‘Jeopardy!’ Fans Blast ‘Unfair’ Clue That Led to Contestant Losing Game
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Jeopardy! viewers sympathized with contestant Scott Plummer on Thursday’s (November 16) episode after an “unfair” wordplay clue tripped him up and led to him losing the game.
Plummer, a one-day champion from Season 38, faced off against two-day Season 37 champ Tim Moon and two-day Season 38 champ Amy Bekkerman in the latest episode of Champions Wildcard, which sees brief champions from Seasons 37 & 38 competing to earn a spot in the upcoming Tournament of Champions.
After the first round, Bekkerman led with $5,000, but Plummer wasn’t too far behind with $3,200. The game was all still to play for as the three contestants headed into Double Jeopardy!
However, things fell apart for Plummer in the “That’s Misleading” category, which saw the players having to put two parts of each clue together to form a compound word.
“If I say, ‘Singer Bryan with a blanket on,’ you say, ‘What is Luke warm?’ Get it?” host Ken Jennings explained before the round began.
The contestants seemed to get the hang of it pretty quickly, answering clues such as “A young goat’s daytime snooze” (Kidnap) and “Hey, yellow fruit, leave, just get on out of here, dig?” (Banana Split).
But Plummer hit a roadblock when he selected the $2,000 clue, which ended up being the game’s last Daily Double. He’d already come back from one Daily Double deficit to amass $3,600, but Bekkerman was well ahead with $12,600 at this stage.
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Plummer decided to bet almost his entire amount, putting up a $3,200 wager on a clue that read, “Paintings seen along the sloping path for wheelchairs.”
The software developer from Golden, Colorado, looked baffled and struggled to come up with the correct response. “Something ramp?” he said as the timer ran out.
Jennings ruled Plummer incorrect before stating the correct answer was, “Rampart… Ramp-Art.”
Plummer dropped to $600, putting him well behind as the game moved into Final Jeopardy! And, to make things worse, Plummer was the only one to get the Final Jeopardy! clue correct, but even going all-in (bar $1), he didn’t have enough to overtake Bekkerman.
Fans felt for Plummer and took to social media to share their sympathies and blast the show for its awkwardly worded question.
“I’m usually on the side of the writers, but DD3 [Daily Double 3] was bulls***,” wrote one viewer on the Jeopardy! Reddit forum. “Literally every other clue in the “That’s Misleading” category gave the two halves in the same order as the correct response compound word (banana split, fishbowl, etc.).”
They continued, “But then suddenly for the DD, the clue gave the two halves in reverse order! What the hell is that? That’s why Scott was muttering “something-ramp.” I’d bet anything he considered “art-ramp” in his head and discarded it because “art-ramp” isn’t a word.”
“The writers so easily could have avoided the issue entirely. Even if they were really committed to the “ramp-art” clue, they could have just reversed one or two of the other clues in the category, like “let’s get out of here, yellow fruit!” to indicate that the order was fungible,” wrote another.
“But to have the first 4 clues follow a clear pattern, and then to have the bottom row clue be the DD and break that pattern–that’s either incompetent or intentionally malicious,” they continued.
“Also, “rampart” isn’t a compound word or phrase in the same way as the other 4 clues: kidnap, saw-horse, banana split, fishbowl. In those 4 cases, if you say the two component words, it sounds exactly the same as the resulting correct response word or phrase. But “rampart” isn’t pronounced “ramp-art”; it’s “ram-part.” Just terrible,” the commenter added.
Another user suggested, “The writers could’ve made the clue much clearer by transposing the phrasing to something like, “A sloping path for wheelchair-bound gallery patrons to view paintings.””
“That was my response, “artramp,” thinking it might be a term of art used in galleries or somewhere I’d never heard before. Totally bogus in every way, and likely cost Tim the game,” said another.
“The writers need to be punished for that one,” added one fan.
Fellow Champions Wildcard contestant Emily White also commented on the Reddit thread, writing, “That was absolutely awful. I hated that category anyway, but that made it doubly worse.”
Another contestant, Sandy Oliver, shared, “The green room was IN A STATE after that one.”
What did you think? Was the clue unfair? Let us know in the comments below.
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