Trollheart

May the best team win?
Sometimes you can tell who's going to win, sometimes it's up in the air. A simple mistake, a few dollars or a bad decision can change what should have been a winning team into the one who returns to the Boardroom to face Trump. Here I'll pore over whether the team that won should have, in my opinion, if I could have predicted they would win and if they deserved to.

Protege: No fucking way. From the total chaos and disorganisation they displayed from the very start, right from picking their name to finding their location, I could not have believed the women would win. They bickered, they argued, they got lost; while the guys were out selling they were still buying their ingredients. But they picked a good location and, in the end, as even George admitted, who would you rather buy a lemonade from? So in my opinion Protege won this one pretty much on the twin tenets of using their sexuality to sell and the fact that the men picked a terrible location and basically let them win.

Take me to your leader
In this section I'll look at whether the leader of each team did a good job, should have been in charge, or whether they made a mistake in stepping up and in so doing, in the losing team, threw the task.

Protege/Ereka
To be honest, though they won Ereka had little to do with their victory. She seemed a very unsure leader, unwilling to make decisions and happy to be led by others. In fact, Omarosa stepped up as far as I can see and took over in all but name the Project Management of the task, and it is probably more due to her “shadow leadership” that they came in winners.

Versacorp/Troy
I didn't see Troy as a bad leader. I actually thought he delegated well, and was surprised to see that he did not bring Kwame back in to the Boardroom. After all, it was the location that let them down and Kwame was tasked with sorting that out. Troy I found to be very personable, a good talker, a friendly guy who sold easily, didn't buckle under pressure and was prepared to listen to others like Bill when things were not going well. I really thought his team was going to win.

The Front Runners
Sure, at this point it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, but as time goes on the cream will rise to the top (sorry for the mixed metaphors) and it will be easy to see who is going to be in the latter stages and who will be going home.

Troy I feel has a good chance of making it. I liked his leadership style. He's a good listener and peopel seem to like him, plus that “country boy” charm is going to take him far.

Bill, though he hasn't stood out too much, was the one who conferred with Troy about how the location didn't seem to be working, and took an active role as a kind of sub-leader at times. I see him doing well, though again, one slip and he could be gone.

Omarosa seems to have good leadership qualities and I could see her going far, though she does display a certain sense of arrogance that may rub her teammates up the wrong way and scupper her chances.

You're Fired!
Here I'll be looking at the candidate who was fired, telling you what I know or can find out about them, and referring to anything they did in the task(s) on which they worked before being shown the door.

David Gould
Age: 34
City: New York
Occupation: Venture capitalist

David is a doctor but says to his teammates “What can I do with an MD? Treat patients? I want more.” So after managing to insult and alienate everyone in that profession, he then tells us he went on to Harvard to get an MBA and now works as a venture capitalist in the field of medicine. Perhaps he feels the first task was beneath his selling skills, but hey, if you can't sell bloody lemonade how can you sell companies and mergers? Anyway there's not a whole lot I can write about him as we did not get to meet him for long, but he was always a candidate to be fired, given his lack of fire, drive and really interest in the task.

Sight adjustment?
Although he says he always decides with his head, sometimes Trump will allow his heart to rule his decisions. If he sees something in the candidate that perhaps nobody else sees, especially if he says he sees something of himself in them, he may allow them a pass. Similarly, if they have done well up to then but just let themselves down this week, he may decide not to fire them. Sometimes I agree with these “stays of execution”, sometimes not. Here is where I'll examine whether the candidate who was fired deserved to be, whether Trump made, in my opinion, the right decision, or whether someone else escaped who should really have been walking out the door.

In the context of the losing team (as this will always be; Trump has no power over who wins or loses and it's only in the losing team --- with one or two really big exceptions --- that he can fire anyone) there was only really ever going to be two possibilities, and both of them came back with Troy. I don't feel Troy was in that much danger; he led the team well and did his best, and it was after all the first task. It will be rare that Trump will fire the PM on the first task, as he admires those who have the courage to stand up so early, so unless they do a really lousy job --- and even here, where he tells Troy that he did, though I disagree --- they're usually not automatically in the firing line.

But one thing he does not like is what Alan Sugar will later call “hiding in the long grass”, which is a tactic adopted by many candidates, as they hang back and wait for some of the weaker ones to be picked off, keeping themselves safe and avoid the Boardroom. He can usually see through this though, and will call out anyone he thinks is flying under the radar, letting them know they had better step up or they will be in trouble. David was one such I feel: he didn't do much and what he did was pretty ineffectual. Sam could have gone too, but his eccentricity and I guess his passion seemed to chime with Trump, and even if the things he did were a bit mad and out of the box, at least he tried, so I would say really, the decision was almost a foregone conclusion and here Trump made the right one.

Adjustment required: 0%

The one that got away?
Even in a winning team there may be those who escaped by the skin of their teeth, the sort of person whom you know, had their team lost, would have been in the hot seat. Of course, there are “the ones that got away” in the losing team also: only three members in total can be called back in, one of which is the PM, so in the ones that remain, is it possible someone has dodged a bullet?

Kwame: A definite lucky escape for the man who chose the location for Versacorp. The opening segment for the task was titled “Location, location, location”, and he picked the wrong one, something even picked up on by Trump as he overflew the area, and again remarked upon in the Boardroom. In fact, I'm unsure why Troy did not call him back in with David, apart from perhaps the fact that he had something personal against Sam and most of the team had identified him as being the weak link, so it might perhaps have looked strange if he had not been brought back in. But Kwame was definitely a contender to be going home.

Tammy: Did nothing but complain, went for a lunch that nobody else took, fought with her teammates and seemed to do little selling. Got on the wrong side of Omarosa and seemed more concerned with herself than the team. Had Protege lost, she would almost certainly have been liable to be kicked out the door.

Ch-ch-ch-changes
In the first season Trump speaks relatively calmly, but whether he was asked or advised to change that, or decided to do so himself, from season two onwards he shouts at us as if we were deaf. I preferred the old Trump.

Trump talks about a choice for the candidates: "We have", he says, "two elevators. One goes up to the suite and one goes down to the street." The idea of the “Suite or the street” was quickly dropped too.

As the series wound on, the Boardroom sections got longer and more involved, with a lot more drama. Here, they're short and more or less functional.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018