Clay tells Markus to set the meeting with the graphic designer "for ASAP," and continues to tell us that coming in all guns blazing will "show the guys that I can lead, and that I'm not afraid to put them in their place if they won't listen." I have a problem with that, the "put them in their place" part and the "if they won't listen" part, because they're not five, but I let it slide with Rebecca so I'll let this slide too. Mostly it's just the way he gets all Vicki Lawrence all over the place whenever he has an opinion, like just assuming they're like these rowdy boys and he's the overworked and slightly disapproving mother hen. I wonder if this chest-out gorilla posing is about the gay thing, or the "small-time small-town real estate" thing. Like those are two different things, but whatever. If you don't think of yourself as a real dude, the real dudes know that, and no amount of throwing your pearls around is going to throw them off. Just be yourself, Clay. I like you, kind of, and so do they. Kind of.

Markus tells Clay that the design guy bartered him up from 11:20 to 11:30, which is totally not ASAP o'clock, and Clay gets to throw a fit, so he does. Markus dives right back into the dork hole, all sniveling and "Because! To give us time to get ourselves ready for it." They're both just being so vapid and petulant about it and I'm like, test your boundaries on some other task, Markus. Please. They're going to work themselves into a knot of bullshit that nobody can unravel. James interviews in this amazed kind of way how "once Clay put that PM jacket on...it was Clay's way or the highway." All the guys are kind of blamflasted about it, but also kind of love it, and so it ends up working, but not the way any of them thinks it will. This is the entire point of Queer Eye For The Straight Guy, this whole enjoyment of getting yelled at by homos to shape up and act right, and I don't even think I get all the math there, and I think we're better off not pondering it, but anyway it's a time-honored dynamic.