Aimee watches all this go down and practices "appearing awake and alert." Donald asks Surya what it's like to lose for the first time, and Surya immediately starts in on Aaron: "It eats at you. We lost because I don't think we had a solid plan. Relying on sales abilities alone, I think we coasted too much..." Trump's like, no more niceties, got it, and asks Surya's opinion on the weak link. "I like Aaron a lot," he says, but thinks this is a PM failure. Trump shows his cards WAY early: "Weak?" Surya would say "ineffective." "Quiet?" Sean immediately jumps on this "I'm a better Viceroy than you" bandwagon -- which, consider the mindset there for one thrilling second -- and lays into Aaron for not speaking up last week. Which has nothing to do with the task, but Sean is a disgusting suck-up, so here we go. Trump wants to talk about how Aaron was quiet last week, Sean is going to motherfucking comply with that. I despise this man. Aaron explains that he values his words very highly, which is a fine explanation, but Trump's off on a thing, so he bitches for awhile and Aaron's finally like, "Okay, I have a lot to say tonight."

Aimee goes, "Let's hear it." Which is yucky because of Sean, but I think she's just responding to the energy in the room, which is all pointed at her, because they're talking about how Aaron acted when he was in the chair that she's currently in, so it doesn't really matter what she says right now, it's just important that she say something, immediately, and stick to her guns. "Who was in charge of marketing and what were those efforts?" Aaron's "main man" Surya, he says, who produced nothing. Surya does that stupid goddamn fake laugh I hate, like "Can you believe this maroon?" The only person who ever used that correctly was Andrea, and she had a lot of other stuff happening that isn't in play right now, so just: don't do it. James explains over the stupid fake laughter of Surya that Surya is a swot who spits jargon and nothing else. Aimee points out that it's hardly fair to settle the entire creative aspect of marketing on just Surya's shoulders -- "There are seven other people here; help me understand that" -- but because nobody saw it happen, nobody can explain how he co-opted it all the second he started in with the whole "this is my day job" thing, making it impossible to fight your way in without questioning his entire career and manhood, and that's what he did there, and it took place on a nonverbal level that none of them really noticed this time. Surya explains the other side of the problem he caused, how he "expected to hear, you know, 'What do you think, Surya?' and 'I want you to own this, Surya'" and how he heard none of that. Now of course, this is mainly because they weren't allowed to interrupt him or say anything at all, but it's also telling that he didn't feel heard. When people interrupt or repeat themselves or say things like he's saying, it's because they don't feel heard. The reason they don't feel heard, usually, is that nobody is listening to them, because they're being annoying or repetitive or not saying anything. So even though he told them that he was in charge of marketing and everybody believed him, Surya himself didn't believe it, because they weren't giving him the cues that he was looking for, because he zoomed straight to pointless-loser mode without even stopping to say hi. So although he basically derailed the entire conversation, from his side he never even got to say word one. It's a hairy little issue.