‘King of the Nerds’ season 2 spotlight: The tale of Chris Jackson
Fellow nerds, assemble once again. We are back with another edition of our “King of the Nerds” spotlight series, where we try to examine every contestant on the second season in hopes of answering one key question: Are they really enough of a nerd to handle this crazy experience? As a former reality TV geek ourselves, we understand what it takes to wear ridiculous clothing, suffer at times when it comes to social skills, and then be crazy enough to still put yourself on TV with other like-minded people.
Today, we turn the spotlight on Chris Jackson, a man with Mensa and engineering super-powers who will try to knock off Brian Davidson, who is currently sitting at the top of our patented-in-our-brain Nerd Scale with a 9 out of 10. What factors go into our oh-so-qualified ranking process? Think along the lines of the following: Fashion, opinions, nerd confidence bordering on cockiness, language proficiency, costume fascination, a cool beard and/or glasses, and of course having very little knowledge of things that are otherwise considered to be cool.
Nerd pros – First of all, we are extremely biased towards anyone who lists “Final Fantasy 7” as their favorite game. Extremely biased. As someone who bragged on national television about obtaining the Master Summon Materia, we have a fine appreciation in Chocobos, Vincent Valentine, and getting ridiculously choked up anytime you visit the City of the Ancients. Why, Square, why?! (Sorry, clearly still working through some stuff.)
Also, this guy has the cockiness down, even to a level that occasionally makes you cringe. Seriously, all nerds aspire to be engineers? This is not so great a mindset for the real world, but perfect for this show and qualifying for high points on our scale. (The real truth is that every nerd actually aspires to be the next Doctor on “Doctor Who”.) Speaking of which, he likes David Tennant, and as someone with major Canadian ties, bonus points for references to Chris Hadfield, Nathan Fillion, and “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” in the bio. After listing so many Joss Whedon products, we are pretty sure that Chris secretly just wants to be Joss Whedon … who is ironically not an engineer and therefore not what most nerds by his logic aspire to be. Wrap your brain around that paradox for a second.
Nerd cons – How can you not care between Marvel and DC? This is a nerd battle that has waged even longer than the mages and the templars in “Dragon Age”! Pick a side! The biggest thing that we worry about when it comes to Chris is that he really doesn’t pop off of the screen so much in terms of his personality, and when it comes to this competition, that could hurt him since you want to make it hard on others to send you home. Also, he needs some more clever responses in his bio, since one of our major points of emphasis on the scale is being able to come up with an effective third choice to an either / or question.
Nerd scale – 8 out of 10. While as much as we’d like to hand Chris a gold chocobo and our title of pre-show champion, we didn’t get enough of who he is out of his bio and video to make an accurate judgment on if he can become the king. What we do know is that he at least likes a lot of cool stuff that qualifies him to be a nerd in our books.