Constant Reader May 2026 (YA) White Smoke by Tiffany D. Jackson

 

 

This is Maple Street…on the last calm and reflective moment…before the monsters came.

Last year I became aware of Tiffany D. Jackson in spectacular fashion with The Weight Of Blood, the most accurate retelling Stephen King's Carrie in the half a century since it hit the best seller list. Mike Flanagan would be lucky to do half as well with the limited series he is scheduled to create of that novel as Jackson does in her version.

In typical fashion I spent the next several months looking for Jackson's previous and future novels: the superb nostalgic riff on the 1990s rap scene in Let Me Hear A Rhyme and her latest novel venture into the world of cults in The Scammer. Then this past month I managed to find White Smoke written in 2021 and what the author considered her first real attempt into the horror genre.

In hindsight maybe I shouldn't have been shocked that she managed to do so well with her version of Carrie; in her first horror novel she decided to pay tribute to arguably the first great horror TV show in history The Twilight Zone. At the center of it is one of the great episodes Rod Serling ever wrote, arguably one of the greatest episode of TV in all time.

'The Monsters are Due on Maple Street' was not the first great episode of Twilight Zone but it was by far one of the darkest Serling ever wrote. It deals when after a mysterious crash all of the power and phones go out in Maple Street. One of the kids mentions reading a comic book in which he saw aliens invade and that they looked like human. The panic starts to spread when one of the cars begins to work at random, and the neighbors start accusing each other. One of them gets shot by accident, the panic spreads and eventually they turn on each other and start burning the houses down. The final twist is one you should find later on but it delivers one of the most famous lines in TV to that point, one that could stand for both the Cold War paranoia of Serling's time and so much of 21^st century America today:

"They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find and its themselves."

That episode Jackson tells us in the afterword is the book's iron spine. I might not have known for sure had Jackson not revealed it. The thing is when you look at White Smoke in its entirety you get the sense that Jackson is almost certainly putting Easter eggs in that she might not be aware of – and perhaps her intended audience might not be – but make this novel all the richer.

White Smoke is told from the perspective of Marigold Anderson, an African American teenager who has just had to leave rehab because of a mental breakdown and for circumstances Jackson's doesn't reveal until the end of the novel. Her mother is a writer who's divorced amicably from her architect father and remarried a white man named Alec. They've become a blended family: Mari has a younger brother named Sammy; Alec a ten year old named Piper.

Mari considers Piper something of a spoiled brat even though Piper's trying to get over a far darker trauma then Mari. A couple of years ago she came home to find her grandmother was dead and had to wait with her until her family came home. Piper's grandmother was the only friend the young girl had but Mari and Sammy are not warm to her – perhaps because of the color of her skin.

Mari suffers from a trauma that has to do with a fear of bedbugs that infected her house several years ago and caused her to suffer from anxiety attacks. The only think that truly alleviated them was marijuana but for reasons we won't learn until the end of the novel, her family has never wanted her to smoke again even though it’s the only thing that has any calming effect. Mari has been trying to make her way through her life on  the back of a self-help mantra "Change is good. Change is necessary. Change is needed."

At this point the Wilson family is moving from their sunny California town to a small town in an unnamed Midwest state called simply Cedarville. Her mother has decided to take a job with an organization called simply The Foundation, and as part of being an artist in residence they get a free house. The free house is wooden, decrepit, with no real furnace and barely any wi-fi signal It's almost a palace compared to the rest of the houses in this section of town which reminds Mari of the opening scenes of The Walking Dead. She barely notices the sign that says Maple Street because its barely been paid attention to.  There's no indication she's seen The Twilight Zone but she sure as hell noticed the signpost up ahead that tells them they've crossed over into a weird place.

Even the welcoming committee admits that this is a decrepit section of Cedarville but that the Foundation plans to make it better. Its only after the neighbors show up that Mari realizes that this is the prominently African-American section of the town with more black people then she's seen in her life. Mari thinks this will be a plus; she doesn't know just how bad it will be – and that's before strange things start happening in her home.

Almost from the start its clear why this house is free: there's a stench coming from it that no one can find and that everyone but Mari is willing to ignore.  Random things begin to go missing and then food starts to go missing. Mari gets a sense that there's mysterious figures around. Buddy, the family dog, begins to bark mysteriously at random. Mari starts having dreams where she's either paralyzed or unable to move or that random figures are in her room. One of the neighbor, Mr. Watson, tells them that there were three different contract companies in four months that had to work the house but never tells anybody why.

One wonders if Jackson is writing so much of White Smoke as a tongue-in-cheek rebuke to Eddie Murphy's famous routine about why you'd never see a black family in a horror movie. "You white folks see blood in the toilet; you go get Ajax."  The difference is the Wilson family isn't entirely staying out of blindness; they cleaned out their savings to put Mari through rehab and a free house is something they can't sneeze at. Of course, there's the added joke that Alec, the white man in the family, thinks that everything is normal which is pretty much keeping with it.

The reference to Mari that might remind fans of Twilight Zone is another classic 'Nightmare at 20,000 Feet' where William Shatner plays a man who suffered a mental breakdown while flying on a plane and is now on a flight for the first time since then when he sees a gremlin on the wing that no one else does. He spends the entire episode first wrestling with his sanity and when he realizes no one will listen to him because of his mental condition, manages to steal a gun and shoots the gremlin off. At the end of the episode he's being assured he'll be all right and he tells his wife: "I know. But I'm the only one who knows…right now." When the final shot reveals the damaged wing, we realize that there is a double triumph: when the aircraft looks at the plane they'll realize that something was on the wing and that Shatner's character wasn't insane.

Mari's condition mirrors that episode, not just because of how her anxiety is triggered by panic attacks – which we finally see happen in horrible detail in the middle of the book – but also because of her former addiction. On multiple occasions her mother feels that it's necessary to do a drug test on her, and we know all of this is conditional on if the relationship doesn't work, she's willing to live with her father again. Furthermore Mari is hampered by her own guilt over what she believes she's caused her family to do, particularly with her younger brother and that she doesn't deserve to be happy. Mari has come to Cedarville because she wants a fresh start and for that reason it takes her a little longer to realize the weirdness.

To be clear some of it comes immediately when Mr. Sterling (Serling with a T!) shows up at their home in the kind of smiling reassuring attitude that would not be uncommon with the representatives of the devil that kept showing up in a lot of Twilight Zone episodes. When they are invited to the introductory gala of The Sterling Foundation the first thing Mari and Sammy notice is that their family is basically the only people of color among all the suits and ties. They also notice that Cedarville's plans for a brand new community go right through where their new home is. Mari wonders how the hell they're going to rebuild where an entire neighborhood is.

When she gets to high school things are even odder. For one thing, there are almost a dozen girls to every boy and the population is almost entirely African-American. The only two people she makes connections with are Yussef, one of the few teenagers who lives in her neighborhood and Erika, one of the only people who has access to weed. The entire high school treats her coldly but Mari attributes it to being the new girl.

Eventually Mari learns about some of the stranger things about this town. How Sterling's brother used to be governor and enacted the Sterling Laws who thought 'drugs were the devil's work as gave mandatory minimums of 20 years for weed. As Erica tells it:

 "He convinced white folks that weed would turn people into addicts who would rob, loot and kill…He dedicated the entire city's budget to 'cleaning the streets. Police were riding around like an army, walking into houses, offices, restaurants, schools, hospitals with no warrants. After the first wave, they started getting greedy, planting drugs on folks."

The prison population grew 900 percent, schools and hospitals started shutting down, folks to the street. And that was the first match that lit up the last riots."

All of this would be familiar to Serling, who lived through the McCarthy era, tried to tell the narrative of Emmett Till in two TV movies that the censors cut to bits and who always argued for civil rights throughout his show – which ended right around the time the riots were starting in Ghettos like Newark and Watts. He would often write about dystopian societies where the state has too much power, most notably in 'The Obsolete Man' where all books and religion is banned. Serling knew that it doesn't take much to build the kind of world Jackson does and he would appreciate her prose.

As White Smoke progresses Jackson tells us of greater sins that deal with Cedarville's past included why the town doesn't celebrate Halloween, the connections the families in power have to run this town and the great generational and original sin that Maple Street is suffering from that dates back decades. It explains much of what has happened in all of Cedarville and why so many in this neighborhood act the way they do; it's not so much a racial one as one of a witch hunt that may have been orchestrated by greater forces. It makes clear that this is a parallel for what Mari is living through right now; she believes she has to punish herself the way this entire neighborhood thinks it has to.

I'm reminded of other Easter eggs throughout the show: most notably how there's a televangelist who always seems to be on quoting the Bible, selling snake oil (or false seeds) and telling everyone to repent. This reminds me of 'Eye of The Beholder', where in a hospital in some unknown place, a leader is preaching conformity while a young woman waits to see if a surgery that will remedy her horrible deformity has worked. Serling never gave an explanation as to where and when that world was; Jackson gives a very real why this preacher is and that he has a very real purpose.

Jackson says that in the afterward that while she is making an entry into the horror genre she believes she's keeping a toe in the psychological thriller space. That is true but only in the sense that The Twilight Zone managed to do both effectively. So much of what she puts into this novel –  powerful forces manipulating small people behind the scenes, the rich and powerful taking from those with less, the use of authority to clamp down on any signs of resistance and using their ability to placate the mob – are very much themes that Serling and his crew of writers would freely make use of in their body of work.

And she demonstrates the ability which I have seen in her later works to emulate Hitchcock when he said he wanted to play the audience like a piano. She does so in so many exceptional sequences that will scare anyone with a pulse. My personal favorite (?) involves the alarms that Mari has set on her phone to remind her of her schedule. One morning she wakes up early to reminder that she doesn't remember setting and in quick succession they become almost omniscient and terrifying with each new reminder.

 And she frequently undercuts with jet black comedy, most of it coming from Alec who is the typical white man who really believes there's an explanation for everything no matter how bad things get. The closest emulation to 'Maple Street' comes when the power goes out in the Anderson home and then the entire street goes black. Eventually the light comes on in their home but no one else's and the entire neighborhood comes ready to raise a mob. Jackson makes it clear just how scary and hysterical this scene is at the same time when everything Alec says pisses everybody else off even when makes no sense:

Oh I see, so you think having power in your fancy new home makes you better than us?

"Fancy?" Alec chuckles. "Have you seen this block.

Someone gasps; the outrage visceral.

"So the Wood ain't good enough for you?" a man yells.

What should be terrifying almost seems to be absurd when they accuse one of the sons of suspicious behavior "because he's walking that dog around." When everything resolves itself the mob disperses and doesn't even apologize even though they completely overreacted.

Though much of Jackson's writing is aimed at white privilege, the even-handedness towards race is clear in this book. Yes the people in Maplewood have a right to be upset but they have spent the entire period taking their aggression out on the wrong people rather than those in power.  She sees very clearly that manipulation has never been a one-way street.

I've been relatively vague on what so much of this book is really about, being content to describe it more on mood then anything else. I believe that's the right approach when you're talking about a horror novel more than most genres. So I'm going to conclude this review with a brief discussion of The Twilight Zone.

There have been multiple attempts to revive it like clockwork almost every twenty years and whether the writers are Harlan Ellison or Jordan Peele, it never lasts as long and is rarely as high in quality. I believe that the problem is that they have tried to copy the mood of the stories but not Serling's approach. Serling would have worn the label social justice warrior proudly had it existed and he did his best to walk the walk when running The Twilight Zone. He did stories which had African-Americans at the lead at times and even hired female directors to work for the show when few would consider it done. More importantly that attitude was reflecting in the stories he told where he used the mask of sci-fi and horror to tell stories where the wicked were punished and the good rewarded. Almost none of the stories in the revivals were willing to do that.

Would Serling look at the world today and be disappointed? Actually I think, like the liberals of the time, he'd be more understanding and say that things only seem worse now then they were when he was first making The Twilight Zone. The idea of an African-American being the creative force behind a revival would have been inconceivable to him when he died too young in 1975. Now such things happen regularly. The world is not a utopia but Serling knew first hand that utopias are dull when you write about them in fiction and almost certainly less fun to live in then they appear. There's no arc of the universe, just an arrow steadily moving. It may move slower then some people want, faster than others, but it keeps moving regardless despite the efforts of those who want to hold it back or push it backwards.

That may be reflected in the ending of White Smoke. For all its very real bleakness, Jackson ends her story in a place more optimistic than Serling would for his Maple Street even if it may not be apparent to Mari or even the reader. Survival is its own victory and she has made a journey that would have been unthinkable at the start of the novel. By the end of the book she has changed her maxim:

"Change is good. Change is not always necessary. But the right change is most definitely needed. "

Serling said something similar in the end narration of another episode:

"…No matter what the future brings, man's capacity to rise to the occasion will remain unaltered. His potential for tenacity and optimism continues, as always, to outfight, outpoint and outlive any changes made by his society, for which three cheers and a unanimous decision rendered from the Twilight Zone.

Jackson's character believe in Serling's philosophy and that's to be applauded as much as anything. That shouldn't be confined to the Twilight Zone either and Jackson's characters believe it.

 

 

Homicide Rewatch: Double Blind

 

Written by Lee Blessing & Joanne Blacke ; story by Tom Fontana & James Shimurara

Directed by Uli Edel

 

It's important to know the difference between what Homicide did that was truly revolutionary and what it just did extraordinarily well. So much of what happens in 'Double Blind' falls in the latter category.

What might seem the most revolutionary part -  revisiting the story of Chris Thormann, a  character we met briefly in Season 1 – isn't that different from what other TV shows had done in the past. Fontana himself had done it more than a few times on St. Elsewhere and even then it was territory that the two other shows that it was frequently company with in the Emmys year in and year out, Hill Street Blues and L.A. Law would do throughout their run, revisiting minor characters and certain storylines sometimes multiple times over the course of their run. By the time 'Double Blind' aired almost every network TV drama was doing so in a course of their long runs: NYPD Blue, ER and Chicago Hope had already done so: the former with cop and criminals, the latter with doctors, patients and even friends of the staff. The show used the passage of time effectively to show how so much of the minor characters had been radically effected by their time on the show while the series regulars frequently barely remembered with the passage of time.

In the case of Chris Thormann it is more personal for Meldrick Lewis. Thormann is one of the last living connections to Steve Crosetti and he played a vital role in the arrest and conviction of Charlie Flavin. So the news that Flavin is being given early parole stuns him more than if this were to come up with another case. It's worth noting that this is the first time in Homicide's run that it has dealt with a parole hearing in regard to a former felon: the series has dealt with old cases and revisited the men they've sent to prison but its never dealt with what happens when they get a chance at freedom. (Fontana had actually visited this scenario  with St. Elsewhere but in a far more melodramatic context for its character and ending.) Lewis is infuriated when he learns Flavin is up for parole after just four years, which would be upsetting enough were it not for the detached matter of the board. They don't even know Crosetti's dead, which infuriates him further. The fact that Flavin has gotten special circumstances – there was a riot and he carried one of the guards to  save a guard and then went back to negotiate the lives of the other hostages  – astonishes Meldrick when he learns the truth.

For all that Homicide chooses to spend the episode looking at it not through the affect it has on Meldrick but rather Chris and Eva. The show is more daring, showing us for the first time the circumstances that led to Chris' shooting and how he ended up blind. We saw Chris through the period of his physical recovery, watched him after his son was born and a lesser show would have him be able to move on. Homicide has never been one of those show and in a season which has been looking both at the pasts of the regulars and the traumas of so many recurring characters, its only fitting 'Double Blind' chooses to do so with one of its first.

Tergesen and Falco were very early in their careers as actors when they were cast in Homicide back in 1993 and both of them have gained a lot in the four years since. Tergesen shows it in that scene where he tells Meldrick just what his life has become like since his world went black and how he's felt impotent in a way that he never has now that he's working in medical answering phones. Falco has a remarkable scene as well when she tells Meldrick just how exhausted it is that her husband has never been able to let going of being a cop and how 'he has to let go of the jazz'.

He gets some encouraging works from Mike, who seems to be trying to rebuild after everything that happened. When he sees Lewis in a brown study and tells him about what's going on with Flavin Meldrick confesses that's he taking on the responsibility of Crosetti and he doesn't know if he can do it. Kellerman assures him that he knows the right words at times and Lewis takes it better then last time. Mike assures him to go help his friend. Meldrick does so by talking through as well as cheering him up by saying that in addition to Gee and Howard, everybody from the Commissioner to Ray Charles wrote a statement is support of Thormann. The officer who Thormann saved is at the parole hearing and what should be an awkward scene shows a kind of unity between those who wear the badge.

But the most powerful moment comes when Chris sets aside his victim impact statement and speaks from his heart and says this isn't about that:

"If this is about whether Charlie Flavin is ready for a new future then I don't know. I'm still working on a future. It might take a year, it might take 20, it might take a lifetime. But I'm gonna get there. And when I do, I promise to let you all know. And then maybe we can talk about Charlie Flavin."

It's a powerful moment, all the more so because Lewis never learns what it is he said. Only Chris and Eva know and neither tell. It works because Flavin's parole is denied

As if that were not enough we see Bayliss and Pembleton officially get back on the horse: "Together again," Bayliss says. "For the first time," Frank gets the last word. Their first official murder will not be a pretty one. In a way we saw the set up for it in the teaser when a young woman came to the squad screaming about how her father beat her mother and that he was going to kill her. We see just how badly the process failed her – and Gee does too – and we see what is the inevitable consequence. It takes a while for the show to get that point when we learn about the murder of Franz Rader, a man shot three times. Cox tells them that its clear the bullets were on a downward trajectory. Brodie has been around long enough to know what this means: "The victim was on his knees." Even Bayliss is impressed.

We learn Franz Rader has beat his wife Lucille multiple times but the battered woman has never chosen to call the police once. After the most recent horrible beating it becomes clear Billie, the daughter, who we saw in the teaser took her mother to the hospital after he nearly beat her to death. Even more shocking is just how willing Lucille is to apologize for Franz's actions and how almost immediately afterward she's willing to testify against her daughter.

This infuriates Frank in  a way we haven't seen in a long time. Some of it may have to do with the breakup of his marriage – he may be projecting Mary's decision to leave onto Lucille's decision to stay – but it more likely has to do with the fact that two hours after her husband died she's willing to sell her daughter out,  Bayliss, for once, is the logical one: he knows two hours later Lucille is still in shock.

At work Rader's partner is fully aware of the kind of man he was with his wife and that he could never discuss it with him. One of his chefs thinks the world of him, thinks he walked on water. This subtle dissonance shows how effectively an abuser can separate his work life from his home life. It's only when his colleagues mentions how horrible his childhood was that Bayliss listens, particularly when he says: "You can't just go back into his childhood and fix it, can you?"

While trying to find the girl Frank and Tim do something we haven't seen them do: try to debate the punishment. In a reversal Frank argues for manslaughter, justifiable homicide while Bayliss is arguing for second degree murder. Both agree that the victim was a bastard but on who the victim is: Bayliss thinks the mother was; Frank thinks Billie was. It doesn't help when they learn that two of the bullets came when he was on his knees and the third when he was flat on his back, a threat to no one.

Billie Rader seems to be doing everything she can to put herself in for the most severe punishment: she's willing to confess when she's finally arrested and when Frank tries to tiptoe around, to find a way for Billie to admit to a lesser charge, she refuses to do it. She seems incredibly angry even when she's confessing to the beatings her mother took, almost as if she blames her mother for taking the abuse instead of her.  No one in the squad feels happy about what they have to do: Bayliss is by far the bluntest and angriest about it, but he's just saying what everyone knows is necessary. "A bottom-feeding, wife-beating member of the tribe," Bayliss admits. Pembleton can only laugh at the irony. "You're the sensitive one, right?"

Monica Kenna's work in this episode is astonishing: we see her powered by desperation in the teaser, anger and indignation in when she's arrested, pride when she shouts about it and finally she starts to cry when she relates her father was begging her not to shoot with his last words. There's never a moment where our sympathy is with Billie even if she would deny that sympathy for herself.

Afterwards Lucille tells the detectives that Franz attacked Billie first and that she only fired in self-defense. This is what Howard predicted would happen and Bayliss is still angry. Pembleton finally calls him on it: "Lucille Rader suffered. She took every beating as if it were her due. Billie, on the other hand…she took all the power and for one moment at least, she won. They were the same. The sin was not their own." Pause. "The sin is not your own."

 That night he goes back to his old district and is greeting by his old commander. He tells Meldrick he'll always miss this and that someday Flavin will make parole. Both of them know this. Chris seems to be willing to let go.

The same is not true in the final scene. Bayliss is at a decrepit home, where his Uncle George, drunken, slovenly and unable to take care of himself is there. He barely recognizes his nephew. "What am I supposed to with my hate?" he asks him. We're a little terrified – but the answer will be somewhat shocking to everybody.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes From The Board

From Simon's Book: The scene where Thormann returns to the Eastern District is taken out of where his counterpart Cassidy returns to the Eastern. In real life Cassidy recovered much quicker than he did on TV.

Its Baltimore: Meldrick and Munch share their mutual outrage over the Orioles decision to move Ripken from shortstop to third base at the start of the 1997 season. (And we'll be talking more about the Orioles and how their year went in just a few months' time.) "Blasphemy!" Munch says. When Lewis dares argue "Ol Cal's lost a step", Munch refers to him as the 'blasphemer to my immediate right."

"Detective Munch" Munch's reaction to Cal Ripken being moved off shortstop. "What's next? Blue crabs with drawn butter and the Union Jack being flown over Fort McHenry?"

One of the best ways that Homicide proves its not your father's cop show is that after talking to a witness Frank says, "Don't leave town." He then assures the pilot he's kidding. When Bayliss remarks on this Frank says with a smile: "I've always wanted to say that."

Not long before this episode was shot Tom Fontana would cast Tergesen and Falco for roles in OZ the prison drama he was working on with HBO. Tergesen would play Tobias Beecher, an attorney who was sent to Oswald as an example by a judge and Falco would play Diane Wittelsey, a female prison guard in Em City.

Hey, Isn't That…Monica Keena, who plays Billie Rader seemed to start her career like gangbusters when she played Oksana Baiul at fifteen in a TV movies. She then appeared in a series of well received independent films including Ripe, Snow White; A Tale of Terror before appearing on Homicide (she used the name Monica Kenna) She then reached a level of coolness by playing the doomed Abby Morgan on the second season of Dawson Creek, before starring in First Daughter and Orange County. Her biggest role was in Judd Apatow's Undeclared, which while not as cult as Freaks and Geeks was nearly as good. She later played Kristen in the 2004 and 2005 seasons of Entourage. After that her career began to slow though she would appear in Private Practice and do voice work in Beavis and Butthead. She's acted only sporadically since then but is currently making something of a return with four projects in development in the years to come.

 

 

 

How A Strike Within In A Strike Lays Bare The False Progressive Values of Hollywood In The Starkest Sense Yet

 

 

Those of you who are long time readers of my column might be aware that in July of 2023 I began a series of articles called the Disruption Series in response to what was quickly becoming the longest work stoppage in Hollywood industry: the joint strike held by the WGA and SAG-AFTRA.

These articles weren't directly political – I still wasn't comfortable writing about politics in anything but in an indirect fashion back then – but in hindsight they were for me the first step that caused me to essentially begin to push back hard again the most well-known left-leaning people in America. Most of my concern was about the health of the industry that was the bread and butter of my columns and whose work I still worship immensely. I knew that Hollywood was still struggling to recover after the pandemic, that streaming was starting to undermine sources of entertainment such as network and cable severely and that increasingly networks were beginning to merge with studios and streaming services in order they could survive financially. This was hardly the time to destabilize the industry further with a labor stoppage.

And yet for the summer and well into the fall that's what both the WGA and SAG-AFTRA chose to do. In doing so they brought out all of the worst aspects of Hollywood's personalities and perhaps for the clearest time yet demonstrated to outsiders that for all of their so-called beliefs in liberal values and equality, at the end of  the day that stopped at their own pocketbook. For all the cosplaying they did as working stiffs on picket lines, what they really were doing was portraying themselves as John Galts. In their minds they were the job creators and the corporations needed to bow before them and pay them what they believed they were worth. That the overwhelming majority were already multimillionaires was irrelevant, that the industry might not have any money to pay them from streaming was not even considered. Their logic demonstrated that they couldn't understand economics at even a first grade level; in their minds Tim Cook and Jeff Bezos were billionaires, so they must be hiding the royalties from Black Bird and Marvelous Mrs. Maisel from all of the hardworking people in Hollywood. The fact that many streaming services were beginning to collapse because there was no money – Netflix would reveal it had been lying about its ratings during this period and would have to start both raising subscriptions and adding commercials to cover it – never enters their minds at all. And they certainly didn't care how they were affected the lives of all the other people who worked in Hollywood – caterers, gaffers, set designers and everything else in the industry – who weren't like Billy Porter and didn't have the benefit of a second house to sell to cover expenses.

What's all the more galling is that eventually both the WGA and SAG-AFTRA had to come back an accept a deal that was, for all intents and purposes, not much better than the one the DGA had accepted a month before both industries went on strike. Hollywood has gone out of its way to polish the turd for its members and for the audiences they have but I will be damned if I can see what they actually gained. A writer for Smash said she got a 6 cent royalty check from Hulu and Mandy Moore said she got one for 11 cents for This Is Us. The streamers were never underpaying the talent; there was no money there to give.

If it anything the industry is still recovering from the strike across the board and we continue to see economic cutbacks everywhere. Hollywood, to be clear, sees no correlation between their actions and these increasingly bad times for the industry, if anything they've become more arrogant in their outrage towards the corporate oligarchs in the aftermath of the 2024 election. What this has done, increasingly, is make them sound even more tone deaf and out of touch then they were during the strike as well as more ungrateful to the industry. The only lesson they've learned is that they want to protect their own finances and can't bear to lose even more money. So when time came to negotiate contracts for both the WGA and SAG-AFTRA earlier this year there was none of the drama or tension as before: all sides agreed quietly and with little reaction.

What almost nobody mentioned, except in some journals during the industry is that there was a labor stoppage going on involving one of the Hollywood unions that was vital to the strike of 2023 and yet no one in any part of the industry wanted to talk about it. The biggest reason is that it would lay bare just how selfish and ultimately hypocritical the industry in a way that none of their tone-deaf performative activism ever could.

On February 17^th the staff union connected with the WGA West, which is located in LA, went out on a picket line demanding better wages and 'just cause protection'. The people who were essential to so many aspects of the WGA West in LA – no doubt playing a vital role in so much the work during the 2021 strike – are not rich people. They have a salary floor of $43,000 which in California is horrible. They wanted a work increase wage somewhere between 15-20 percent they settled for four. They also wanted their salary floor increased to $57,000, longevity increases for those who had worked at the union for five, ten or fifteen years. They also wanted a labor-management committee and contractor protections.

The picket line became a staple outside the headquarters on Fairfax Avenue and 3^rd Street. To say this was awkward for the WGA is putting it mildly because they were trying to negotiate with the studios for a better deal for themselves. Now you'd think in an industry that deals both with optics and trying to deal with negotiations they'd want to put forth a model of being good management as well of progressivism.

Instead they have been accused of terminating the employing of a union organizer and supporters, bargaining the contract in bad faith, many staffers alleging they were stripped of their health insurance and illegal surveillance of their employees. Indeed showing no sense of optics at one point representatives of the WGA attempted to enter a build for film and TV bargaining while they're protestors were present. The fact that this took place just three years after accusing corporations of being bad bosses shows a kind of bizarre lack of self-awareness. Writers have actually called this strike 'embarrassing' and says this 'degrades the goodwill we won during our strike'.

To be clear these writers mean the goodwill they got with the corporate interests, not the people who don't have jobs in Hollywood that isn't related to talent. They made it clear multiple times during the strike they couldn't give a damn. The most obvious example came when Drew Barrymore began her talk show because she wanted to provide an income for the people who worked under her and were starting to undergo financial strain due to loss of income. Everyone would immediate vilify Barrymore on social media, eventually causing her to back down. This was the clearest example to that point (there were far more to come, unfortunately) about the basic selfishness of the industry and their lack of compassion when it came to  so many of the values they preached.

Much of this took place during the height of award season and while A-List talent was telling ICE to F--- itself, screaming at a man with Tourette's for being a racist and accusing the men's hockey team of being sexist, there was no support among these speakers for the people striking in LA. In an irony the writers themselves couldn't script the WGA canceled its LA awards ceremony so that the dues paying members wouldn't have to cross a picket line – and more importantly not get involved in what would have been awkward conversation with the media about this. They held the ceremony in New York where every winner would celebrate themselves away from the ugliness of labor strikes. To be sure Hollywood had no problem cancelling every awards show in the fall of 2023 until the strikes involving them were resolved, something that I'm very sure no one wanted to talk about.

This deal, I should add is, the exact same kind of scale that was arranged with WGA East which settled in February of 2026, right about the time WGA West was rejecting it. The deal they have is prohibitive and still needs to be voted on by the rank and file but I have little doubt it will be approved.

My sympathy is far greater for the staff members at WGA West that it ever could be for those who pay dues. These people were vital to their industry in a subtler and more important way and clearly make far less then the talent involved. It also shows the very real contrast for what the writers and actors claimed they were doing. They were cosplaying at being working stiffs; these people actually were – and they couldn't be bothered to even wear a pin in solidarity. I guess they were too busy make it clear that no one was illegal on stolen land to help people who were having trouble paying rent.

If Fox News and right-wing media hasn't been paying some attention to this story and using it as part of their nightly broadcast for the last three months then they're clearly not as good at their job as so many people have thought they were for this time. To be sure much of Hollywood's actual behavior and the left overall has more than provided multiple examples of their greatest hypocrisies possible and considering that the GOP doesn't have the best relationship with organized labor these days this would probably cause backlash on them from the left who will gladly point out right-wing hypocrisy to cover their own any day of the week.

Yet this 'strike within a strike' could not be a clearer example in microcosm of so many of the hypocrisies within Hollywood's progressivism, not the least the way they have recent decided that corporations are villains and rich people are the enemy. That Sarah Paulson, while this strike was still going on, chose to spend $100,000 for an invitation to the Met Gala, no doubt hundreds of thousands on a costume to show she was against the one percent ,while so many of the people who had played a role in her continued prosperity struggled for a working wage and health insurance, is perhaps the most tone-deaf part of an excruciating level of performative behavior.

Millionaire actors have been jetting around the world protesting film festivals, attending awards shows while wearing pins protesting the administration, calling their corporations out for fascism, using the public airwaves to rail against all the evils Republicans are doing to the average American all while a picket line is going on outside negotiations to make sure they get more millions for themselves. This is the kind of behavior you'd expect on Succession or at The White Lotus and somehow the people who create and star in it are as blind to their foolishness as anyone at Waystar Royco.

It is bad enough that Hollywood has basically decided that terms like 'limousine liberal' are no longer slurs but badges of honor that they were like the pins on their awards shows. That at the end of the day they are just selfish when it comes to feeding off the fruits of the labors and have no more problem ignoring the working stiff then the corporate bosses that are on the sides of conservatives is the biggest sign yet of their own hypocrisies. The WGA West strike and how Hollywood spent the height of awards season pretending not to see the little people who put them where they were should be the clearest reason yet for why anyone who still thinks it is important for a celebrity to 'share the values that you do' is nearly as clueless as the celebrities themselves.

Celebrities are a bunch of rich entertainers who are very much part of the one percent themselves. They're performers who can read a line of virtue signaling as well as any line of dialogue. They are as selfish as the MAGA politicians they rail against as now being in line with the values of the 'average American.' To be clear they haven't been an 'average American' for a very long time. Average Americans don't go to film festivals, have thousands of cameras pointed on their every move, get royalty checks from movies they made twelve years ago that you didn't see, win shiny awards that are gold plated or get paid a million dollars for appearing in a coffee commercial. So why should you believe them when they say that they think that the corporations are exploiting the average person? They've made a lot of money because of these corporations and will do everything they can to get more money from them.

But speak up for the people who help them make their millions and who need health insurance and money for rent? Quiet, we're too busy in an awards show surrounded by our fellow millionaires screaming at the policies of another group of millionaires about how the working people in states hundreds of miles away are suffering.

To be very clear I'm not going to stop watching their movies and TV shows any time soon; I drank that Kool-Aid long ago and I can still separate the artist from the art. Just try to remember that these actors can't separate time from their busy schedules to support the people who helped them get their 6 cent checks from Amazon next time you ask if "they share your values"

They can afford to and they can afford not to. I can't say the same for those who worked at WGA West – and those are the ones you should feel for.

 

Back to the Island: Life, Jeremy Bentham and The Polar Bears: How Lost Explained Mysteries When We Weren't Looking

 

 

One of the reasons I'm such a fan of Back to the Island is because St. James and Murray are exactly like me in a key respect: they are both critics and fans. The latter comes into play because (like me) they've clearly rewatched Lost several times before they wrote this book. (For the record I'm at seven, which means its well past time I rewatch it again.) Like me they seem to enjoy rewatching the show in order to find out details that we missed the first (or the fourth, or the twelfth, or the hundredth) time around.

The reason I know this is because when I read their book the first time I realize Emily and Noel make me look like a piker. They've picked up on details about Lost that I missed, perhaps because I haven't been looking for them. Much of it has to do with the symmetry that the writers so subtly that the fan probably doesn't notice, within individual episodes, within the season or even within the series as a whole. Once you see them, you're like any good fan wondering: "How the heck did I miss that?"

And the reason was something that rarely gets discussed in television and certainly not in shows like Lost: the writers were very subtle at their jobs: "…the show's dedication to answering its mysteries only insofar as the characters care about them always kept it on the right track." That may have left the fans somewhat disgruntled but it also is the main reason why Lost is a masterpiece in a way so many of its often failed successors were not. Darlton knew that at the end of the day the long-time viewer of Lost – and I was one of them  - cared less about having everything neatly checked off but far more about what happened to the characters as the show progressed.

Perhaps the best way to illustrate this is with an episode I mentioned in passing in an earlier article where this worked the best: 'The Life And Death of Jeremy Bentham." This episode we airs at the exactly halfway point of Season 5 is one of the highpoints not just of the season but the entire series. In 2009 Entertainment weekly ranked it as one of the top 10 episodes on TV that year and I've always agreed with them.

Let me explain why it’s a masterpiece: 17 year spoiler warnings ahead

At the end of Season 3 we saw that Jack had read an obituary and attended a funeral of someone that he and Kate both knew whose death shook him profoundly, but not her. By the end of Season 4 we're told that 'Jeremy Bentham' was the person in the obituary, that he came to see five members of the Oceanic 6 as well as Walt and told them that they needed to go back to the island. In the final shot of Season 4, after Ben has told Jack that they all have to go back to the island he says: "We're going to have to bring him, too." Finally we see who's in the coffin – and its Locke.

After the viewer spent the next eight months getting their jaws off the floor we spent the first half of Season 5 watching the Oceanic 6 being assembled slowly and very reluctantly to get on Ajira 316. Ben had taken possession of the coffin and made it very clear to one of his followers that "if they don't bring him on the plane, all of this will be for nothing." We learn as the season unfolded that John killed himself but every time Ben talked about it, we knew he was keeping secrets. This became clear when Ben gave Sun Jin's wedding ring to tell her that Jin was still alive. Ben had just been caught in a lie about never seeing Locke when he came back and the viewer had just learned that Locke never went to see Sun because he was keeping a promise to Jin that he would not bring Sun back to the island. This was the viewer's biggest hint that Locke didn't commit suicide.

During the flashes that took place on the island in the first several episodes we watched as John was told by Richard (at some indeterminate time in the future) that the Oceanic 6 had all made it back to civilization and that Locke was going to have to bring them back. Asked how he was supposed to do that Richard told him: "You're going to have to die." As the flashes continued Locke was clearly trying to find out how he would leave the island and how to convince them to come back. By the time we reach 'This Place Is Death' Locke manages to convince everyone that they need to go to the Orchid in order to stop the flashes. At this point it's becoming clear that every time the island skips in time, it's starting to cause the castaways to come unstuck in time and if they don't stop the time-jumping they will all die horribly. Charlotte begins to succumb the quickest of those who are still in Locke's party – by this point it's down to Jin, Sawyer, Juliet, Miles, Dan and Charlotte – but they're all starting to suffer nosebleeds and headaches.

Locke ends up trying to climb down a well where we see a wheel that we've seen before. At the end of Season 4, it was frozen in ice and Ben ended up going down that path and moving the island because Jacob said it was the only way to save it. Ben had told John that the person who moves it can never come back.

Locke has broken his leg fallen (we actually see his exposed shinbone) and while he is in pain a man he's seen before – 'Christian Shephard' – tells John he's here to see him the rest of the way. He has to gather all his people and go to see Eloise Hawking. Locke tells Christian that Richard said he would have to die. Christian says: "That why they call it a sacrifice."

Locke then manages to get the wheel right on its axis and then turns it. As he does 'Christian' shouts: "Say hello to my son!" Locke screams "Who's your son?" (Poor Locke. No one tells him anything.) Locke's actions, as we learn have stopped the island from skipping through time and its landed the remaining survivors in the time of the Dharma Initiative. As Juliet realizes "We're already saved." I've dealt with the ramifications before but now that I've done that lead up its time to get to Jeremy Bentham.

The episode opens in the aftermath of Ajira 316 ending up on the island. Ilana, one of the passengers tells Caesar that they found someone who no one remembers for the plane.  We see a man in  a blanket who tells us "My name is John Locke."

It's an indication of the kind of series Lost was that what should have been the most stunning event in series history to that point was essentially brushed aside by most fans, including myself. The writers had spent so much time laying the groundwork for the belief that the whole reason they were bringing the body of Locke back to the island was for this very purpose. I basically remember seeing this episode in 2009 and essentially saying: "Took long enough."

The reason for Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham's power becomes more incredible every time you rewatch it (I won't spoil that part of it in this article) but even if you belief that death was just an inconvenience for Locke, it's still an incredible episode that Cuse and Lindelof have created.

For one thing the episode is essentially a giant flashback which tells us exactly what happened to Locke from the moment he turned the wheel until he ended up dying. It's a globe spanning journey that takes us across multiple continents, across America, before ending in a dirty hotel room in Los Angeles. It lays the groundwork of the epic struggle between Ben and Widmore which seems to be (as the viewer believes) at the center of Lost. It tells us how Locke ended up using the name Jeremy Bentham – and in keeping with the show its another in-joke for all of us who spent months wondering why Locke chose that name. He didn't. Widmore did. Jeremy Bentham is a British philosopher like Locke. Widmore says: "Your parents had a sense of humor when they named you, why can't I?"

And most impressively it is one of the greatest showcases for Terry O'Quinn as John Locke, who by the time Season 6 debuted had been named by Entertainment Weekly as one of the 100 greatest fictional characters of all time, along with such classic TV characters as Tony Soprano, Vic Mackey, Dexter Morgan, Don Draper and Patty Hewes, all among the greatest characters of TV's golden age.

This is how St. James describes him:

Across the run of Lost to this point, Locke has been a figure with an almost tyrannical sense of purpose. He, alone, can intuit what the island wants and he, alone, can make sure that will is carried out. That quality makes him an antagonist, a necessary evil, a messianic figure, a survivor, and a charismatic enigma at various points, and at times, he's been all five at once. He is perhaps the single most fleshed-out, well-developed character in this show and Terry O'Quinnis remarkable at playing every little micro expression that might plausibly flutter across Locke's face.

St. James this episode answers a character question: "Who is John Locke, deep down?" And the answer isn't particularly flattering: he's something of a dupe."

This would be a very reductive analysis of John, were it not for the fact that O'Quinn himself felt as much him as the series progressed. The show will actually twist the knife when it reveals Locke's last thought as he died was: "I don't understand." And it’s the saddest thing we've ever heard.

The show has spent four and a half seasons basically establishing that Locke is a man who always believes the wrong people, who always makes bad choices, who has endured the kind of family life that is the worst of any character and who ended up in a wheelchair because of his father. We saw in his last episode he was watched throughout his life by the forces of the island and always walked away from it and ironically when he was paralyzed ending up on the path that put him on it.

And this episode basically tells us Locke's story in microcosm. He loses the island when he's booted off it. His leg is broken so he is put in a wheelchair, which by this point we know is his weakness, he travels which means he's literary being carried around by an agent of the enemy and he fails to tell each of the castaways to return. Furthermore each of them treats him with the kind of behavior that demeans his always fragile self-worth: Sayid says he must have nothing to come back to, Kate says he never loved anyone, Hurley, when he thinks he's dead just says: "No biggie" as if he couldn't care less. And Jack, who by this point has falling into drinking and drugs and is seeing visions of his father tells John that he's a tired, useless old man. His last words were: "We were never important."

St. James writes that his purpose has been co-opted more bloodthirsty men but its worse than that. When we see him in the hotel room as he prepares to hang himself as Nikki Stafford writes: his face shows the weight of all these failures.

In Season 2 Locke delivered a quietly devastating sentence in only three words: standing amidst a hatch that was about to explode, he simply says 'I was wrong'. And in those three words, he sums up every important decision he's made in his life. Now, in a quiet room, the chaos is all happening inside Locke, and he looks at Ben, with the red cord around his neck and says: 'I'm a failure'. Both of these brief sentences are delivered with a conviction and absoluteness that Locke doesn't show at any other time. These are the only times that believes what he's saying one hundred percent.

And just to make it all the more worse Ben then spends the next two minutes convincing Locke how important he is and that he is a success to talk him off that ledge and get the rope off around his neck. And then the moment he learns the information John has he immediately strangles Locke with the very cord he was going to use to kill himself moments earlier. Locke has been manipulated from having any choices in his life, and now he doesn't even get to choose how he dies.

This is one of the most tragic deaths in the entire show and even if you assume that John has survived it, it doesn't make this moment any less painful. (On rewatches, of course, it becomes all the more agonizing.) Which is why I surprised in her review of this episode St. James spends so much time talking about something I kept missing all this time: This episode explains the polar bears.

To be clear it's been telling us for a while but because it never said, "This is why polar bears are on the island', the idiot fanbase kept asking the question. (And I'm sorry Nikki, this includes you: You had it as unanswered question in Season Five and I'm pretty sure you didn't get it until the DVD's came out. No judgment, I made the same mistake.)

We learned as early as 'A Tale in Two Cities' that the Dharma Initiative brought the polar bears to the island. That's what the cages Sawyer and Kate were being kept in. They had to solve puzzles to receive their daily fish biscuit.

Now in Season 4 finale, we learned beneath the island is the Frozen Donkey Wheel that allows the island to move in space and time when turned. Dharma found out about it (that's confirmed in the opening scene of Season 5). They must have figured it out and realized that they needed an animal that could survive the cold.

Why not a human being? Well, pushing the wheel is a one-way ticket off the island. The episode told us as much in Charlotte's flashback in Confirmed Dead. She goes to the Tunisian desert where the skeleton of a polar bear has been found with a collar from Dharam on it.

Now in The Shape of Things to Come we saw Ben end up in Tunisia wearing a parka. Five episodes later we see how he got there (this is how Lost works) when he moved the wheel.

At the start of the episode the final puzzle piece is filled in as Locke after moving the wheel ends up in the exact same location as both the polar bear skeleton and Ben. Charles Widmore makes this point explicit to the viewer (but, critically, not to Locke) when he tells him "that's the exit'. By this point we know Widmore once lived on the island and was exiled and has been monitoring this area for awhile for this very reason. We knew that because the first time Ben showed up two Bedouins appeared suddenly and seemed mystified as to how he arrived – but they were heavily armed. When Locke is brought to Widmore, similar Bedouins do the same thing.

St James explained all of this and then says:

The thing is: Nobody ever sits down and says any of this within the show itself. All the puzzle pieces existed within the show, but they were spread out across three seasons of television from the initial reveal of those polar bear cages to the final moment of Locke crash-landing in the desert. What's more, if you didn't remember that, say, Charlotte found the polar bear skeleton in Season Four, you'd be unlikely to conclude 'Oh, hey, Locke landed in that same place. I wonder if the polar bears were being used to move the island?" "You'd just think weird shit was happening for its own sake.

To which I will proudly say: "Guilty."

Lost has always had a reputation long after it ended of never answering its fans questions. To be clear as Lostipedia indicates and St. James points out, the number of mysteries involving Lost is surprisingly small and mostly has to do with  character motivation. One could make the argument its because the writers rarely explicitly spelled things out.

I actually think it has more to do with the fanbase's expectations being so high that answers were rarely satisfactory when that happened. We saw examples of this played out in Season 6 most notably when we finally learned what the whispers were all about. Hurley and Michael explained it to the viewer a few episodes before the end, all but spelling it out. And the fans were somehow more upset because to them the solution was something they'd hypothesized on years ago.

I believe the reason this never bothered me came in large part because of my experience as a fan of The X-Files. As I've written in its own series of articles the show kept building new layers to its mythology that often disregarded the previous ones to the point that it was completely incoherent by the time we reached the series finale. Chris Carter then decided to make the revelation of the mythology the center of the series finale and it was among the most excruciating two hours of TV I've ever watched in my life. It wasn't just that all they were doing was restating the mytharc with no purpose to what was happening in the present, it was that they weren't explaining how it all fit together. It made the viewer wonder over and over: "How many years have I wasted trying to understand this crap?" I certainly feel that way when I run across 'The Truth' in reruns.

It would be glib to state The X-Files is a masterpiece despite the fact it has an incoherent mythology and Lost is one because it has a coherent one. To be sure Lost's basic backstory is more comprehensible then The X-Files but there are times even in the second half where you can see that the writers are making at least some of it up as they go. But the reason Lost works is that always remember that the characters came first and that the solutions to the puzzles were only as important as they affected the characters. It wasn't a necessity to enjoy Lost if you could figure out the mysteries, merely a bonus.

And that's going to be true the next time I rewatch Lost. (I really have to get around to that, it's been nearly two whole years.) Do I need to know that Jeremy Bentham finally explains why there were polar bears on the island to enjoy it more? No. Will I appreciate the episode more knowing it? Honestly, no. To paraphrase Locke at the start of the series: I don't need to have a reason to know that certain TV shows like Lost are masterpieces. Not everything needs an explanation to be a classic.

 

 

This is Jeopardy, Do Superchampions Get Tired? Conclusion

 

 

In the last five years 11 players have reached super-champion status winning 11 games or more. Amy Schneider and Matt Amodio, numbers 2 and 3 in consecutive games won respectively gave no real sign that they were running on empty at any point prior to their defeats. For Matt he finally ran into a super-champion of his own; for Amy Rhone Talsma played just well enough to beat her.

So let's look at the others.

 

Jonathan Fisher, 11 Wins, 2021

With Jonathan its very difficult to tell whether exhaustion played a role in his defeat as in so many of his games he either was playing just well enough to win or his opponents were just as good as him. On his eleventh game Jonathan managed 27 correct responses and three incorrect ones but two of those were Daily Doubles he missed. When he finally lost to Nancy Donehower he got 21 correct responses but six incorrect ones.

I can't say one way or the other about Jonathan.

 

Mattea Roach, 23 wins, 2022

In Mattea's case I do think they were starting to flag a little by the end. On their 22^nd win Mattea went into Final Jeopardy well behind Sarh Snider. But somehow Sarah hadn't seen Citizen Kane and Mattea lived to fight another day.

To be clear Mattea was far better the next day: their Coryat score at the end of Double Jeopardy was 17,800 to Danielle Maurer's 6000 and Betsy Hobbs 7600. It was the Daily Double Danielle got late in Final Jeopardy running away from it that stopped it from being a runaway. That said Mattea only got one correct response the entire second half of the Double Jeopardy round so its clear they were flagging. That in the fact the clue happened to relate to Georgia where Danielle was from was the final nail in Mattea's streak.

Throw in that Mattea was never quite as dominant as the other super-champions ahead of them on that list and I think they were running on fumes by the end of it.

 

Ryan Long, 16 wins, 2022

Ryan is hard to say because he struggled a lot in his wins: lot of incorrect responses on Daily Doubles and overall as well quite a few incorrect Final Jeopardys even when he didn't have runaways.  Aaron Gulyas nearly beat him in his 11^th appearance.

The biggest sign he might have been fatigued, however, was in his fourteenth game when he played against  Meagan Morrow. He got 22 correct responses and six incorrect ones; Megan got 16 correct and only one wrong. The two of them were tied in Coryat score but because of the number of incorrect responses Meagan was ahead going into Final Jeopardy. All three players were stumped  by it and Ryan bet slightly less then Meagan to hold on for win number 14.

The next day Ryan faced off against Tom Philipose and it was the same story. Ryan got 28 correct responses and 1 incorrect one; Tom got 20 correct and none wrong. Ryan finished slightly ahead in Double Jeopardy and it was another triple stumper which preserved his streak

So its pretty clear even though it appeared Ryan was playing well he was starting to flag by the time he reached his seventeenth appearance. And on that day not only did he play poorly Eric Ahasic was just too good for him to overcome.

 

Cris Panullo, 21 Games, 2022

Until Jamie Ding came along this past few months Cris Panullo had been fifth all-time in winnings in a players original run, winning more money in 21 games then Mattea did in 23 and arguably a better player then Ken Jennings to that point in Ken's original run. The only argument that Cris was slowing down was that he went from 34 correct responses in his 20^th victory to 'only' 26 in his 21^st. And he managed 27 correct responses in his 22^nd appearance.

The difference was the Daily Doubles. Cris got one wrong in Double Jeopardy that cost him $6600; his opponent Andy Tirrell got one right that gave him $3700. That caused 8 lead changes late in Double Jeopardy and Cris ended up retaking it with his last two clues.

That said the Coryat score tells a different story. Cris would had $19,000 to Andy's $9000. It's hard to argue Cris was losing steam in his last appearance.

 

Ray LaLonde, 13 Games, 2022-2023

 

Ray was one of the best Jeopardy champions but not quite as dominant as so many of those on this list. He had earn many of his wins because his opponents were just that good. That said he was probably starting to miss a step in his last few wins because luck was a big factor.

In his 11^th game Ray, Emily Kawaler and Rachel Cohen were basically dead even all the way through. Emily was $1000 ahead of him in Final Jeopardy and she was the only one to respond incorrectly. Win 12 against Isaac Rabbani and Kristen Jacobsen was even harder and this time he had to respond correctly in Final Jeopardy to win. And playing Denise Carlon in the first game of 2023 he was lucky to pull of a win: Denise was ahead of him at the end of Double Jeopardy and Ray had only a $100 margin at the end of Double Jeopardy after getting both Daily Doubles wrong. That $100 margin got him his thirteenth win.

In his final appearance against Lloyd Sy and Claire Theoret he was clearly running on empty: while he got 22 correct responses, he also got 6 incorrect ones. And that last one for $400 cost him the lead going into Final Jeopardy and therefore his run ended.

As we now know Ray has suffered from physical ailments that caused him to be seated in later appearances on Jeopardy. While I can't rule out that wasn't a factor, he was still playing at a superb level. But his opponents were just as good as him and eventually it cost him.

 

 

Adriana Harmeyer, 15 Games, 2024

Adriana is an interesting case study. While she was a superb player it must be admitted that many of her victories were as much due to her opponents getting incorrect responses – particularly on Daily Doubles – as much as her playing well (and getting Daily Doubles correct). In more than a few games in her original runs her opponents were playing far better than she was throughout the game and it was only through their own errors that she continued to win. In her fifteenth appearance, for example, Colleen Matthews played better than her and finished with a higher Coryat score. But because she got both Daily Doubles incorrect Adriana was in the lead going into Final Jeopardy and as a result won.

But when the crash came, it came fast. And it came in Double Jeopardy against Drew Basile and Tekla Sauter she was once as high as $13,700. Then the last three responses she gave in Double Jeopardy were incorrect and Tekla and Drew completely outplayed her. She became the first super-champion to lose in a runaway victory as Drew Basile began his own impressive run.

It's hard to know if Adriana ran out of steam or if she just ran into a better player: Drew managed the third most games and money won in the 2025 TOC lineup. She couldn't outplay or outlast him.

 

Scott Riccardi, 16 Games, 2025

In Scott's case there is no evidence fatigue was setting in by the end of his run. On the contrary all statistical evidence proves that he was actually getting stronger with each victory in his last week. This was true even in his final appearance: he managed to get 29 correct responses and didn't get a single clue wrong until Final Jeopardy. Jonathan Hugendubler's victory is in part because he got to both Daily Doubles in Double Jeopardy ahead of Scott which insured Scott wouldn't have a runaway – and set up the conditions for his spectacular upset.

 

Harrison Whitaker, 14 Games, 2025

In Harrison's case its hard to know. He managed six consecutive runaway victories prior to his fifteenth appearance and the only clue he got incorrect was the Daily Double in that game. The evidence is that he was giving few correct responses for a while: 30 in his thirteenth game, 28 in his fourteenth, 25 in his fifteenth.

The other evidence is that his opponents were starting to play better and find Daily Doubles ahead of him. That was true for Libby Jones and Brendan Thomas in his last game and Wilder Seitz in his fourteenth. Wilder got to all three in the latter game but critically got 2 wrong. Had he gotten one of them correct he might have been able to end his streak that day.

There's some evidence but its hard to say for sure.

 

Jamie Ding, 31 Games, 2026

In Jamie's case there does seem to be some clear evidence he was starting to run on fumes in that final week. The clearest evidence came in what was his thirtieth win in which Patrick Nolan was ahead of him late in the Double Jeopardy round. In that game he only got 21 correct responses to Patrick's 19 and he had to bet everything on a Daily Double in Double Jeopardy to assure he was ahead in Final Jeopardy – narrowly.

The best evidence is, of course, how thoroughly Greg Shahade beat him in his final appearance. Jamie didn't find any Daily Doubles, got eighteen correct but also three incorrect while Greg found all three to runaway with the game by the end of Double Jeopardy. Greg is only the second Jeopardy super-champion after Adriana Harmeyer to lose his title by being on the other side of a runaway which is the clearest sign of his exhaustion.

 

Conclusion

 

In the case of Cris Panullo and Scott Riccardi, there is no sign fatigue played a factor in their defeats. In the case of Mattea Roach, Ryan Long, Ray Lalonde, Adriana Harmeyer and Jamie Ding the record shows fatigue clearly paid some factor in their losses. There isn't enough evidence in the cases of Jonathan Fisher or Harrison Whitaker for me to state definitively.

Overall of the 20 super-champions in nine cases there would appear to be statistical evidence fatigue played a role in their defeat. In eight there's no direct statistical evidence of it and in three I just can't tell way or the other.

In addition we have to consider the factor of who they lost to as being a role. Five of the super-champions here were beaten by players who would ascend to the Tournament of Champions in their own right. Emma Boettcher, Jonathan Fisher (when he beat Matt Amodio) Eric Ahasic and Drew Basile all ended up getting to the TOC and Greg Shahade almost certainly will be invited back.  Considering that Victoria Groce has subsequently been a finalist in the last two Jeopardy Masters her defeat of David Madden in 2005 would indicate she was a better player than just her one victory in her original appearance.

That's being trying to sound academic. Now I'll be a human being again.

I think there are a lot of factors for long term success on Jeopardy and that to quote Yogi Berra 90 percent of the game is mental. Is the other half physical as that sage put it? No but it has to be a factor the longer the streak goes.

And waiting for every Jeopardy champion is the knowledge that someday, there's going to be someone who is better than you. It may be a great player like Drew Basile or just someone like Nancy Zerg for whom victory is as much a shock to them as it is everyone in the studio or watching at home.

So remember whenever the next super-champion comes along they are only human. At some point they'll be slower on the buzzer or miss a Daily Double that you knew at home because the fatigue on the body will momentarily overcome their beautiful minds. And remember this is Jeopardy. You'll be seeing them again sooner then you think and they'll get a chance to prove how bright they are.