'Jeopardy!' Fans Blast 'Misleading' Category That Made Contestant Lose

Jeopardy!

Jeopardy! fans weren't pleased with the outcome of Thursday's episode, after viewers at home thought one contestant was robbed of his chance to win.

The situation went down during Double Jeopardy! when a clue in the category "That's Misleading," ended up being a little too misleading, so much so that contestant Scott Plummer was understandably tripped up, but the slip ended up costing him the game.

The "That's Misleading" category prompted players to put two parts of the clue together to form a compound word. "If I say, 'Singer Bryan with a blanket on,' you say, 'What is Luke warm? Get it?" said host Ken Jennings as he tried to explain the rules beforehand, per TV Insider. 

The clues that followed included, "A young goat's daytime snooze” (Kidnap) and "Hey, yellow fruit, leave, just get on out of here, dig?" (Banana Split).

But for Plummer, who landed on the episode's last Daily Double, the category seemed to go a different way when it came time for his clue: "Paintings seen along the sloping path for wheelchairs."

"Something ramp?" Plummer guessed as the time ran out, before Jennings revealed the correct answer, "Rampart," causing Plummer to lose almost his entire total.

Plummer went on to be the only one of the three contestants to answer Final Jeopardy! correctly, but unfortunately, he was unable to wager enough to win.

Fans who watched the episode were quick to point out that Plummer's Daily Double loss set him up poorly for Final Jeopardy!, potentially even ruining his chances of winning the game.

"Really, really didn't like DD3," one person wrote on Reddit after the episode. "Every other clue in the category followed a structure of putting each part in other (kidnap, sawhorse, banana split, fishbowl) except for that one."

"Absolutely baffling decision to make that a Daily Double," the same user added.

"I detest when the producers put DDs under gimmicky, wordplay categories like THAT'S MISLEADING," someone else argued. "The confusing syntax of the clue clearly startled Scott and with only four clues left knocked him out of the game."

Others pointed out that Jennings caused confusion by telling the players that each clue contained a compound word, though "Rampart" isn't actually a compound word in the same way as the other answers were.

"Ken's 'compound-word' clarification at the beginning of the round was counterintuitive for that DD," one comment read.

"I thought the same thing. Poor Scott!" added another user.

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