The Celebrity Apprentice Episode 9-09 Recap

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So I’ve missed the last couple of weeks, and it was for good reason – my personal job search has proven successful, as I’ve found new employment and start work this week. But a side effect of this was that I was forced to miss a few recaps. Regardless, things can best be summarized as such – Sharon Osborne will be a finalist, and will face either Bret or Holly. I’m leaning towards Bret, and the fact that noone was fired from RockSolid two weeks ago would appear to speak to this. More on that later.

This week’s task was the ever popular renovation/interior design task. The idea is to furnish a two-room New York corporate apartment (which in other cities would likely be a bachelor apartment) with one room getting a “celebrity” treatment. For this task, Curtis was traded to RockSolid for Bret, because Maria and Sharon allegedly didn’t like Curtis. PMs for the task were (as they were two weeks ago) Sharon and Holly. Advisors this week were Don Jr. and Richard LeFrak, who looked at times like he wanted to be anywhere but here, but he was apparently fronting the charity donation this week, so I guess it’s like when a person becomes a professor at a university – you get money for your research, but you have to teach some kids in order to do it. Sadly, we did not get Paige Davis to run in between the two apartments. Or Genevieve Gorder as a guest designer. I guess I just look for some of the Trading Spaces wackiness when I see this kind of stuff. I’d settle for Raj Bhakta appearing (in his bowtie, of course).

RockSolid’s approach was to keep things simple but add in a lot of luxury, as in over $10,000 in housewares and over $100,000 in furniture. The drawback to this was that there ended up being nothing truly celebrity-like about the “celebrity” room. I suppose a stripper pole would’ve done it, to be honest, but the place looked very clean, large (for a New York apartment) and liveable.

Tenacity took a different approach, in that Cyndi got to design the “celebrity” room and the other rooms would get different colours and a “Balinese” theme. Apparently this required Buddha, Zen and a lot of clutter. So much clutter that I felt that it would be very difficult for anyone to move around in there. But the “celebrity” room was a winner, painted red everywhere and filled with all the eccentricities that one expects from Cyndi.

From the two, RockSolid earned the win, mostly on the strength of having a place that looked habitable by anyone, giving Sharon her first win and possibly requiring a rubber match with Holly. I don’t think there was much doubt though, because even though the “celebrity” room was a requirement for the task, I’d imagine that being able to feel that a place was a “home” instead of a “Polynesian hotel” was a more important factor in choosing the victor.

Boardroom, and it pretty much looks like Holly’s gonna be fired. A case was made for Bret, but he was given permission beforehand to do his gig, so no dice there. But Trump clearly wanted to keep Bret around – there’s no real other reason to say “fight or I’ll fire you”, since you know that’s what Trump wants to see. Trump also wanted to keep Holly around because he was looking for an excuse to fire someone else. The whole “red room” thing was manufactured controversy designed to have Holly stand up for herself, because Cyndi still doesn’t quite understand what Trump wants in the Boardroom.

The way I look at the “red room” thing is this – Holly told Cyndi that the room would be painted red, and chose the specific colour. She then gave Cyndi free reign to do what she wanted. And thus, the room was entirely red, except for the floor. I’m kinda thinking that Holly wasn’t expecting THAT. Now it’s true that Holly reigned in Cyndi a bit when making the purchases, but at the end of the day Cyndi put what she wanted to into the room and thus it had her stamp on it. Unfortunately for Cyndi, she didn’t bring up this point very clearly and Trump had his out. I’m sure she’ll be back for the Final Task working for whoever faces Sharon. Although if the task is the traditional event-based task I’d say that you’d WANT Cyndi on your team.

OK, so now we’re down to five, and we’re told that there will be three people fired next week. One will be fired in the Boardroom, and two more after doing interviews with last year’s winner and Original Apprentice Bill Rancic, who I’ve decided has a strange resemblance to UFC fighter Rich Franklin. Curtis and Maria will be the first two fired simply because a Final Two with either of those two would not be interesting. Sharon will be one of the Final Two because she is a Big Name celebrity – people know who she is.

And so we’re left with a toss-up between Bret and Holly. The advantages to having Bret are that he hasn’t lost, he’s very creative, there’s the Rock Star vs. Rock Manager scenario and we haven’t had a female-male Final Two on the Celebrity editions yet. The advantages to having Holly in the Final Two are that she will have conflict with her teammates, very focused and knows how to play the Boardroom game. As I said before, I’m leaning towards Bret, simply because I think that he and Sharon would play off of each other better head-to-head, but if I’m being honest either case would work well.

I’m thinking the celebrity pool will include Cyndi, Summer (if Holly is PM) or Goldberg (if Bret is PM), Maria and Bret or Holly (depending on who was fired). But this is all guesswork at this point.

Project Manager Standings:
Bret Michaels (2-0) – $140,000
Maria Kanelis (1-0) – $20,000
Curtis Stone (1-0) – $40,000
Sharon Osborne (1-1) – $40,000 ($40,000)
Holly Robinson Peete (1-2) – $347,893

Selita Ebanks (1-0) – $20,000
Cyndi Lauper (1-1) – $20,000
Summer Sanders (1-1) – $20,000
Rod Blagovich (0-1) – $0
Bill Goldberg (0-1) – $0
Michael Johnson (0-1) – $0
Sinbad (0-1) – $0
Carol Leifer (0-0) – $10,000
Darryl Strawberry (0-0) – $0

Kevin has been an Insider since 2003, writing on a variety of topics ranging from The Amazing Race to Mixed Martial Arts. His current hobbies include Fantasy Football, Sporcle, travelling, making liberal use of his DVR and wondering what the heck he's gonna do when his two daughters are old enough to date. You can follow Kevin on Twitter (@starvenger).