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Game Changer is competitive by nature, but only a few of the players take that competition seriously. (Ahem, Brennan Lee Mulligan, ahem.) Mostly, the cast comes across as a group of friends and co-workers trying to produce comedy together, while fully aware that winning Game Changer just means getting two seconds of celebration and a gag prize. Cutthroat, potentially hurtful behavior is rare.
“What’s the Catch” is a rare exception. The players make choices that visibly wound and frustrate each other, sometimes immediately after complaining about how bad it felt to have something similar happen to them. The wild thing is, none of this behavior is in pursuit of winning. It just seems to be about comedic cruelty, and spreading the misery around — including to host, producer, and game designer Sam Reich himself.
The contestants: Kurt Maloney, Jacob Wysocki, Kimia Behpoornia.
The game: There isn’t much of a game here! Players choose between unseen mystery prizes, winning potentially exciting gifts, but also acquiring “catches.” These add-on conditions modify the prizes and make them much less enviable. The players get several chances to exchange prizes or catches, and mostly use them to downgrade each other’s prizes. But there are no points, strategies, or victory conditions, and there’s no declared winner.
The inspiration: The blind-item choice mechanics and the specific “what’s behind curtain number one” phrasing come from the game show Let’s Make a Deal. The rest feels like an attempt to address and complicate the game’s “Monty Hall problem.” But this episode also resembles Game Changer’s three “Secret Samta” episodes, which similarly have contestants trying to hang onto good prizes while sticking each other with duds.
“What’s the Catch” starts off with Sam sitting in front of an elaborate faux fireplace. The players quickly get their first prizes: an $800 professional photo package for Kurt, a $500 theme-park fast-pass day for Jake, a customized $1,000 seven-course dinner for Kimia. All the prizes are represented by mounting boards that get hung on the fireplace’s mantelpiece – the kind of boards that would normally hold a taxidermied fish.
Game Changer veteran Jeremy Culhane serves as the episode’s announcer and color commentator. Many of the prizes are presented by Game Changer and Make Some Noise regular Josh Ruben, dressed in an iconic bright yellow fisherman’s rain slicker, with a hook protruding from one sleeve. His eyes are glazed and unfocused, and his toothy, open-mouthed expression suggests he only has a vague idea of how or why humans smile. “That’s all he did?” Kurt protests after Josh first appears, sitting in a tableau representing Kimia’s fancy dinner. “He got a whole day rate for that?” “He didn’t do anything!” Kimia shouts. In retrospect, they probably all would have been a lot happier if the Fisherman was only there for that prize presentation.
In round two, the players draw their first catches, represented by magnetized fish cutouts that attach to those empty taxidermy panels. Each “catch” has text footnoting the prize it’s linked to. Kimia’s first catch says her $1,000 dinner will now be served at 4 in the morning. Kurt’s professional photo package gets modified with “…in an inflatable T-Rex costume.” (“What will be inside the costume?” Jeremy exults. “You? Your prize? Rest assured, whatever’s worse!”) Jake wins another real prize, a $500 couple’s massage, represented by Fisherman Josh grinning eerily from a massage table.
In round three, Jake winds up with “a home deep clean,” while Kimia gets the catch “…as offered by Grant O’Brien” attached to her $1,000 4 a.m. meal. (Fisherman Josh presents this catch while wearing a Grant-style sweater and glasses.) Kurt gets the game’s first “swapster lobster,” a fake lobster labeled “SWAP,” which lets a player forcibly swap prizes or catches with other players. Kurt uses it to remove “…in an inflatable T-rex costume” from his professional photo package, and stick it on Jake’s couple’s massage.
This only feels like a minor betrayal, since Jake didn’t seem to care that much about the massage. But he was vocally looking forward to the home deep clean, which Kurt steals in round four with a second swapster lobster. Jake promptly draws a lobster of his own, and steals it back. Sam tells them both that after two trades, it’s now locked in place and can’t be moved again – a common rule in White Elephant or Yankee Swap games, though Jake associates it with another party game, Pass the Parcel. Kimia, meanwhile, gets the catch “…but it’s patriot-themed,” which gets added to her 4 a.m., Grant O’Brien-cooked $1,000 dinner.
The players visibly deflate as the qualifications on their prizes pile up, or they yell in frustration at each other and at Sam. But that doesn’t stop them from targeting each other with the worst catches, ruining each other’s prizes as thoroughly as possible. At several points throughout the game, a player who was mad or sad at being targeted just a second ago guffaws at someone else getting their prize badly modified as well. This is not a complaint! It’s just a type of drama Game Changer rarely sees, and it’s startling, exciting, and a little squirmy.
Fisherman Josh keeps turning up as a presenter and distraction, with the players riffing on his physical issues (he apparently has wooden knees after a shark bit off his original knees) and his uncomfortable, mostly silent presence. Kimia, kicking off round five, accepts a prize Josh is presenting, solely so he’ll go away and stop looming next to her. When she gets a hook that will lock a prize or catch in place, she sympathizes with Jake not liking his T-Rex costume massage, but says he’s complained about it enough already that it’ll be funny to make sure he’s stuck with it. “Do what you have to do for the show,” Jake says grimly. It’s a turning point where the players decide that making the most brutal choice is funny, and that it’s more important than protecting the prizes their friends desperately want to keep.
Round five wraps with Jake collecting a $1,200 acting reel — as we see later, Dropout plans to fund a series of short filmed scenes showing off his range, and cut a sizzle reel for him. He seems profoundly uninterested. Kurt wins a $300 “paint-and-sip party.”
Round six burdens everyone with a new catch. Jake eagerly applies “…every day for a week straight” to his theme-park fast-pass day. Kimia gets “…over Zoom,” and trades it for the final catch, “…for all of two minutes.” But because she only has one prize (the $1,000 meal) and she’s maxed it out with three catches (4 a.m., Grant O’Brien, patriot-themed), she gets to put it wherever she wants. She immediately turns Jake’s planned week of theme-park fun into a week of trekking out to a theme park for a series of two-minute photo ops.
