Meanwhile, Coldwell Banker calls Charmaine and she sells an extra 100 programs for $85. She and Lee are very happy together, and Lee is very self-congratulatory but not annoying about how they are "thinking different, thinking smart." I like to see Lee and Charmaine playing nice, just because they are so, so deeply weird with each other most of the time. Lee refers to "his" risk having turned into a "huge reward" for the team, and takes the ego to the roof about how Synergy has been "owning" them but now, thanks to the great idea he somehow forced Charmaine to have, he is leading Gold Rush out of the desert and into the sunshine and it's only a matter of time before they elect him PM in perpetuity.

A very creepy statue of a drowning man is lapped by waves. It's a cool idea, for a sculptor, but weird in context. It's a symbol of Allie, only instead of the harbor water, it's blood. She sucks at selling people on the "wonderful story" and the "emotional rollercoaster" that their ugly brochure represents, but not as bad as Andrea is at interacting with human beings. We see her selling and selling, and it's a three step process: (1) Andrea approaches a family. (2) They get one look at her clacking heels, intense eye sockets, anger lines, and malnourished vegan frame, assume she's a docent or park ranger and they've been caught doing something awful -- touching the art or stealing memorabilia -- and turn bright red. (3) She yell-mumbles at them about something or another having to do with giving her some cash, without friendliness or human emotion her voice. (4) They decline fearfully, still on a fight/flight high from when they thought she was five-oh. (5) Repeat. Allie interviews about how in every task, Andrea sucks at selling or schmoozing people, but doesn't turn that critical eye on herself and wonder why the fuck she would ever delegate that task to Andrea. Junior watches as the group continues to melt down. Solid to liquid to gas to plasma -- there is no rock-bottom to their sucking. Andrea randomly mentions that she is a "bulk sales" expert and Allie wonders why the hell she didn't tell them that to begin with, and that's when Allie decides to blame their assured failure this week on Andrea, regardless of what happens. It's pretty much fair dinkum, to me: yeah, Allie's being a shitty manager, and they would lose regardless of Andrea. But on the other hand, there hasn't been a phase of this task, from research to production to sales strategy, that Andrea hasn't willfully fucked up in the last 24 hours. Or almost any other task, really. And if Andrea had come up with the "bulk sales" idea yesterday, like Charmaine did, they would never have gone to the island in the first place, because it's a better idea (which value Lee managed to basically ruin, on GR). So I think the failure lies ultimately in Andrea not stepping up at the beginning of the task and offering her actual skills, because she was too busy tooting her horn about her many other expertise-level areas of skill, which turned out to be imaginary. In other news: last chance to vote! Meaningless sweepstakes results to be announced live!