Re:Series 2 - Episode 13
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This episode made the weekly top 10 on Challenge + 1:
1 CLASSIC WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE (TUE 2200) 44,000
2 CLASSIC WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE (MON 2200) 32,000
3 PRICE IS RIGHT (FRI 1330) 23,000
4 FAMILY FORTUNES (SUN 1730) 20,000
5 DEAL OR NO DEAL (MON 0702) 20,000
6 TOTAL WIPEOUT USA (WED 1901) 20,000
7 TNA IMPACT (SUN 2203) 19,000
8 KNIGHTMARE (FRI 2329) 18,000
9 NOEL'S ARE YOU SMARTER THAN A 10 YEAR OLD? (MON 0830) 18,000
10 CLASSIC WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE (WED 2200) 18,000
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Memorable episode, with another winning team. Yay!
In the clue room there was a powerful feeling of deja-vu. Julian nearly walked straight into the cavernwight by the left-hand door. In episode 3, team 3 did exactly the same thing.
Thankfully there was no repetition of team 3 in the medusa's room tho.
Where was the stone statue of Christopher? Has it been stolen?
Liked the way Treguard had them take turns guiding Julian for a few seconds each in that room.
Comfortably made it thru the last few rooms, altho their directional movement was a bit slow. Nice moment when they completed their quest.
It's a shame that Julian's team have been slated so much. They were a very intelligent team and it's not their fault that the quest they were set was less exciting than some.
One final comment on this team: Becca's hat looked really cool.
Moving on and this time it truly was a case of "after the lord mayor's show". Team 11 didn't exactly set the dungeon alight. They negotiated a bomb room far more calmly than most teams, but after that it nosedived. They only scored 1/3 against a predictably grouchy Igneous, then misread the label on the potion bottle as "poison"....
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In my opinion, Julian's team are the least impressive winners of Knightmare. It's a disgrace that they go down as more successful than Leo or Martin in the history books!
What strikes me about this wining team was the lack of riddles compared to many other teams. Several of the riddles I haven't known the answer too, but this lot gained help from Merlin and got past the dragon without having to do anything other than some basic directing. Leo's team in series 3 had a horrid riddle in level 3 which they got wrong and sealed their fate. It seems that the probability of winning is inversely proportional to the nomber of riddles a team gets on a quest, as it seems to be most of the deaths are from failing to earn magic or useful information.
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Neither winning team in series 2 faced any questions in level 3 and there were some suggestions that it had not been tough enough.
In series 3 the single difficult make-or-break question in level 3 raised the bar, but proved too much for both teams who reached that point.
It must have been very tricky for the producers to find the optimum level of difficulty, especially as there were teams aged anywhere from 11 to 16.
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There is definitely significant bias going on, the winning teams have been given an easier ride, although to be fair to them, they still had to avoid blunders. There is a difference between judging the show watching it for the first time as a child and watching it now over 30 years later. It would be interesting to find out if there had been attempts to minimise bias i.e. make quests as level as possible in difficulty, so that a team which gets everything right is almost certain to win, and a team that makes a mistake has a chance to win if they correctly guess the right clue room objects, would it make great TV? Does the attraction of professional sport come from admiring the skill of the competitors, or the uncertainty of the winner due to the luck factor?
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Is it bias, or is it just imperfect balance?
To me, bias implies a wilful desire. An imperfect balance, on the other hand, could simply arise because it's fundamentally very difficult to say (especially in advance) whether two quests are equally hard. Add the fact that the quests had a predetermined path to the equation and a badly performing team could win through sheer luck. That doesn't mean there's a bias though (to my mind, anyway).
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Is it bias, or is it just imperfect balance?
To me, bias implies a wilful desire. An imperfect balance, on the other hand, could simply arise because it's fundamentally very difficult to say (especially in advance) whether two quests are equally hard. Add the fact that the quests had a predetermined path to the equation and a badly performing team could win through sheer luck. That doesn't mean there's a bias though (to my mind, anyway).
The bias as I see it comes from a combination of the number of riddles and how many "hurry up" dangers they encounter. It seems to me that a lot of teams fail from getting an insufficient number of riddles correct, and in doing so fail to obtain either a useful clue or magic. In the former case, they can still succeed with luck, in the latter case they have no chance. It comes across as the producers deciding they want a team to win after a sequence of losses and reduce the riddle solving to make a winning team more likely, and maybe more likely to be given the benefit of the doubt with close encounters with deadly threats (e.g. virtually walking into a cavernwrite but surviving because it appears to be sleepwalking).
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I should add the other bias is the number and usefulness of hints teams receive. I've seen one or two hints given out that pretty much tells them the answer, whereas in other situations a team has had only subtle hints in which they still need to think to use it.
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