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.