Since the original thread was completely lost, I'm going to start it over by posting what was my review of the episode:
One note if you missed this episode, it and it appears all other episodes this season are apparently available on Yahoo! as soon as it has aired on NBC on the west coast.
Anyway, one thing I'll disagree with after seeing the first episode and the extended that the show has "jumped the shark", and that this season is to me a lot more promising than I first thought it would. The move to LA in my mind had to do with not wanting to film in April and May (since at the time this season was planned, it was likely for a September premiere), with filming in June and July (when filming of this season took place) in New York made difficult by the fact you can have a prolonged heat wave with temps at or near 100 in the daytime and only dropping to the upper 70s-low 80s at night whereas in LA at that time of year, the 70s-low 80s are the normal high temps with overnight lows in the 50s and low 60s while I also believe from June 30-approximately August 10 you need to have special permits to film on the streets of New York as that is summer tourist season.
I actually thought it was fun to see them do up the tent while wearing suits, and that to me was a test to see who would earn their way to being the first PMs, which Heidi and Frank clearly did. Frank, however, made as has been noted here one big critical error in not having signage until late in the task, and that wound up being the difference (to be honest, I thought Heidi's team would have won this task by an even bigger margin). Heidi was extremely impressive as the PM. She focused on what figured to bring in the most volume, and that was the basic car wash, which I felt was the best strategy given the time constraints of the task.
One thing Martin did say in his exit interview on Yahoo! was he felt his "bladder issue" when they were introducing themselves caused him to be isolated from the rest of the team, and that in retrospect may very well have been a real factor in his eventually being "fired" by Mr. Trump, though even Mr. Trump said it was a very tough decision to have him be the first one "fired" of this round of the show.
Frankly, what I thought might happen there was Frank and Martin would both be "fired" by Mr. Trump (especially since we know there will be multiple "firings" in one shot at least a couple of times this season due to this only being a "14-week job interview"), and then he would send Heidi to the other team to be their PM on the next task.
As for the tents, I think that provides a new element of stress that we wouldn't see otherwise, and it I think was put in to prevent what has happened in previous seasons with teams tanking a task on purpose to get rid of someone they don't like. The other twist of having the winning PM in the boardroom I think is a good one, as that person is going to have to be careful as a slipup could really come back to haunt them later on, especially if that person later becomes PM of the losing team of an early task for instance.
From an entertainment standpoint, this was an excellent episode, and again, far better than I expected.