Drassil wrote:Mystara wrote:Thing is, I just find it unlikely that [Team 7] were killed off purely for the purposes of squeezing in one more team.
We know from one of Brett's recent posts that his team (i.e. the next one) had a standby team, meaning that Tim Child was open to the possibility of fitting in at least two more teams after Team 7.
Every team had a standby team - in case of injury, illness or sudden death of the previous team, it means that filming didn't have to completely stop.
The team after mine had a standby team, but since TC was unsure as to whether we'd even complete the dungeon, I seriously doubt he thought our standby team's standby team would have any chance at all.
But that point notwithstanding, being open to the possibility of fitting in two more teams is a far cry from deliberately killing a team off just to squeeze one more in, which would appear to have no benefit whatsoever.
Drassil wrote:Anthony via HobGoblin wrote:"The room we died in was one of the more difficult rooms from a later level and our dungeoneer was placed in the room at a very dodgy angle. A few rooms previous to the death room we encountered a goblin with life-draining eyes ... Pickle broke rank and told us that we had to cover the goblin's eyes - maybe because he liked my cousin. Afterwards, Tim Child was furious and told us that we should have died in that room! Probably why he engineered our demise."
If Tim Child tried to kill the team with the evil-eye statue and failed, and then tried to put the team into losing status via a one-out-of-one riddle challenge and failed, then it begs the question: what if Jeremy had survived the Block and Tackle? Mogdred's All-New Playpen? A Corridor of Blades with simultaneous blades on both sides? Merlin's Advent Calendar of Doom?
If I were the Knightmare producer wanting to engineer a Series 4 death, I'd present the team with a clue room and make whatever object they leave behind the one that keeps them out of losing status. Any outcome would be difficult to argue with. (Series 5 proved that given a choice between a horn and gold, it was impossible to predict which one would have seen off Skarkill.) Other ideas include a room with Gundrada in the pillory where goblins drive the team out just a bit too soon (with some urging from Treguard or Pickle) for them to free her and secure her help, not unlike Jamie, MEDAL and the Automatum in Series 2.
These are the other reasons that I just don't buy the idea that TC was out to get them:
1) I don't see why David Learner would break rank. Why try to help a child that you're never going to see again by pissing off your employer?
2) What would be the point? David Learner helps them in one room, then TC simply devises yet another team-killer.
3) If TC really wanted the team to die, there are better and safer ways to do it, as Drassil points out above. Furthermore, is causing the dungeoneer to enter at a funny angle really a big deal? It only takes ten seconds to reorient your dungeoneer. Worst case scenario, you can't do that, and you have to perform exactly one more manoeuvre in the room. No big deal.
4) Finally....why? How does TC benefit from killing off one team to squeeze another team in?
I can understand it if the team was in a losing status. They've had their chance, and the rules of the game say that they lose. Then it's just a matter of making the death happen.
But for no other reason than to squeeze another team in just makes no sense at all. The show starts to drag when you start dealing with the process of dismissing one team, bringing in another, introducing them, kitting them up, sending them in and (at some point) giving them their quest. That's where the pace of the show slows down dramatically. It's just not good TV to keep repeating that.
Not to mention that I think it would generally be perceived as better viewing to let each team get as far as possible. The deeper you go into the dungeon, the more you get to see the rare rooms and puzzles that other teams don't get to. Starting all over again just leads to repetition of the same rooms that you've seen ten times before.
So there might be more going on than we're aware. But I find it hard to believe that it all boils down to TC killing off one team for the sole purpose of introducing another.