Appentice - rollers and coasters

[zico]

This week it’s a 3.30am start with only 3 milliseconds for everyone to get ready before heading out to the allegedly famous Thorpe Park, home of roller-coaster rides. Claude and Karen are there in person, but Lord Sugar appears as a hologram, taking the opportunity to be projected as a bit taller than Claude and Karen. The task is to develop a new thrill ride and to get people wanting to go on it. Well, count me out. Happily for the H&S inspectors, the rides will only be virtual.

At Team Unison, Thomas is enthusiastic as ever, wants to build the best ride in the history of the world and also to be PM, but Lottie cheerfully torpedoes his PM bid in favour of Scarlett, saying Scarlett has many leadership qualities while Thomas is just enthusiastic. Lottie also gets to be marketing and branding sub-team leader in charge of Thomas who tells everyone he can’t believe he’s not sub-team leader. Scarlett explains her decision to the others as wanting productive conflict between Lottie and Thomas. It’ll certainly be conflict, but will it be productive?

Thomas’s best-ride ever is based on the concept of saving the world from falling apart by spinning round it lots of times in the rollercoaster which restores gravity (according to Thomas). Lottie knows that 14 loops is the most loops of any current roller-coaster so suggests they make it 15. They also decide to have the highest initial acceleration of any ride, anywhere ever. Initially Lottie and Thomas work well together by adopting all of Thomas’s ideas, but Thomas gets cross when Lottie insists on their poster showing a spacecraft rather than a roller-coaster, because that’s what Scarlett had insisted on. It’s quite an entertaining contretemps and Lottie pulls rank to get her way on this one thing, throwing Thomas into a huge sulk, while Iasha pulls a surprised face in the background, which is where she’s been all throughout the task.

At Team Empower, Carina says she’s visited the park “since I was a baby myself” and gets made PM. She has a dream/nightmare concept which all the team buy into. Ryan-Mark is sub-team leader for marketing and he tells people at length how good he is at this before proving himself wrong by making an almighty mess of branding. He picks “Insomnia” as the brand name and produces a weird green alien logo. The others in the team know the definition of insomnia, and wonder how an insomniac could have dreams or nightmares. Carina and Jemelin decide a backwards fall is a novel concept for their ride, while Pamela says “yeah, maybe, maybe not or possibly no” in the background.

Next day, the teams meet up again and show the other half what they’ve been up to. First off is the 3-D ride simulation, and Thomas is mightily enthusiastic about the Final Loop, as are the rest of the team. Team Empower are much less impressed by their 3-D simulation, with Lewis calling it underwhelming. Both teams are equally unimpressed with their respective posters, with Scarlett wondering why the record-breaking features aren’t even mentioned on the poster. Carina doesn’t like the name Insomnia, the confused logo or indeed any bit of the poster whatsoever. Time for a bit of market research and for Team Unison, Thomas’s fastest loopiest ride, the public feedback is nauseous, vomit-inducing and sickness. This pleases the team no end. To nobody’s surprise, Team Empower’s Insomnia makes the public think of aliens rather than nightmares.

The teams pitch to 3 theme park bosses and assorted members of the public in a 4-D shaking-seat cinema. Thomas is dressed as an astronaut but rather spoils the look by having his spacesuit unzipped to the waist to show his vest. The audience get to experience Unison’s fast and loopy space ride, with quite a few audience members (including Claude and Karen) looking pretty uncomfortable. At the questions, vomit and nausea get brought up again, and one boss asks why the poster didn’t mention the record-breaking stuff. There’s a question about what’s actually going on in the ride, and how the world is being saved which Iasha explains at length, which only leaves people looking baffled and bewildered. Team Empower up next and the audience seems to enjoy their ride more, but their questions are around what’s going on with the messy branding. The bosses do like the backwards-drop feature though.

Back in the boardroom and Lord Sugar says he has a hunch that Thomas will turn out to be very enthusiastic about roller-coasters. Lottie is asked about her unfortunate tendency to annoy people and replies that her aim is not to get on with everyone, but to be successful. In a spectacular lack of self-awareness, Lord Sugar berates her for this failing, saying that any self-respecting entrepreneur would just want to get on with everyone, and wouldn’t even dream of getting a bunch of people together and constantly criticising and undermining them. Glad we cleared that up. Results time, and all 3 bosses voted for Empower’s Insomnia, thanks to the innovative backwards-drop feature, and they also liked the pitch.

Scarlett is asked to select 2 other people to bring back into the boardroom and she dithers for so long that the Lord decides for her and for one week only, the final 3 become the final 4 as Lottie, Dean and Iasha join her in the firing line. Scarlett criticises Lottie for insisting on the spacecraft being on the poster, despite Scarlett specifically asking for that very thing. Cheeky, but she gets away with it. The word “deadwood” is being used rather freely in conjunction with both Dean and Iasha, not at all unfairly, it has to be said. Scarlett says this whenever she's worked with Iasha, it wouldn't have made any difference to the task if Iasha hadn't been there at all - harsh, but fair on the evidence so far. Lord Sugar eventually decides that Iasha has been ineffectual for too long and fires her. He spares Dean, but insists he take on the PM role next week.