Desi babe Toral shredded by catty foes on Trump’s Apprentice
The gigantic product-placement show for the product known as Donald “The Donald” Trump, The Apprentice, had a great first season, stumbled badly in its second, then recovered somewhat in its third. The jury - well, my jury - is still out on this season, the fourth, but so far it’s almost all upside. This week’s episode was did nothing to hurt the show’s upward trajectory.
The two teams, all -girl Capital Edge and all-boy Excell - were instructed to create a promotional character for Dairy Queen’s popular Blizzard, but the real drama was the subplot involving Indian-American (or desi, as people in the know call them(selves)*) looker Toral, an Apprentice-candidate who had barely survived a brutal board room session a week earlier. Having had her butt saved by her close ally Rebecca, Toral was expected to “step up to the plate” as this year’s cohort of Trumpettes like to say.
She got off to a poor start by only meekly applying for the almost all-important position Project Manager, losing out to an aggressive teammate who was basically dying to see Toral get whacked.
While Excell quickly hit on the right concept, an appealing yet inoffensive genie, Capital Edge floundered badly, settling for an absurdist character that was basically a rip-off. To make it worse, they repeated a glaring mistake made by one of the teams in Apprentice Season 3 by not including the the client’s logo in the creative (the Play Station mural, if you remember). Mind boggling.
I got the impression that most of Capital Edge’s team members were more interested in setting Toral up for failure than they were in taking their team to victory. Her foes’ plan of attack was to make her wear the costume during the presentation. For whatever reason, Toral failed to grasp what was happening, and instead of putting on the costume she dug in her heels and refused on the grounds that it would be undignified to be seen in such an ugly creation.
Her teammates spent an inordinate amount of time and energy pressuring Toral on the issue and the entire spectacle was quite unbecoming of a bunch of people claiming to be top performers and entrepreneurs and what not.
The Dairy Queen representatives weren’t exactly blown away by either creative, but Excell’s was undisputably superior, so the men scored another victoy
Toral came under instant attack in the board room, even though she was most emphatically not the reason Capital Edge lost, and she buckled under the pressure. Trump was unimpressed by her refusal to wear the costume, so she changed the story, claiming she didn’t wear it for religious rather than family reasons. The transparent lie landed with a thud and Trump fired her without even narrowing the field to three firees.
Toral was a weak player, a whiner, and a finger pointer, and she had quite a bit to prove after her narrow escape in the previous episode, but she shouldn’t have been fired. She had argued against the creation and she had called for the DQ logo to have been included. While her immature refusal to wear the costume was a strike against her, it shouldn’t have been a lethal blow. Not fighting harder for the Project Manager position was a bad mistake, though, and I have a sense that my view is the minority one.
Among Indians and desis, Toral seems to be seen more as an Omarosa than a Raj, last season’s splendid representative of both Imperial and sovereign, democratic India.
* Classic joke: Desi is an acronym for Doctors Earn Serious Income.
