The Apprentice's Latest Tense Boardroom Deliberation Gifted Us Our Favourite New Meme

This article contains major spoilers for the latest episode of The Apprentice.

You can always depend on those boardroom showdowns in The Apprentice to serve up some top-level reality TV drama, and this week’s was truly next level.

In Thursday’s instalment, the remaining 13 contestants were tasked with creating a new non-alcoholic drink, with cocktail bar owner Sophie’s team losing out in the end.

As project manager, she brought back teammates Akshay and Navid for Lord Sugar’s final decision – which proved to be a controversial choice, as they’d been responsible for more sales than any other members of their group.

During the deliberation, Alan Sugar grilled Sophie about whether Akshay or Navid should be fired from the competition, which was followed by five full seconds of extremely uncomfortable silence.

But while it initially looked like she was finding it difficult to throw one of her teammates under the bus, it soon emerged she was actually just struggling to narrow it down to just one of them, as she eventually told Lord Sugar: “Both!”

The dramatic scene had viewers tweeting along with the episode howling, and instantly inspired a new Apprentice-themed meme:

​​In the end, Lord Sugar went against Sophie’s advice, sending just one candidate packing.

Unfortunately for Navid, he was the contestant who got fired, but while his time on the contest may have been short, he did have his own scene-stealing moments – mainly when he let his Nicki Minaj stan-dom shine through:

The Apprentice airs every Thursday night at 9pm on BBC One.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost UK and has been updated.

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