Marko Saric might not have had the most impressive one-day cash winnings coming into his second game of Jeopardy!, but he still had the title of “champion” (beating a five-day champion, no less), and that’s what counts! Now, he’s got a lot more to boast about.
On Friday’s episode, Saric officially made it a streak by besting contestants Molly Fitzpatrick and Scott Nations. Saric, who’s a math professor from North Carolina, started with $3,799 and ended the day with $26,600 in a two-day total. As a mathematician, he’ll no doubt agree that the growth rate of his winnings is impressive.
Saric didn’t dominate all game, of course. The first round saw him get 11 correct and 2 incorrect for $4,800, just slightly above Fitzpatrick’s $4,000 and double that of Nations at $2,400. Really, though, if Fitzpatrick had just gotten her Daily Double question correct, she would’ve been well ahead of him in round one.
Round two was also not a given for Saric to walk away with a second win, since he got the second Daily Double of the day wrong, a $1,200 mistake. However, he led the pack in correct answers and cash, going into the Final Jeopardy round with $15,900 to Nations’ $11,400 and Fitzpatrick’s $4,800. After accurately answering the last clue, he wound up with $22,801 on the day, with Fitzpatrick trailing at $9,598 and Nations in third with $4,499.
The Final Jeopardy clue is what really got fans talking, though. In the category “Comic Book Characters,” the clue was, “Featured in a 2020 film, she gets her name from a 16th c. Italian stock character who often word diamond-patterned outfits.” Both Saric and Fitzpatrick correctly identified the subject as Harley Quinn (with the movie being Birds of Prey), while Nations incorrectly guessed it was Wonder Woman (which, to be fair, was also DC and featured in 2020’s Wonder Woman 1984).
Online, some fans took issue with the structure and contents of the clue. As one commenter on Reddit wrote, “Harley Quinn first appeared in Batman: The Animated Series in the ’90s, so I think of her more as an animated character (though she has long since appeared in the comics as well, so that’s entirely my fault). Also, I thought the reference to ‘featured in a 2020 film’ was odd, since Margot Robbie has played the character in multiple movies: Suicide Squad (2016), Birds of Prey (2020), and The Suicide Squad (2021). I guess they chose to highlight Birds of Prey since she was the lead of that one (more than ‘featured,’ I would argue), but the movie didn’t do particularly well.”
Another fan agreed with that criticism, writing, “Agreed that Harley Quinn is first and foremost an animated TV character, so it was a bit odd that the clue focused on her being in a movie and comic books. A reference to her being the title character of an animated streaming series would be a more helpful hint than ‘Featured in a 2020 film.’”
Elsewhere in the thread, someone took issue with the generational aspects of the clue, writing, “I wish the writers would not have FJs tilted in favor of a specific generation (in this case Zoomers). I doubt 5% of people over the age of 35 have ever heard of a comic book character from a 2020 film. FJ should be general knowledge that is multi-generational (e.g. Shakespeare, U.S. geography, the Bible).”
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