Adventures in Early Modernity

Well, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? Once again, I’ve been caught up in my studies – a Cambridge MPhil is no joke! I’m nearly done writing the first draft of my dissertation. In particular, I just finished writing a very interesting chapter on posthumous views of Henry VIII’s masculinity and sexuality, and how such seemingly “private” issues became weaponized in arguments over Henry’s public persona and character as a monarch. But while I’m really excited to share more details, I think I’ll have to hold off on writing that post until I’ve submitted the final draft of my dissertation in June. In any case, this post isn’t about my dissertation research, but a long-overdue account of my experience in the Jeopardy! Second Chance Tournament. So without further ado, here we go!

I was already in Cambridge, having just started my MPhil, when I got the text. Funnily, because I’d switched phone numbers from my U.S. to U.K. one, I didn’t get it at first. Thankfully, I’d also listed my U.K. number as an alternative, so I managed to see it, albeit a day late. It was from one of the Jeopardy! producers I’d spoken to in the run-up to my first round, asking me if I wanted to come back to Los Angeles to take part in the Second Chance Competition (henceforth SCC). I’ll talk more about what the SCC entails below, but the important thing was this: I could go back to Jeopardy! 

But then I looked at my calendar. I was to stay in LA from November 3-6 (i.e. Sunday-Wednesday of Week 4 of Michaelmas Term at Cambridge). And I’d already gotten my schedule. I had a paleography class, along with a Latin one on Monday, the core class for my degree on Tuesday, and an early modern books one on Wednesday. Needless to say, I couldn’t compete and miss one week’s worth of classes when terms at Cambridge were just eight weeks.

The producer, though, informed me that the filming schedule was fixed. I was preparing to reluctantly decline when I discovered that, by some unforeseen miracle, Week 4 of my Michaelmas Term was a reading week. I had no classes; I was free to go. I said yes very soon afterwards. The preparation process for my second appearance on Jeopardy! did have to be tweaked, of course. Where my mom had read out questions to me over Whatsapp the first time around, I now watched past episodes of Jeopardy to see if I could answer the questions asked. If I couldn’t, I wrote them down in a trusty notebook. I still have it, and I can’t imagine I’ll ever get rid of it. It is, after all, a poignant reminder of my time on Jeopardy!

Shortly before I flew to L.A., though, the producers told me on what day I was filming. It was to be November 5 – Election Day. Everyone alive remembers the stress and anxieties of the 2024 election, and I was no exception. Fortunately, Jeopardy! filming would apparently conclude that day at 5 P.M., meaning that while us contestants would eat lunch at Sony Picture Studios, we’d be out in time for dinner. Unfortunately, this also meant that we’d get out of Sony at the same time that the election results began to come in on the East Coast. My anxiety began to simmer. For the last few years, I’d become addicted to keeping up with U.S. politics, meaning that being unable to keep up with the election the day it happened was one of my worst nightmares. I had already voted (for Kamala Harris, of course), but it deprived me of the illusion of control. And illusion, or perhaps delusion, had become integral to my sense of self.

I arrived in L.A. on the afternoon of November 3, two days before filming. I reunited with my parents, much to my delight, and I got to spend that night and the following day walking around L.A. with them. I would call it “the calm before the storm”, but the storm clouds were already visible. As a gay man of Filipino descent on the autism spectrum who’s also studying to become a historian, it was inevitable I would support Harris and the Democrats in 2024, just as I had done with Biden in 2020. But doubts still lingered. Would America be brave enough to elect the better qualified candidate, even though she was a Black woman, or would it succumb to its worst impulses and vote for the deranged, male authoritarian? 

In light of the election’s outcome, as well as the subsequent events that have unfolded under this second administration, I must confess that many of my memories filming the Jeopardy! SCC have become fuzzy. But I distinctly remember the night before the election. I’m an agnostic, but my nerves for tomorrow, which would decide not only the fate of my Jeopardy! chances, but also America and the world, were near breaking point. So I did the only thing I could do. I prayed. I got down on my knees in the dark, next to my bed, and I prayed that Trump would lose. I preferred that, I said, over a Jeopardy! victory, although I did acknowledge I also wished for that. As it turned out, only one of my wishes was granted.

I dressed more formally for my second appearance on Jeopardy!, donning a white button-up shirt, a navy-blue suit, and a black bow-tie. I desperately hoped the wardrobe coordinator wouldn’t reject my outfits, as I brought three more options, like she had done the last time I was on. Fortunately, it met with her approval. One of the things that stood out to me this time around when I boarded the van Sony sent to pick us SCC competitors up from our hotel was that we were all on the same playing field. We’d all played well in our initial rounds months ago, true, but we’d all also lost. We were, hypothetically, equally talented at Jeopardy!, so I had more of a chance than I’d ever had against Adriana.

I won’t recapitulate the similar preparation we all had to undergo before filming, as it was much the same as my first appearance. The SCC was made of two groups of nine, with one reserve. There were three ordinary rounds of Jeopardy!, which narrowed down the nine competitors to three finalists. The three finalists would then compete against each other in two rounds, with the person with the highest two-game final winning the SCC and advancing to the Champions Wildcard Tournament. While I only faced four other competitors across my three rounds, I do feel I should shout out everyone in my group. Drew, Sam, Lindsay, Zoe, Josh, Ferdinand, Jonquil, Steve, and Jonah are some of the smartest, most brilliant people I’ve met. I’m so glad to have met them and competed against them! In particular, I’d like to thank them for making me feel so welcomed, especially given I was by far the youngest person there. 

In the first round, against Zoe Grobman and Josh Heit, I was leading comfortably, but not enough to runaway with the game, by the time that Final Jeopardy came around. The category was “Facts About Countries”, but fortunately, I remembered how to properly wager this time around. I ended up wagering $3,800, a bit more than I strictly needed to maintain my lead if Josh, at second place, wagered everything and got the question correct. And then the question showed up: “It has 40,000 people & a workforce of 42,000, more than half commuting from nearby, including Vorarlberg state in a neighbor country.” For a bit, I panicked. Vorarlberg sounded German, so I figured it had to be near there, but there were two small countries I knew of near Germany: Liechtenstein and Luxembourg. I knew one of them had a notably smaller population, but I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember which. I chose Liechtenstein on a whim, figuring that it sounded like the name of a smaller country, whatever that meant, and changing my answer at the last minute.

To my delight (as you can tell from the photo below), I got it correct and bet enough, meaning that I finally won a Jeopardy! round. I thus secured a spot in the two-game Finals. By now, it was mid-day, so it was time for lunch. I had lunch with the two other finalists in the group, Drew Goins and Sam Cameron, due to the producers’ insistence that as part of our continued seclusion, we stay away from the already eliminated contestants and their phones. Both were surprisingly approachable, given that they were older than me and Drew’s position as an Opinions journalist for the Washington Post. I hope I can meet up with them again one day.

I don’t remember much of the details about the two-game finals, save for the broad strokes of how it went. I achieved a quite comfortable victory in the first round of the finals, thanks to the rather serendipitous fact that the animal in the correct answer, a rhesus monkey, was, as I’d written, also a “rhesus macaque”. What happened in the second game was, to be honest, a generational fumble on my end. I can blame a lot of things for my disappointing performance in the second game, from my fatigue (it was by then around 3-3:30 PM and it was my third game in a day) to a very unfavorable set of categories, but doubts still linger in my mind. It was true that if I’d won the SCC, I’d have had to film the following week for the Champions Wildcard and miss one of my seven weeks of classes, something which I wasn’t sure I could afford to do. But when I look back, I sometimes feel like I let my family and friends down by not doing better. Still, given Drew’s amazing performance in the Champions Wildcard, and later, the Tournament of Champions, as well as his rapid rise to Internet fame, I’ve never felt anything but positivity towards his ultimate victory in the SCC. 

Still, I had gotten second place in the SCC, meaning that I secured the second place prize of $15,000 – nothing to sneeze at! After the photos, some of my fellow competitors asked if I wanted to celebrate with them that night by going to a trivia night at a local bar. I was feeling quite tired, though, and I preferred to have a quiet dinner with my parents rather than all the sensory overload of a noisy bar. In retrospect, I am so glad I chose the quiet dinner. I truly think that being in a bar with crowds of people, most of them probably fellow liberals/left-wingers like me, would have made the incoming news of Trump’s reelection even more painful. Instead, I got to mourn in private that night. 

And so my Jeopardy! stints, as well as my quiz competition career, came to a bittersweet end. I had won $15,000, which I remain endlessly stunned by and grateful for. But the fact the taping occurred shortly before what I and many others think was one of the worst mistakes made by the U.S. in the last half-century will forever tinge those giddy memories of jubilation with the suffering this second administration that everyone knew, even then, it would wreak. I do count myself very thankful, though, that not only have I gotten the chance to compete on both University Challenge in the UK and Jeopardy in the U.S., but that I at least had some positive memories of November 5, 2024. If nothing else, we’ll all need our moments of joy for the near future.