This was a long and energetic 2 hour episode. It was announced in the beginning that Tito Ortiz would not be around for this challenge as he had a fight/match to attend to. The task this time around was to create an awareness campaign dubbed as “Soles United” for the Footwear company Crocs. The campaign’s mission was to encourage people to donate their used Croc shoes which will then be recycled and given to the needy. The team would also have to create an in store receptacle bin for people to place the shoes in and the winner will be determined by Croc’s founder and CEO.
The project manager for Hydra was Piers Morgan and for Empresario it was Carol Alt. The team’s meeting rooms were actually right next door to each other this time around which created an interesting twist. At first the Hydra suspected that the Empresario was eaves dropping on them and as a result Piers Morgan had a plan to send Vincent Pastore as a spy to get information out of them and was dubbed as the “rat”.
They did this by pretending that they had some kind of dispute while being very loud about it and Vincent Pastore sat outside the room pretending to be disgruntled. He then approached the ladies on how he wanted to work with them for this task as a result of the dispute and Empresario had no issues with taking him in.
Hydra’s direction was to once again utilize Lennox Lewis as the celebrity figure and created a receptacle bin using his image. They also came up with the slogan “Wear them, share them”. Empresario created a receptacle bin that was shaped like a Croc shoe while using Carol Alt as the celebrity image with a slogan of “Share the love.”
It got interesting afterwards as Vincent Pastore decided that he genuinely did want to help Empresario mainly in spite of Piers Morgan for assigning him such a task. He did end up providing Hydra with notes about what Expresario was planning to do though and became a double agent of sort. The episode then became like this one big soap opera about morals and ethics in business and life it seemed.
One topic was about whether or not it is okay to sabotage another person/company in order to get ahead. Ivanka mentioned how it was okay In her book depending on the situation. Maybe it’s just me, but when Stephen Baldwin started to talk about morals and ethics it just didn’t seem very genuine as he seemed like he was putting on an act.
Vincent Pastore decided to confess to Empresario about his original motive for joining the group and how he provided Hydra with internal information. In the meantime, Piers Morgan and Stephen Baldwin decided to have a little fun by giving Empresario members hints that they knew their whole plan and believed they were silly for trusting Vincent in the first place with a nudge on the fact that he plays a character in the show Sopranos.
Eventually, Empresario decides to get rid of Vincent and upon returning to Hydra and learning about his disloyalty to them as well it created a lot of tension. In the end, his decision to kind of play both sides of the fence didn’t work out as both teams did not want him and he ended up leaving while awaiting the boardroom date.
In the end, the Croc executives believed that Empresario’s idea was the best overall which gave the team it’s first victory. As the winning project manager, 10,000 pairs of recycled shoes were to be donated by Croc to needy people in Africa under Carol Alt’s name and she will also receive $20,000 for her charity.
Before any type of candidates were selected to be fired, Vincent Pastore mentioned that he wanted to simply resign from the show. There was then a discussion about quitting in life and how many times it is a mental game. Trump then got Vincent Pastore to express how he wanted to quit simply because of Piers Morgan which didn’t seem right. An interesting comment came up as Trump asked Baldwin for his opinion. Baldwin began to talk about morals and ethics again and mentioned how he believed that a big reason why Trump was successful was that he would never hurt someone to get ahead. Trump kind of smiled and just said no comment.
In the end, Trump accepted Vincent Pastore’s resignation and he was he one to go. This episode almost felt like some kind of high school match with people teasing each other along with “I’m telling on you” type of scenarios. The theme was definitely about one’s character overall. I guess as apparent in this episode, inconsistency in your actions and principles in life can sure create one big mess.