Some of Them Did Deserve A Second Chance, Part 2: Game 2 of The First Final Analysis

 

Well the second part of the finals of Week One of the Second Chance Tournament was somewhat anticlimactic. But honestly I’ve watched so many Jeopardy tournaments by this point in my life that I’m well aware that’s a feature more than it is a bug. And just because the winner was pretty clear by the end of Double Jeopardy doesn’t mean it hasn’t been any less fun or that the contestants didn’t enjoy it any less.

The Jeopardy round of Game two began at roughly the same peak as the first game. All three players started hunting for the Daily Double and it was found relatively early in the round, this time by James. A blunder on an $800 clue IN THE BIBLE BOOK had cost him the lead before he found it two clues later in AMERICAN HISTORY and he was in third with $1200. This time he didn’t mess around with weird numbers in his wagers – he just bet everything.

In 1840 a U.S. judge ruled the unwilling passengers on this ship were kidnap victims, not merchandise.” It took James a moment but he came up with the Amistad and went into the lead.  It was gone a few moments later as Jessica took over with $4600 by the commercial break. There was more up and down movement the rest of the way, but the Jeopardy round ended with close scores: Jessica had $4600, James $3600 and Molly $2600.

In Double Jeopardy, the writers took a poke at the tournament itself with the first category:

Ken: Don’t take it personally, but we begin with SO YOU BLEW IT THE FIRST TIME.”

This gathered a lot of laughter from the contestants, nearly as much as the subsequent category WHY ARE MY PANTS WET? (It wasn’t scatological; it had to do with bodies of water.) But for James Fraser, that first category would prove to be prophetic/

He would find the Daily Double in it fairly early having just moved into the lead with $6800. Perhaps trying to put some distance between his opponents in a very close game, he bet everything:

“Last name of Milton, who moved to Philadelphia in 1876 to start a candy company; that one ended in bankruptcy but another did not.”

James spent a long time pondering it before guessing: “What is See?” As you might expect (or perhaps know for certain if you live on the East Coast) they were referring to Hershey. James dropped to nothing and took it as good humor as possible: “BLEW IT that TIME for $800.”

James tried his best to catch up the rest of the round, but unfortunately he could only get up to $2800 before losing $1200 in IT’S ALL ABOUT HER. By that time Jessica had pulled ahead and found the second Daily Double in that category. She didn’t have a lot of money either - $8600 – but she was more conservative than James and bet $3500. It worked out better for her:

“Subtitled Coming of Age in America, this anthropologist.” She also needed a pause before guessing: “Who is Meade?” The clue did refer to Margaret Meade, the author of Coming of Age in Samoa.  

Though we could not have known it, the game was over more or less then. Not long after James went into the red, and it took him until nearly the end of the round to get out of the hole. Molly would play well throughout the round – she was the only finalist who didn’t make a mistake in Double Jeopardy but Jessica had too big a lead. When the round ended, Jessica had $15,300 to Molly’s $10,600 and James $2000. Jessica had officially locked up her spot in the finals.

Final Jeopardy was mostly for show and its interesting to think what might have happened had Jessica been threatened by one of her challengers. Because while the category 19^TH CENTURY LITERARY CHARACTERS seemed like one players could handle, it was one tricky enough that none of them could get. (Full disclosure: I was correct, but it was more a blind guess than any certainty.)

Here's the clue for the record: “This characters from an 1859 novel symbolizes the Fates, who in mythology spin the web of life, measure it & cut it off.” You would have to know your Dickens really well to get this clue (James was the closest in that sense when he guessed: “Who is Uriah Heep from David Copperfield) but even if you knew this was referring to A Tale of Two Cities, you’d have to think back to know it referred to Madame Defarge, the revolutionary who, as Ken would put it when he revealed the correct response: “knitting by the guillotine, the symbol of death.” It would James and Molly everything they had, and Jessica would lose $10,000 but it left her with $5300, which made her two day total $33,900 enough to give her $35,000 and advance her to the Tournament of Champions.

Like all Jeopardy players, especially these ones, they were as modest as champions that have won multiple games. In the interview segment in the final game, Ken asked the kind of question Alex no doubt would have in a similar situation to all three players: What are you thinking if you make the Tournament of Champions? Molly, who in her first interview segment considered herself a dark horse, acted like the typical Jeopardy fan and said she would want to meet Amy Schneider and Mattea Roach.  James said that he was happy to be here and told him that his friends in the Navy had told him not to disgrace himself. (Despite the error on a crucial Daily Double, rest assured he did not.) And Jessica, who in a weird way, was the inspiration for this tournament, said that she was looking forward to a chance to face off against Matt Amodio and Jonathan Fisher, the latter who she was beaten by in her original appearance.

It is fitting in a sense that Jessica has earned the first slot from this tournament: it’s not just that she won the finals, it’s that she was the only finalist to win her game in a runaway. It does not, per se, make her a better player than James or Molly; either of whom could have defeated her had things gone another way, but it does illustrate in a sense that of the three, she made the most of her second chance.  She knows better than anyone that just because she’s made it to this point it may very well be as far as she goes, but this is a Tournament of Champions. Anything can happen, and usually does. Part of that will depend on what happens next week. Stay tuned to this column to find out my play-by-play of the finals next Thursday and Friday.