Ask the Slot Expert: When all will be revealed

I watched many game shows over the summer to avoid doing tasks around the house. That's the reality, but I justified watching the shows by thinking that I should get more use out of the multiple streaming services to which I subscribe.

I've seen a disturbing trend over the past few years. Game shows don't always give you all the answers.

Jeopardy has always given players and viewers all the correct answers to its questions. I guess I should really say that Jeopardy gives the correct questions to the answers. Alex Trebek and Ken Jennings sometimes even tell contestants why their questions are incorrect.

Rick Edwards, the host of my summertime British game show obsession !mpossible, explained why each multiple-choice answer to the show's questions was either right, wrong, or impossible.

For most of the seasons of The Masked Singer, the show displayed many of the clues to a contestant's identity after the unmasking. Lately, Nick Cannon, the host, or the contestants themselves explain a couple of the clues and viewers are on their own to try to find a list of all the clues online. One thing that hasn't changed since the first season is my unfamiliarity with many of the panel's guesses and actual identities of the singers.

The game show that takes the cake for leaving viewers in the dark is the first season of 007: Road to a Million on Amazon Prime Video. I say the first season because I understand that the second season, which I haven't seen yet, has some format changes.

The game is a cross between The Amazing Race and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Like the Race, the teams consist of two people with various relationships that travel to different countries. Like Millionaire, players have to answer multiple-choice questions of increasing value and they are eliminated if they get a question wrong.

Teams complete some sort of task, like trekking across the Scottish Highlands, to get a metal case. Inside the case is either their next question or a device to help them find the next destination or case.

Teams start in the UK, then somehow get to Europe, South America, or the Caribbean. Viewers don't see the teams being told to fly to the distant destination, nor do they see that journey. Teams just somehow end up in Istanbul, Naples, the Atacama desert, or Ian Fleming's estate, Goldeneye, in Jamaica.

Having to complete a challenge is like the Race. Unlike the Race, many of these challenges seem to be very dangerous and viewers don't see the safety crews working with the teams. We don't see the crews that must have provided the teams with food and water when they were in remote locations.

The medical clearance and waiver must have been comprehensive.

One team had to jump onto the back of a moving freight train. I did that once when I was a little late to catch a train to New York City. My station didn't have raised platforms then, so the trainmen had to leave the doors open and raise the plates that covered the stairs. Unlike the other stations with raised platforms, the doors on the train were open as the train pulled away.

I easily jumped onto the bottom step, but then got slammed into the side of the vestibule because the train was accelerating and I wasn't. I once saw a man successfully complete the same feat only to end up covered in coffee when he squeezed his coffee cup after landing on the step.

After the team got onto the train, one of them had to go outside the box car and walk on the top of the cars to get to the first car.

Other challenges included climbing Sugarloaf Mountain in Rio and spending the night in a forest or desert.

Other dangerous challenges were: climbing a construction crane and crawling halfway out on the arm to get the case attached there; walking through the desert at about 10,000 feet elevation; hiking up Lascar, the most active volcano in its region, to the top at around 18,000 feet (a dangerously high altitude) to get a case; and retrieving the case from an enclosure with two Crocodylus Acutus (one of the largest crocodile species) alpha males.

I should mention that one team had to do all of the tasks in the prior paragraph.

Brian Cox plays The Controller, who gives the teams their clues and instructions and reads them their questions.

Each question is multiple choice with three answers. Teams could work out the answers to some questions by, say, weighing a tarantula or measuring the length of a snake.

Teams could reason out the answers to others. For example, who invaded Scotland in 80-something A.D.? The Romans, the Vikings, or the Huns. The Vikings and Huns weren't around that early, so it must be the Romans.

Others, teams could only guess at the correct answer if they didn't know it. How much did a genuine Faberge egg sell for at the most recent auction?

What does this game have to do with 007? Besides playing variations on the music from James Bond films during the show, not much.

The most annoying aspect of this game is that when a team gets a question wrong, The Controller does not reveal the correct answer to either the team or the viewers.

Viewers can Google the answers to most question, but I wonder whether the show would have revealed the correct answers to un-Googlable questions: How long is this snake? How much does this tarantula weigh? How far is Mount Etna from a team's vantage point on top of a parking garage?

Being in the dark while watching these shows reminded me of playing a slot machine. They keep us in the dark too. We don't know the long-term paybacks of the machines we play. On a reel-spinning slot, we don't know how likely it is for a physical stop to land on the payline (we've been living with this uncertainty for over 40 years). We don't know how likely each wedge on a Wheel of Fortune wheel is to land under the pointer.

A more modern example: At the end of a Pick'Em bonus, many machines do not show us what was under the symbols that we didn't pick. Those machines don't want to reveal that the result was pre-determined and only one outcome had enough symbols to win. (Of course, if players bothered to read the help screens, they'd see that the manufacturer discloses that player interaction during the bonus round is for entertainment purposes only. In other words, what you pick doesn't matter.)

Although James Bond spends a lot of time in casinos, the contestants have been in a casino only once as far as I've gotten in season 1 (episode 7). You can tell it's a set because none of the actors playing the other gamblers in the casino looked at the contestants whooping and hollering after answering a question correctly. The three remaining teams each have to answer a question in the casino. I was disappointed that only one of the questions was casino related.

I had hoped to end this column with another lyric from Kashmir to bookend the quote I used for the title. I couldn't find an appropriate line, so I'll end with:

Whoa-oh, whoa-oh
Whoa-oh-hoh, oh, ohh

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