Thats always been the case and that fact will probably stop her winning

Agree

Disagree. I didn't interpret Helen's approach during the task as anything malicious. She said she was up all night worrying about the way the task was going; hardly seems the work of some Machiavellian character to me. I think she just knew that Melody was a rubbish team leader and saw that they were thus in danger of losing the task. She knew that Melody is better at selling and Helen is better at strategy and organising, so straight up asked to swap. It may be unusual but what's so bad about that? Nobody can say she was bitching behind anyone's back - she was up front with what she wanted and I didn't think it was rude either. She was merely trying to save the situation because Melody was so inefficient.

And as for 'showing her true colours' - you don't think the candidates would kind of have done that by this stage? I don't think they're THAT good at acting so as to still be fooling us by this late stage of the game! I reckon most of us who are vaguely good at judging characters would know what they're like by now.

I don't understand why she took it upon herself to try and take the PM role away from Melody. If she thought Melody was doing a bad job then all she had to do was just tell Melody this concern and thereafter advise her with positive imput (of things that could be reconsidered/rethought out) so that the team could remain a unit rather than in conflict right at the start of the day. Plenty of PM's in the entire back catalogue of Apprentice tasks have not known what the hell they were doing, so, what Helen thought she had so much of in comparison to what she thought Melody to have so little of that would need this task to be saved in such manner, I don't know!? Surely it would have been more benifitical for Helen to just let Melody remain in her role but help her out at it and get praise from Lord Alan via that way, if that is what her aim was. She would have come across more a saviour of the task in this way (if the situation had been that catastrophic) rather than trying to be noticed and gain personal glory by literally attempting to take the present PM out of the equation. Sure she's won tasks but, that doesn't mean an ego trip was due.

Is that honest in a "am jus' bein' honest laeeeeek" honest?

So am I, am being honest too.

That's the machiavellian factor.

Considering some of the dubious firings in this series, i thought she was really lucky not to get fired.

I was expecting him to say 'Helen, looking at your CV, you don't have your own business, you have no experience of running a business, so on that basis Helen, YOU ARE FIRED!'.

But, for once, he did the right thing. Just.

I thought Helen was extremely silly to try to take over the PM's job. As to it being a "strategy", I dont think so, just her ego getting in the way.

And trying to sell to retailers?. What was she thinking?.

I never would have pegged Helen as so dense to think she could sell wholesale items to retailers.

Goes to show that even the brightest (and Helen has been brighter than most this year) can be dim at times.

Must do better Helen, much better!.

When did he say that? He said it was unusual, indeed unprecedented, and wanted to get the details out in the boardroom, but I didn't get the impression he disapproved. (Or approved, really; he didn't seem that bothered either way.)

However, Nick then asks what her plan would have been if she had taken over, and it turned out she wanted to go more heavily into retailers. She wanted to go faster in the wrong direction. She got some stick for that, quite rightly. One can admire her honesty for admitting it, because the stupidity of it had already been highlighted in the earlier boardroom session. It doesn't change the fact that had her coup succeeded it would have been a disaster. That's what Lord Sugar disapproved of. If you pull a move like that, you need to be right.

To be fair, though, Helen was only reacting to their experiences.

They had managed to get an order that would have made them £90 for a couple of hours work had the wholesaler not been shut.

Whilst it seemed (and, indeed, still does seem) odd to try and sell to retail, their experience seemed to suggest that it worked.

Following Sugar's 'see what sells and sell more of it' mantra, they saw that they could sell in that manner and Helen wanted to try and do more of it. Which is exactly what Sugar told them to do.

Personally I would have let my prior knowledge override what was, I thought, a flukey order but I don't think the strategy was quite as stupid as it was made out to be.