‘King of the Nerds’ season 2, episode 5 review: Did Zack enter the Nerd-Off again?
Tonight on “King of the Nerds,” we learned that somehow, this show can make both a spelling bee and also a debate entertaining. Maybe it was the “Star Wars” / “Star Trek” references … or chocobos. Chocobos make everything better.
We don’t know what was a bigger surprise here: Finding out how little Jack actually knew about either “Star Wars” or “Star Trek” going into a debate about which was better, or the fact that Zack someone managed to not go into a Nerd-Off for the first time since the premiere. The prophecy of him going in every week, it seems, has fallen.
But, it was still the Midas Touch Attack who were stuck in the unfortunate position after losing the Nerd War debate, which is no surprise since … well, like we said, Jack was completely clueless on the subject matter. The Titans of Rigel are proving to be an unstoppable force even without Katie as a part of their team (even though she still totally was), and we attribute it to the mixture of power players. You have the engineer (Chris), the scholar (Brian), the scientist (Kayla), and the creator (Xander). Basically, it’s like a Fantastic Four (the comic, not the movie), whereas the other team has at times been more like Mystery Men.
One last note on the Nerd War: We are having a serious inner struggle when it comes to which judges were better: Mayim Bialik and Bill Nye, or Billy Dee Williams and Kumail Nanjiani. That may just be a debate for us, mostly because of our mad love for Kumail.
The moment that you saw the Nerd-Off later was between Katie and Jack, you all thought he was leaving, right? He was luckily spared somewhat by the fact that this nerdy spelling bee was not all about the same subjects as the Nerd War, even though he did correctly spell a very-difficult “Star Wars” word in Kashyyyk (or land of the Wookies, if you will). As a side note it was an interesting strategy for Chris to try to sway Jack into not voting in Katie, but has likely put a target on Chris’ back now. Jack was not the “gullible” person that Chris thought he was and showed him as much when Jack picked Chris to be the person that got “shocked” every time he got a question wrong. Jack came out swinging and we loved it!
After seeing a final two last season being both women, we thought that a guy was going to win season 2; but who thought that Kayla would be the only woman in the final six? This season has not been kind to the ladies, and it wasn’t kind to Katie tonight. She was a good competitor most of the competition; we were pretty skeptical about her nerdiness going in, but she did a pretty fantastic job in a majority of the challenges, and is really the only reason Midas Touch Attack was seemingly competitive in last week’s robot dodgeball. So it’s onwards and upwards to next week, and we’ll have to see if anyone from this team has a chance in the end of sitting on the throne. This wasn’t the strongest episode of the season, but entertaining nonetheless. Grade: B.
What did you think about this “King of the Nerds” episode? Did the right person go home? Share your thoughts below, and head over here if you want to see where we ranked most of the contestants moving into tonight’s episode.
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Photo: PBS