King of the Nerds episode 105 recap: Angry nerds are scary nerds

By Natt Garun February 15, 2013

King of the Nerds rubix

It is at this point in the competition where you begin to realize “King of the Nerds” isn’t really about nerds, but more like generic people doing fun stuff. Case in point, this week, our contestants ran through a pool to assemble a life-sized Rubik’s cube, solved a sudoku puzzle, got drunk, played a memory game, and got tackled by a sumo wrestler. Woohoo, reality television!

The competition starts off with the Orange team forced to pick one player to sit the challenge out to make the teams even at three against three. Joshua immediately volunteers to stay behind, citing that sudoku and Rubik puzzles aren’t his thing. Obviously, this gives Danielle a jolt to send Joshua to eliminations should the team lose.

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Moogega, who has received minimal screen time until this episode (kinda), says she loves solving sudoku puzzles except it’s sort of a one-person kind of deal. I can’t blame her; too many people picking at a puzzle makes you lose focus, and not having a pen to write down notes does make it harder. Celeste and Virgil, Blue team’s Rubik master and computer programmer, ends up solving the puzzle correctly, which has Danielle’s eyes targeted on Josh.

Back at Nerdvana, Moogega and Danielle are taking the loss pretty well. The two decide to hit up the Jack Daniels and run around in booty shorts, spanking each other with a toy sword. “It bounces,” Josh awkwardly comments, as if he’s never seen an ass before. Shortly after, he leaves the room because he’s too stressed about losing and Ivan goes to talk to Virgil. Guys. Two drunk straight girls in booty shorts are touching each other and you’d rather spend it with other dudes? Sigh.

Ivan is worried the Blue team will select him to eliminations because he’s clearly the strongest member on Orange. He confides in Virgil, who doesn’t necessarily say he will or won’t vote for Ivan. Ivan walks away thinking he’s convinced Virgil to keep him safe. Apparently, no one in this house remembers it’s a reality competition they’re filming.

Ivan is ultimately is revealed to have been selected for elimination and gets super awkward up in blue team’s faces – staring them down and making them tell him that they truly thought he was the right choice to send to the Nerd Off. Why are nerds so socially inept? Why don’t they realize people are here to win for once?

With Ivan and Josh in the Nerd Off, the two are forced to play a memory match game. Sounds easy, up until they get tennis balls thrown at them and a sumo wrestler to block the way in order to distract their focus. The game cuts it pretty close, but Josh gets his ass beat and is sent packing. Angry nerds never win. Especially not against sumo wrestlers.

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King of the Nerds episode 103 recap: Games we play

If you were placed in a room full of cliques and had to trust your life with either the jocks, theater kids, or nerds, it's safe to assume rolling with nerds is a safe bet. After all, they're supposed to be honest, genuine people who just want a place of acceptance, right? Wrong. So wrong. Nerds are the worst - at least they would appear to be in the third episode of "King of the Nerds."
Basically, whatever a "King of the Nerd" nerd says he or she can do, he or she cannot. Last night's theme revolved around gaming; the challenge was for both teams to maneuver a remote control quadrocopter through an elaborate obstacle course in three minutes. Meanwhile, the opposing team would be armed with Nerf guns to shoot the quadrocopter down; for each take down, they get to deduct 500 points from the opponent. "This is the challenge I've been waiting for!" says Blue team's Celeste, who's talked about her pro gaming background since the start of the show. Instead, she's the only one who had her quadrocopter shot down twice. She's disappointed, but ends her turn with a Kanye-esque shrug and an exasperated "Whatever, man." True pro gamer sportsmanship.
In a rallying effort, Alana claims she's the bomb diggy at shooting shit, but fails to take down any Orange team quadrocopters. This is, of course, unsurprising. The Blue team puts all its hope on hand-eye coordination-challenged Virgil who magically ends up scoring more points than Celeste in under one minute. Orange team's Brandon says he's a great shooter 'cause he's from Texas and has handled real guns before, but didn't hit Virgil's aircraft once.

With the Orange team suffering its first loss, the team members have to decide who to send to the Nerd-Off. Joshua says pink-haired Danielle seems to lack valuable skills going forward, so he tells her his decision to her face. Danielle flips a big shit about it, cries, whines, and goes on for about 10 minutes of why she's worthy of sticking around (But I dressed like a big slut during the cosplay challenge! I scored major points then broke a piece of the quadrocopter just now! What did YOU do?) Joshua says he will vote himself out instead to make her happy, but ends up picking Danielle anyway. Danielle thinks she's tricked Josh, and faces a harsh reality when the scheme blows up in her face. All in all, no one is to be trusted in this nerd hole.
Danielle and good guy Brandon gets sent to the elimination challenge where they have to drive remote-controlled golf carts and push giant balls into a goal. Brandon overanalyzes the most effective radial turn of the golf carts, gets lost in learning the controls, and loses big time to Danielle.
Things are about to get major awkward now that Danielle and Joshua have to continue on the same team knowing they've backstabbed each other. It makes me sad to see Brandon go; he seemed like the few genuinely nice kids in the house. But like all reality shows, good guys finish last...ish, so unless he kept calling Virgil a dick, it was imminent that he wouldn't stick around for long.
Next week, guest judges Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes join the episode which can only mean one thing: Comic books!

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King of the Nerds episode 102 recap: A honey badger in a room full of kittens

king of the nerds episode 102 recap a honey badger in room full kittens team orange cosplay

According to popular culture, being a nerd means being an outcast. You're the last person picked in a dodgeball game, no one wants to sit with you during lunch, everyone wants to trap you inside your locker. But as we've seen in last night's episode of "King of the Nerds," nerds are bullies too. Not just bullies; In fact, they're all pretty dickish.
It all starts when the challenge requires the Orange and Blue teams to create a cosplay story. Everyone had to make their own characters and outfits and try to sell them to the judges. Virgil decides it's good strategy to take all the tools out of the shack so the Blue team would be left with no scissors or wire snippers to make their costumes with, and Brandon calls him a dick for it. It's almost painful to watch Brandon express himself in the ever-so-slightly demeaning demeanor, because you just feel like he'd never ordinarily call someone a dick (but this is reality TV, so get with the program). The fight goes something like this:
Brandon: Virgil is just not a very decent person.
Virgil: Okay so, you think we engaged in a dickish behavior?
Brandon: This is a false statement.
Intense dramaz! Meanwhile, Alana gets all mom and yells at Virgil for wasting time picking fights while he should have been working on his costume.

The mega awkward team challenge forces both teams to rename themselves, but the names are so blasphemous that I'm just gonna continue calling it Orange and Blue. Team Orange blows the Blue team out of the water with their consistent teamwork and storyline. The Blue team, instead, consists of Virgil the robot, Alana the witch with a German?Croatian?Russian? accent, Danielle the Rubik's cube horse, Genevieve who sings about living in garbage cans, and Jon the Bane-esque rocker from the planet of UGH! (no joke, this happened). You wonder why they didn't impress guest judge George Takei, who did not grace the show with his infamous oh my's. After the Orange team was declared the winner, they are treated to a Little Ceasars pizza party (no joke, this happened).
Alana pulls a dick move by asking Virgil to grab her a Mountain Dew then conspires her teammates to vote him off to the elimination Nerd War. Everyone appears to agree, but at the reveal, they vote for Alana instead - claiming her skills are less useful moving forward in the competition. Yikes. The Orange team votes Jon again to compete against Alana in a trivia game about fictional worlds. The questions aren't actually hard (How many books were in the Chronicles of Narnia?, What language does Chewbacca speak?), and each time a person gets the question right, they roll a giant dice down a hill and try to knock out cardboard knights for points.
In the end, black magic RussianGermanCroatian witch Alana saves herself with a lucky roll and sends Jon packing. Upon leaving, Jon claims he will "miss the free beer."
Next week, we get a teaser that it's a video games challenge week, so let's hope the contestants have better hand-eye coordination there.

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King of the Nerds episode 101 recap: ‘This is truly nerd heaven’

It's official. A love for technology, video games, science, comic books, and what you'd otherwise qualify as nerd or geekdom has gone mainstream. So mainstream that it landed on a 10 p.m. time slot on basic cable channel TBS right before "Late Night with Conan O'Brien." Yes, "King of the Nerds" is a new reality competition that features 11 contestants fighting for $100,000 and nerd bragging rights. Is the latter actually something people aspire for? Eleven people apparently think so.
We open to an introduction by hosts Robert Carradine and Curtis Armstrong (Lewis and Booger of "Revenge of the Nerds") about how nerd culture has exploded in the past few years, naming celebrities such as Michael Cera and Seth Rogen and (naturally) Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg as leading men in the space. The hosts and contestants gather in the courtyard of "Nerdvana," the home and stage of the show where weekly Nerd War competitions will take place.
The contestants have pretty impressive credentials; they're all either pro-gamers, scientists, mathematicians, developers, or comic lovers. Some of the personalities are stereotypically nerdy, such as Brandon who wears glasses, speaks in high pitches, and is easily excitable by anything Carradine and Armstrong says or brings out, or pink-haired Danielle who occasionally speaks Orcish. Others seem a bit more socially-apt. Celeste is a cute gamer girl while Moogega, the child prodigy, is a NASA engineer and Ph.D candidate at age 26. These two don't try hard to visibly exert their geeky tendencies, but rather show it off by skill (Celeste can solve a Rubik's Cube in minutes).
Not too much happens in the first episode as it's more of a place for viewers to get to know each character. But, 40 minutes in, all contestants have done so far is pick shit. Randomized team leaders picked their teammates by pouring paint on each other's heads (nerd on nerd hate crime?). Since there are uneven number of contestants, the last person picked got immunity and was forced to choose the team they think is stronger. Lastly, the contestants pick who they want to send from the decidedly weaker team to fight in the Nerd War. Blah.

Finally, at 10:45 we get to the actual competition of the show where Hendrik and Jon, both of whom the contestants deemed as the strongest competitors, battled it out in a game of chess. Surprisingly, these nerds aren't very good at chess, or at least have forgotten how to play. When does the geekdom kick in? Hendrik chooses last-picked, immune Alana as his advisor for the game while Jon selects teammate Virgil without the intention of actually using him. Gratuitous sex appeal arrives on the show in a form of a "stripper Harajuku cat girl" who moves the giant-size chess pieces for them while a shirtless gladiator man destroys killed pieces with an axe. Sttrrraaannggee. At last, it was Hendrik who made an erroneous move, rendering Jon another week at Nerdvana.
"King of the Nerds" has the potential to be a pretty entertaining competition if it does not err too stereotypically nerdy so catch back with us next week to see if things get more exciting. Also, drinking game alert: A sip of your favorite alcoholic beverage every time someone says "nerd." I swear to you, the show is so self aware that you'll be hitting the floor in two minutes.