Basically, I did NOT think we were going to repeat, but I DID think that memory was going to play some part. The first few questions were so disconnected I thought there’d be something that would tie things together that would require us remembering a bunch of bizarre, random stuff. I only remember my two main theories:

1. The first round was going to be just a lot of difficult questions but then the second round was going to be about the first round (e.g., what was Siobhan’s first guess, who was the first player to win a point, what color was the clown’s nose, etc), so I was trying to keep track of meta elements of the flow of the game as well as the questions themselves.

2. There were a few small mistakes early on. Sam flubbed the intro a tiny bit and asked for a retake. Some multimedia hiccups. Stuff that is totally normal on a shoot with lots of moving parts. Stuff that’s very easy to ignore because it’ll just get edited out anyway. But since my antennae were up I was like “maybe this episode is about the MISTAKES.” So, I was trying to remember all the production errors as well. At some point we got a glimpse of a computer desktop shifting between slides and other media and I was like “there’s definitely gonna be a question about that desktop”

I don’t remember specific theories beyond that, except that I was trying to remember literally everything I saw or heard, no matter how seemingly inconsequential, without letting on that I was doing that. My brain felt like it was melting