They both know they need the other gone to win, however if they are the final two that would be the absolute correct ending

However if the team had lost Francesca would have been pushed under a bus

It's a clear strategy, especially on Luisa's part. I don't respect their decision to have a strong brand whilst leaving their product to the vagaries of fate.

Lord Sugar had already identified the argument to fire her - didn't taste the food...

The ambigous bit is what that chef was doing. If he couldn't cook it ,or guide her from Luisa's rendering of the restaurant recipe, what was he doing? The recipe may have needed tasting as it was cooked,because the quantities of spics and condiments were vague, but none of them were better at tasting than the others - and the other real problem anyway was that whoever was cooking it hadn't tasted the original.

The obvious thing would for Luisa and Francesca to gang up on Neil. Why would the PM put the person who runs a Cup-cake business (ie, all about cooking) doing the market research and leave the person who doesn't know about cooking in the kitchen.

Luisa would probably spin it as "just suggesting" that Francesca should be in the kitchen. Francesca might have got fired, but Luisa was sitting pretty.

They have no way of calling that with any certainty - they have to go with past show experience and game play logic. Sometimes the food quality doesn't matter, and more often the quality of the idea and packaging does. Doing the marketing on your own - while the other strong candidate is safely cooking away is usually more risky. Luisa sharing the blame is safer for Neil if the idea is a dud. From Luisa's viewpoint, if you let the other strong candidate run with the vital bit, and don't trust them, doing the marketing with them still leaves them with more of the blame and may make a win more likely. Doing the cooking gets you no brownie points, as Lord Sugar doesn't want a cook, and you may go if you cook it wrong.

The problem with the food is calling whether its going to repeat Zoe's experience where she's killed by inedible biscuits, or Yasmina's where her inedible chocolates are deemed fixable, and her cheap and nasty wraps are deemed to show business sense, or Kate's chocolates - whose cost is deemed unfixable. You can only go on what happens more often than not. .

Now you say that, I think that Luisa vs Neil is a very fitting end to the series - they have both been two prominent characters throughout the series and although they've both had somewhat negative episodes they have both shown real business acumen and skill.

Agreed. I still don't understand why Luisa and Neil claimed they couldn't cook. Both are parents. Of course they can cook.

Neil doesn't impress me in this episode as his pitching was dreadful. And the Thai and Caribbean combo? Jesus Christ. Only thoroughly drunk students would eat that.

Obviously a deliberate ploy by Luisa. I find it very dubious that she was so vicious towards Neil in the previous task and at the start of this one, calling him a "pitbull", but suddenly she got onside with him and used that to berate Francesca. I think Francesca should have spoken up about that, Luisa obviously had the food experience over Francesca and tried to stitch her up by pretending that she was just as clueless.

Luisa wanted Neil onside because she knows that he is a very strong candidate and doesn't want him working against her. She seems quite afraid of Neil actually and scared that he will upstage her.

Doesn't matter, in the real business environment you just could not put up with Luisa's unprofessional behaviour on a regular basis. The reaction of the people in the advertising firm when she was arguing with Jason sums it all up. I doubt whether she is able to change her behaviour in the long term. Her business plan must be extremely good to have any chance of winning. As for her skills I haven't seen many good performances from her.

Luisa should have been in the kitchen preparing the food but I think she's too daft to be stuck there all day on her own. I bet somebody makes the cakes for her business too.

Both Neil and Luisa saw the branding as the key (correctly as it turned out). Yet they came up with something that looked like Cillit Bang named like a dog food. Luisa doesn't seem to care how blatantly she acts, and Neil doesn't care as long as he's on the winning side. Francesca could have stood up for herself, but having accepted (without any grace) the role in the kitchen she didn't appear to try at all.

I wasn't aware becoming a parent instantly gave you the ability to cook, I'll have to remind my mother.

Who said anything about instantly? You learn how to become a parent and part of that learning is learning an ability to cook something for your child. How else did you survive as a child?

I know plenty of parents who can't cook anything more complicated than a pizza or baked beans ...

Luisa stitched Francesca up by saying she couldn't cook when it was abundantly clear she can. She merely didn't want to be consigned to the back-room role - she wanted to be in the half of the team where she could influenced the PM and the task outcome more directly.

For all Karren's comments about how she was working well with Neil and putting their differences aside (fair comment), her subsequent put-downs of Francesca when research told them the food tasted bad were uncalled for and overly personal. I remain unconvinced by her personality, although as I've said in previous weeks I do believe her business instincts are solid.

A lot of parents rely on products like those created tonight, I wouldnt call that cooking. A lot of parents allow their partners to cook. A lot of parents think of oven chips and fish fingers as cooking.

None of that would have been of any use tonight.

Well it was Neil's dreadful pitch that got the team 2500 orders which along with his pitch to Argos in week 3 which also got 2500 orders is the largest anyones managed this year.

And are Neil and Luisa really parents?

This. I agree about Luisa having some good instincts. It's the conniving and the way she treats others that I don't like. But perhaps in reality all these elements count.

They are. Neil has two children (I think he said two daughters in one episode) and Luisa has one daughter.

In The Apprentice, yes, to a degree. In the real world, such extreme behaviour tends to be found out quite quickly, though.

I think Luisa was trying to set it up so that Francesca was fired from the start of the task (just as she successfully tried to get Jason fired)

...lying about her cooking ability (as KB to her credit twigged)

.....flirting with Neil

.....giving extremely complicated instructions to a self confessed hopeless cook

I used to be pro-Luisa but she's really shown her true colours in the last two tasks.

It would be awful if she reached the F2, let alone won.

The relationship between them now is like a truce between a mongoose and a snake. They will fight to the death if they have to.

Luisa sensed which way the wind was blowing in this episode, and played a very safe game, by letting Neil take charge and sticking by him.

I am ure LS, guided by KB, would have seen through Luisa's game playing here.

Given that she was on a warning the previous week LS would have had an interesting decision of which of the girls to fire. Alas we will never know.

Not so much that, but I think it was clear that Luisa desperately wanted to win, and with the level of self-confidence she has she is desperate to be at the heart of every task - being in the kitchen would have kept her away from the decision-making. So she pulled the can't cook/won't cook routine - a blatant lie which Neil should never have fallen for - and got what she wanted.

It's not so much that she deliberately sabotaged Francesca - she wanted to win not lose the task - but that her selfishness and (over)confidence led her to a deliberate ploy to avoid the kitchen.

The thing is, Luisa has pretty sound business instincts. But in a team situation she will always try to put herself where the action is - most of the candidates do something similar, just less blatantly - to further her own cause, which overrides any team considerations in her head.

That's why I can't see Sugar partnering with her. Why put your money into someone who always thinks they're right and, when push comes to shove, will follow what they want to do against any external advice?

I didn't think it was entirely fair to blame Luisa for not going in the kitchen. She said that she wasn't confident about savoury ingredients and thought she'd be better on branding. She's obviously more confident with desserts because that is her business, but anyone in the food industry has at least a basic knowledge of food, which is clearly more than Francesca had. Luisa obviously thought that she wasn't the right person to cook, but when she saw the way that Francesca was doing it, she changed her mind and in hindsight, she probably should have volunteered to cook. And besides, it was Neil's decision as to where they all went, not Luisa's.

And Francesca completely overreacted to everything. Like when Luisa was talking about how the clients didn't like the taste - 'Go on, stab me some more, I haven't felt it enough yet!' She wasn't stabbing her in the back at all, she was saying that that was what let their product down, which was the truth.

I don't think Francesca was at all blameless - the whole throwing noodles against the wall thing was puerile and purely for the cameras, and she did allow herself to go into victim mode - I mean, seriously, NOT tasting the food?!?

But it seemed clear enough to me that Luisa should have volunteered for the kitchen. But she would never do that - selflessly volunteering for a back-room role is hardly within her nature. In doing what was best for herself, it meant the team as a whole suffered.

Having said that, Neil should never have fallen for the can't cook/won't cook routine - that was weak leadership. Even though cakes are her speciality, putting Luisa in the kitchen was clearly always going to be a better fit than putting in Francesca who couldn't cook at all.

Not impressed with Luisa at all. Pure tactics. I know they all do it to an extent, but this was blatant self-interest.