and Joan have their backs to the audience. Well planned, Burnett! The audience cheers for Annie but freaks out for Joan. I mean, I get that she’s a legend and all, but she’s been sort of a butthole all season. Both Apprenti agree that they’re really happy with the whole experience.
Trump asks Brande if she could have beaten Annie, and she gives the best response possible: “Well, I guess we’ll never know”. Trump finds it less funny than I do and demands an answer and sucks all the energy out of the room. He asks Clint who he’d fire, and Clint says “your editor”, which amazingly, is pretty funny. Once again, Trump hates jokes so he asks again. Clint says he’s glad he doesn’t have to choose, and Trump gets irritated. Jesse says he’d pick Annie as the winner to save on workman’s comp. But “That doesn’t mean I hate old people, though.” Congratulations, Jesse James! You may not have won, but you gave us the funniest line of the season, and that’s almost as good. When asked his opinion, Dennis gestures randomly for almost a minute before picking Joan. Trump asks Scott Hamilton “Who would you do?”, and it’s more than a beat before anybody realizes what he just said. Hee. Scott would pick Joan, because she’s old and has energy. Seriously, that’s his reason. (Oh, Scott. I used to admire you so.–Myndi)
Next, we have video segments about both charities. Since we don’t make fun of charities here, let’s skip ahead. Trump brings out last season’s finalists, Piers Morgan and Trace Adkins. Yay! (He also claims that Trace is a “huge country star, thanks to The Apprentice”. Trace is going to rough him up after the show.) Man, remember how Trace was so awesome that we all assumed that Clint Black would be just as awesome because they work in the same field? We were young and stupid. Trace picks Joan as his favorite and doesn’t really give a reason. Not for lack of trying, though. Piers also picks Joan because she won on three of the five criteria. I think I’ve made my feelings clear on that already.
We’re in the home stretch here! Trump asks Joan why she should win. Joan says she represents the new way that this country does business. So, vicious personal attacks then? Seriously, we keep hearing about how Joan played the game so much nicer than Annie did, and that’s not the case at all. I don’t want to spend time with either of them, but Annie’s been way too preoccupied with singing her own praises to cut anybody else down. And then she talks about how great charity is, and she’s not even answering the question anymore.
He asks Annie the same question. Annie says that she raised more money, won more challenges, and won more as Project Manager. She makes the mistake of mentioning the designer again, which enrages the crowd. Joan starts talking over Annie, even saying “You’re a person who should be interrupted”. Annie calls out Joan on her unprofessional behavior. This means Joan has an opening to talk about how awful Annie is some more. Joan’s getting wild applause for everything she says, even when it’s incoherent.
With three minutes left, it’s time to pick a winner. Ivanka thinks Annie played the game better, but Joan was “a better role model”. Wait, what? Don Jr. says it’s a “tough call”. It doesn’t matter what they say, because Trump wants the crowd to love him. That means Annie’s fired, and Joan Rivers is the Celebrity Apprentice!
After this aired, Myndi asked if I thought the feud was all a put-on. I mean, Joan hugs Annie immediately after the announcement. I’ve thought about it, and now I’m pretty sure that since Joan won, then it was all done for the cameras. If Annie had won, Joan would still be insulting her on TV to this day. There are a lot of things that are really cool about Joan Rivers, but I don’t think for one minute that she’s a nice person. She’s been in the business three hundred years, and she has zero celebrity friends who’ll pony up cash on her behalf. She started out doing improv with Alan Arkin and Ed Asner, and those guys want nothing to do with her. She played the game nastier than Annie did, despite what everybody involved is trying to pretend. Bottom line: I don’t want to spend time with either of them. I think they’d both be unbearable in the workplace, too. Annie would always be grabbing the credit and talking about how great she is, but Joan would suddenly lose it and decide she hated you without warning. Or maybe I’m just bitter because Jesse didn’t win. That’s probably it, actually. (Well put, my friend. I’ll co-sign that.–Myndi)
That’s the season! Thanks for reading, and we promise that as long as Donald Trump keeps presenting us with retarded baby ducklings, we’ll be waiting to make fun of them.
