Heidi finally reins them all in and reminds them about THE SHIT THAT IS ACTUALLY GOING DOWN IN REALITY, NOT IN NICOLE'S HEAD OR FRANK'S BOOZY GLOW, asking Kristine who she'd like to partner with. Kristine interviews that yeah, of course Heidi thinks they're going to fight together, being the last of the pureblood Kinetic women. Of course she'd want to assemble a willing and able team...but that's not how this is going down, for some reason. She's irritated by Heidi's lack of effort last time, and scared (as she should be) about Heidi's penchant for biffing presentations, but she's thinking clearly and at least has a game plan, and it's a great one, actually. I wish we'd ever seen Kristine before, so we'd know how well her brain has worked on previous tasks! If Heidi's team wins, that's another win for Superstar Heidi. If Heidi's team loses, Heidi's gone and won't be in the F2 where she belongs. If you're on Heidi's winning team, it's a null sum; but if you're anywhere but Heidi's losing team, you're already in a better position. Even if that ends up being with Nicole, who will sink you in a heartbeat even though you're on the same team, because she's sucky and stupid and more interested in assigning blame than she is actually using her head to win, because she prefers her victim status to anything remotely approaching power or respectability.

Now, first of all, it would never occur to me to be anywhere but Heidi's side, defending her from attackers and bringing her snacks, because she is the love of my life, and second of all, Kristine is brilliant, because that's honestly really good math. The only part she's missing is how, because of how this show works, because of the Martha Stewart Principle, Heidi's only shot at winning this thing would have been to become vastly uglier the second Trump pronounced her a Superstar, or managed to find some other impossible way to compensate for the fact that for women, to get anywhere on this show (and let's be honest, in a lot of the business world) have to walk an impossible balance: to be both everything Trump wants and everything Trump wants to be, while simultaneously being just a little impossible bit less than those things, or invisible in his presence.