After appointing herself team spokeswoman and resident overbearing loudmouth, Kristi Caudell a 24-year-old sales executive from Gainesville, GA, was sent packing during last night's The Apprentice 4 broadcast, becoming the fifth contestant to be fired by Donald Trump
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The Apprentice 4's fifth episode began with The Donald offering the all-female Capitol Edge team, which had lost three of the first four tasks to the all-male Excel team, an opportunity to raid the men's team and help balance out the competition. The women quickly chose to pull soft-spoken standout Randal Pinkett into their group; although once he joined the women it appeared their decision was based more on hurting the men's team than actually using Randal's skills to help improve their own team's performance.
This week's task was to create a prototype of a float to promote the new Sony Pictures movie Zathura, with the judges for the task being John Favreau, the film's director, and Sony executive Geoffrey Ammer. To prepare for the task the teams met individually with the director to get some initial instructions on what to focus on, and in both instances the film's odd name was overridingly stressed.
On Excel, Brian Mandelbaum stepped up to be the project manager, and despite the continued problems caused by the disinterested Markus Garrison, the team appeared to focus in on the customer's wants by heavily promoting the name of the film -- even going so far as having a looped recording that continuously announced the film's title. The team's only conflict appeared in the form of a showdown between Josh Shaw and Markus over Markus appearing to not want to assist in the construction clean up after he felt he had been marginalized and underused on the task. While Markus might have had a point -- assigning him menial things like take-out food duty wouldn't appear to be the best use of a so-called inventor's time -- the manner in which he decided to voice his concerns did nothing to help ease his strained relationship with the rest of his team.
At Capitol Edge, it was once again a different story. Jennifer Murphy stepped up to be project manager, but she was constantly at odds with the outspoken Kristi, who Jennifer had put in charge of the visual design of the float. It also appeared that despite the director's harping that he wanted to heavily promote the film's unusual name, Capitol Edge had learned nothing from last week's loss, which was largely caused by a failure to pay attention to product branding. Instead, they appeared to incorporate the name only sparingly and alternately chose to focus their limited time and resources on trivial things like taking half the team shopping to buy a red carpet.
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At the presentation things went well for Excel, despite the fact Brian continued to over-explain things and ramble even to the point where he appeared to annoy the director by continuing to speak even as the director was attempting to say nice things about the team's work. Fortunately for Brian, Capitol Edge's presentation went much worse, as Jennifer consistently mispronounced the name of the film, and at times appeared confused as to why some of the float decisions had been made. To no one's surprise, Excel once again prevailed when the winning team was announced.
As a reward, Excel was treated to a song writing session with hip-hop artist Wyclef Jean, where the whole team was incorporated into a makeshift rap with every member adding something unique to the mix.
In Capital Edge's boardroom session, both Kristi and Jennifer took heat from their teammates for their missteps and constant fighting, and when it came time to select who would come back for the final showdown Jennifer selected only Kristi to return with her. While the two were waiting, both Carolyn and first season Apprentice winner Bill Rancic (who was filling in for George this week) recommended that Trump fire Jennifer as she was the primary reason that her team had failed. However, when the women returned to the boardroom The Donald opted to give Jennifer another chance to prove herself -- no doubt impacted by his previous public comments that he found it hard to be objective about a woman he called "one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen" -- and instead fired Kristi.