Very exciting music takes us to the high seas, specifically to the Norwegian Cruise Lines ship the Norwegian Jewel, and Donald Trump is bugging her captain meaninglessly ("How many propellers? Two? They must be big!") and the captain just looks on, hoping Trump won't reach out and push a bunch of buttons like a hyperactive preadolescent in a limo for the first time. Which is what Trump is, and will always be.
The teams meet up in a large gallery, and Bill and Carolyn accompany Trump down a glamorous staircase. Dude will make an entrance, like it or not, but it's more fun when it's not leaping out behind them on a street corner and screaming. He introduces them to the Jewel and says that cruise lines are a $10B in-dust-ry, and gives them their task in record time. They have to make a thirty-second TV spot advertising the NCL "freestyle cruising program," which we'll learn about later. He makes the execs say their own names again, because one of them is German and Trump doesn't have time for a name that is German, and gives the teams their crews and editors, and a deadline: the Jewel is leaving port at 3 PM on the dot, and they might just end up going on a cruise instead of a game show if they don't leave in time.
We have three hours to deadline. The Rushee PM is Dan, and what he is doing is screaming his head off like he's on the angel dust, shooting out tasks and orders and requests and lots of lists of things with the precision and slightly scary mania of a submachine gun in the hands of the inexperienced. Everybody jumps when he yells. He points so many fingers in so many directions and delegates so much stuff, he's like the octopus version of Roy Cohn. Lenny and Lee, useless as usual, sit in the middle of the chaos cracking on Dan about how he needs to "relax" and how he's going to have a "heart attack." They're right, but that's like all they ever do, whisper shit about the PM, and it's getting old. Dan tells Charmaine to make a list of something, then flips into overdrive and starts dictating list items at a dizzying rate. Lenny interviews, quite humorously, about how scary Dan is. "So hectic!" He explains to the screeching face of Dan how the "freestyle" thing works: basically, that on a regular cruise, you have a schedule -- dinner with the Sommelier in the Shrimp Face room, Moonlight Disco in the Danse Macabre Suite, shuffleboard with the centenarians on the Waiting For Death Deck -- but with the NCL freestyle concept, you just do what you want. Which is better, but I mean, it's still a cruise. The completely boring and stupid and tacky shit you're doing when you are on a cruise, I don't want to do it either way. I'd like to not be told when I had to do the crap, but I'd prefer just to not do any of the crap.













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