Thanks, Evelyn!

The team who failed to complete the Block and Tackle in this episode (we met them before and afterwards) did seem to have their dungeoneer continuing to walk forwards towards the wrong exit when the floor fell away. Had the dungeoneer sidestepped to the right they might have made it through. But I agree with what you put about the unfairness and duress caused when encountering the room for the first time!

The problem they had was the dungeoneer entered at a 45 degree angle pretty much facing the left exit, so that likely motivated them to send him forward quickly to that exit, unfortunately he had no chance of getting there before the floor fell away. It was a rotten starting position for the dungeoneer. Is this part of the artificial difficulty element, to make the same rooms vary significantly in difficulty for different teams?

A terrible question. Inclusion of the word "most" (a rather subjective term) in a true or false question is bad form too. Unless a young child is expected to have studied every dictionary ever published and know the placement of a certain word in over 50% of them.

They don't need to go to such extremes, they just need to use initiative and work out that a word which has aa at the start is going to be first in most dictionaries (we can also safely assume we are talking about English dictionaries given we are dealing with English people).

The problem is the first word in an English dictionary is "a", not "aardvark", so technically "false" was the correct answer. The question should have added the condition word with multiple letters.

I like the idea that both BUT and TRANSFORMATION would have been used at some point.

However, to this day I think it kind of sucks that the team were supposed to be psychic and know that, on this one and only occasion in the entire show, the character they were facing was not going to wait patiently for them to spell out a long word.

I think the idea was they were in level 3, and at that level you are expected to work these things out for yourself.

I agree it was a great series. I only wish one team had managed to go all the way. The two teams who failed at the stained glass window room can't have been more than three rooms from the end.

That leap of faith was so close to perfection. If only the dungeoneer hadn't taken a forward step after landing. Before the leap, one of the advisors was questioning if he was level. It would have been optimal at that point to move the dungeoneer half a side step to the right (I think he started left of centre of the path before jumping), which would have given him more margin for error on landing, and he would have likely survived.

That team seemed to be given a decent chance of success. Only one question correct in the clue room but a dagger with the clue objects, so obvious what to leave behind. In the beam room, I'm convinced he did sidestep too far to the right over a gap in the floor, but was let off. Too coincidental it cut for several seconds to the advisors at the point they were panic directing.

One obvious flaw with this team was lack of advisor coordination. All shouting at the dungeoneer when guiding in a tight situation is going to be confusing for them. What they should have done is allocate one advisor only to be responsible for the directing once they have agreed where their dungeoneer needs to go.

I've yet to see (or at least don't remember) a team who can turn the dungeoneer in directions other than right angles. There are situations where turning the dungeoneer 45 degrees is optimal, and given the dungeoneer can see the ground around their feet, they should be capable of half turns.

Why couldn't Douglas have just shut up and done what he was told?

Because then we would all have to endure watching a very poor team blunder their way along for even longer.

I think the death was fair. They only got one riddle, but it was an easy riddle that they should have known, it was just asked in a slightly cryptic way. It is nowhere near as bad as series 3 Leo failing a very tough riddle (how many adults have heard of Avebury stone circle, never mind young children?) and being finished off as a reult.

There does seem to be an inconsistence between the number of riddles a team correctly answer, and the amount of essential information they receive. One or two teams have scraped through with one riddle in the level 1 clue room, others needed to get all three right to get key information or a password. This adds an element of chance into the game, which is ok if luck is meant to play a part, but I thought knightmare was a logic and skill game, where luck should be minimal, if you die it is your own fault and every team gets treated equally.

Luck is definitely present in terms of level of difficulty. If riddles are seen as the harder parts of the quest, clearly some teams have a tougher quest than others, and if there are a lot of riddles, it seems you have to nail pretty much all of them to succeed barring carelessness. The difficulty of the riddles also varies from quest to quest.

I agree the death was fair. Only one chance to gain magic but the riddle was easy, it was not like Leo's in series 3. I think if you can't get riddles based on (very) common knowledge like that correct, arguably you don't deserve to succeed. I was impressed with the dungeoneer answering Cedric's riddles correctly on his own, it is as if the advisors were hopeless at riddles in general (I can't criticise, I am also hopeless at riddles but the elephant never forgets one is elementary).

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.

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).

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?

Rewatching this as an adult I can see how fixed this programme is (was). Compare this quest and IMO unfair death for failing to collect the pieces of a spell, which was impossible to collect with the speed the automatum came in and headed straight for the right hand piece, with the earlier winning team quest which almost got spoonfed a victory.

Good Episode, but this new team seem to take ages on the Combat Chess, and they were very sneaky on the Scorpian Scene by keeping to the far right which made me laugh, Now I know why they decided to create a hole to the right of the Scorpian in Series 3 which forced teams to run through and time it right.

I'm guessing none of them play chess much if at all. They took ages because they made a poor move, putting the dungeoneer on a square where the bishop could move three squares in front, which blocks the dungeoneer from making any forward progress, forcing them back to their previous square. They got it right on their next move. Chess is about planning ahead and working out how the opponent might respond to your move, and looking for threats they can make.

Clue room time, and, my my, isn't Igneous in a rotten mood? Very impatient for answers. And if that really is what he's looking for, boy, has he chosen the wrong team. It's understandable not knowing the answer to the first riddle (King Canute isn't nearly as famous as some of the post-Norman monarchs), and the second riddle is perhaps a bit ambiguous (I'd say answers like 'car', 'cart' and even 'bicycle' would be reaonable, if anachronistic), but you can't really give them the benefit of the doubt over the third. Most children over the age of six know that the pull of the moon causes the tides (or at least they did back in the 1980's. Not so sure about the modern generation).

My theory is the phrasing of the riddle might have thrown them. The wall monster said "what moves the waves?", whereas what he meant was what causes the tides, but waves have nothing to do with tides, so they didn't pick up on what he meant. Wind is what moves waves, unless it is a tsunami which is generated by a submarine vertical displacement.

One must wonder how in the heck the Powers That Be come into possession of all the Blocker/Dreadnort passwords anyhow? Lord Fears' security leaks like a sieve! XD

Through spyglasses. Several times teams have obtained blocker passwords and causeway paths through spying on Lord Fear at the moment he has to tell one of his henchmen how to get past such an obstruction. There seem to be a lot of spyglasses lying about in the levels, so not beyond the bounds of possibility one or two of the powers that be characters have taken a peak.

They really had a shocker in the descender. Told to descend 7 levels, Ian told Duncan to say, "Stop!" but he reacted too slowly and also mumbled it and they kept going. Finally stopped in the wrong place.

Entered into a super-fast corridor of blades and were sliced almost immediately!

Their reaction said everything. They didn't even look that disappointed....

I agree with others who have suggested that this super-fast corridor of blades might have offered the first short-cut to level 3, had they survived it. Tough challenge tho. An excellent team would have found it difficult and i think it's fair to say that team 8 could not be described as excellent....

Possibly, but I think no team would have got through, even the best. The blade came along and sliced the dungeoneer before they even had a proper chance to take stock of where they were. They had virtually no time to call out the instruction to move right and the dungeoneer to react in time. My opinion is that it was an elimination from game punishment for not following the scroll instruction carefully enough. Those who legitimately enter the COB (i.e. it is on their correct path) have nearly 10 seconds before the first blade comes toward the dungeoneer, and even then, the first one isn't a threat to the dungeoneer.

When going down in the descender, do you only count doors and ignore windows? It seems to go window - door- window - door, so the dungeoneer has to say halt after passing the sixth door if they are descending seven levels. It is no good shouting halt when the seventh door appears as the descender will not be able to halt until the eighth door.

I've played snap as a child but have never heard of "joker takes all" used in it.

Team 2, started on Smirkenorff who was a bit slow today.

Maybe there was a strong headwind.

The block and tackle room initially looked to be a blatant attempt to kill them to finish the series at a cnvenient time. He entered at an awkward angle, they did a zig-zag tour of the right hand side of the room before finding the exit (turn 45 degrees right is what you want), they were very lucky not to be whacked by a sliding block. I don't think they got let off in the COB, it looked to me like a miss by a hairs breadth. Shame they ran out of time, from my memory of Dickon's quest they were only about three rooms from victory after the transporter pads.