I couldn't have been less surprised...

I couldn't have been less surprised by this week's firing if NBC had posted a giant "Countdown to Toral's Pink Slip" clock on the screen; of course, I still thoroughly enjoyed watching her squirm for an hour straight. If you tuned in, you had the good fortune to witness Mean Girls in their natural habitat singling out one of the herd for swift and merciless disposal. Awe-inspiring, really. And when they weren't channeling Animal Planet, Capital Edge was busy tanking the design-a-new-promotional-character-for-Dairy-Queen task; honestly, I felt a twinge of vertigo coming on every time I tried to look at that googly-eyed "Zip" thing. Meanwhile, Excel came together in a glorious display of teamwork and really snippy leadership to create "Jenny the Genie" a rather clever 2-D sketch that materialized into every Kabuki nightmare I've ever had, once good ol' boy Mark slipped into that soft-serve wig. (And let us not forget the delightfully traumatic experience of listening to the men attempt to compose a jingle they'll never actually use; is it just me, or did fresh-faced Adam totally out himself there as a closet drama-club geek?) In a rather anticlimactic finish, the fellas won and got to play ball with the Mets, while the ladies hit the boardroom and whoa! Trump went all no-huddle offense on us! All right, fine, I guess they did manage to surprise me a little.

A word about the contestants' narrative skills: Early on in the task Josh informed us that project manager Clay fell "somewhere between Napoleon and Hitler" on the big chart of tyrannical rulers. Well, all right, just as long as we're keeping things in perspective. Seriously, dude, I think Kristi got a lot closer with the far more eloquent statement, "Toral is a friggin' goober."