A few weeks ago, I came across a GIF from the 1994 film The Lion King that made me weep. It shows the lion cub Simba moments after he discovers the lifeless body of his father, Mufasa; he nuzzles under Mufasa’s limp arm and then lies down beside him. I was immediately distraught at that scene, and my memories of the ones that follow: Simba pawing at his dead father’s face, Simba pleading with him to “get up.”   

That scene lives in my thoughts with a few similar ones: the baby elephant Dumbo cradled in his abused mom’s trunk as she’s trapped behind bars; Ellie, the beloved wife in Up, grieving a miscarriage and eventually passing away within the first five minutes of the film; Bambi, the young deer, wandering around the snowy forest looking for his mother, who has just been shot dead. When they pop up in my mind, I’m always left with the same thought: Why are so many kids’ movies so sad, and how does that sadness affect the kids they’re intended to entertain?

Young viewers experience these movies differently, depending on how sensitive they are, their personal history with the film’s themes, and how well they understand the material, Randi Pochtar, a psychologist at NYU Langone Health’s Child Study Center, told me. It’s up to the caregiver to monitor their reaction, looking specifically for changes in behavior. “Are they now suddenly afraid to go downstairs themselves; are there changes in sleep or appetite?” Pochtar said. If so, it might be time to limit the amount of upsetting media they’re exposed to.

In general, though, Pochtar thinks that sad films are just one of many ways kids are exposed to life’s tough realities. Seeing characters prosper after tragic events can also show kids that although life can be hard, joy and meaning are still possible.

[Read: What kids learn from hard conversations]

Still, it wasn’t clear to either Pochtar or myself whether the filmmakers behind heavy kids’ movies typically intend for sad scenes to be teaching moments. I figured the most direct answer would come from someone who’s made those creative choices, so I reached out to Rob Minkoff, The Lion King’s co-director.

Minkoff agreed that kids can learn important lessons from sad films. But he also pointed out that many of them aren’t just made for children; they’re also supposed to be compelling for the adults watching. If you focus only on making a movie that’s good for kids, he told me, “it’s going to be PAW Patrol.” (Not familiar with PAW Patrol, the intensely popular children’s series about dogs with emergency-services jobs? Ask any parent of a young child if they like it more than they do The Lion King.)

Before the period commonly known as Disney’s Golden Age—1937 to 1942, when hits including Pinocchio, Dumbo, and Bambi were released—animation was reserved for short comedic vignettes, and not everyone was sold on the idea that the medium could sustain a feature-length running time. Disney had to keep the stakes high enough to engage people of all ages. (The studio’s first animated feature was the 1937 film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which concerned an attempted murder and ended with a woman falling off a cliff and being crushed by a boulder.) And out of economic necessity, Minkoff told me, Disney often mined the public domain for storylines. Snow White’s source was a disturbing fairy tale from the Brothers Grimm; Pinocchio was based on Carlo Collodi’s alarmingly cruel novel, The Adventures of Pinocchio, in which the disobedient puppet kills his cricket friend and, for separate reasons, is eventually hanged.

In Minkoff’s estimation, Disney’s animated features became softer and safer after the studio’s golden age; he and the Lion King team wanted to get back to that envelope-pushing era. They drew inspiration from Bambi, but he took issue with how that film dealt—or didn’t deal—with the death of Bambi’s mother. After she dies off-screen, Bambi eventually learns what has happened—but then the film fades back in, after some time has passed, with a happy song about spring. “I felt very strongly that [The Lion King] needed to dive into this story, into the death as a subject … to talk about it and not to ignore it or deny it,” Minkoff said. One way he wanted to do this was by having Simba interact with Mufasa’s dead body. Yes, the exact scene that I’d found so brutal.

Not everyone on his team agreed. “We were presenting the storyboards for it, and someone’s comment was, ‘It’s too confrontational; it’s too intense.’” They suggested having the sequence happen in shadow or in the distance, but Minkoff fought to keep it conspicuous. He knew that people could underestimate the power of animation as a storytelling form, and he wanted to prove them wrong.

[Read: A cartoon gateway to real-world issues]

More recent animated movies, and kids’ movies in general, have included similarly grim moments. Take 2010’s Toy Story 3, which infamously involved a plot point that saw its characters stuck on a conveyor belt leading into an incinerator—holding hands, heartbreakingly, while realizing they might be living their last moments—or Inside Out, the 2015 computer-animated film in which a lovable character sacrifices himself, never to be seen again.

But young viewers can usually handle it. Meredith Bak, who studies children’s media at Rutgers University at Camden, told me that kids might identify with sad movies or find them meaningful; they might be introduced to new perspectives. “I think it’s important for filmmakers to really respect their young audiences by recognizing their ability to engage with this full range of emotions,” she said.

Now that I think about it, I don’t recall being deeply upset when I saw The Lion King in theaters as a kid. I just remember loving it. With this in mind, in a group chat full of family members with kids, I took a poll: When watching kids’ movies with sad themes, who is more emotionally affected—the kids or the parents?

It wasn’t unanimous, but it was close. “One hundred percent me,” my cousin said. “My kids have 300 questions about death but are unphased, while I’m on my second box of tissues.” Although some of my relatives’ kids get emotional, more of them react inquisitively, or with theories about how the characters could have avoided their fates. Their parents, however, are a wreck.

Children tend to understand a lot more than we give them credit for, and many childhoods aren’t easy. Still, if it’s true that these movies can hit adults particularly hard, perhaps it’s because adults tend to have the experience or the cognitive ability to appreciate them from multiple perspectives. When watching that scene with Simba and Mufasa, I don’t only think about the devastation of losing a parent. I think about the tragedy of leaving a child behind. I see the scene refracted through my life and the lives of people I care about; hell, I even see my dog, and how confused he might be if I ever left him.

The question might not be whether these movies are too sad for kids. It might just be whether they’re a bit too sad for adults.

The deer in the snow turned away
from my flashlight and kettle
to let me fight with the ice alone.
I was thinking of you then,
of your sleeping head,
of your maskless mouth.
I used to think your heart
was like an old waterway
always locking and filling
up, but it’s not just one thing
—it could be this kettle.
It could be the steam
in the dark. The light
bouncing around the branches
at midnight. Mine might be an ancient
furnace. The bunny tracks running
up from the bramble to the
catalpa. That tree will bloom
in June. White clouds tacked on a
knotty frame. Broad leaves with no
teeth or lobes. I’ll remember then,
the bunnies living in its roots,
the furnace resting beyond
the green crawl-space doors, and I’ll
reach for your radiant hand before supper
because that’s when we say grace.

Forecasters say snow could fall on higher ground in areas such as Caithness and Sutherland.

White House says the two leaders discussed Israel's military campaign in Gaza, including its 'objectives and phasing'.

White House says Tehran is providing Yemeni rebel group with weapons and tactical intelligence.

Sean Durkin’s first film, Martha Marcy May Marlene, was about the complex aftermath of one woman’s escape from a modern Manson-esque “family” centered around sex and drug use. His second, 2020’s The Nest, looked at a high-society couple in 1980s Britain who buy a mansion and are subsequently haunted by the decision, struggling to stay above water as the property sucks up all of their money. Both movies were immersed in an atmosphere of gloom and anxiety that somehow didn’t overwhelm either; even as Durkin tormented his characters, he had real, obvious love for them.

That’s exactly what makes his newest work, the wrestling drama The Iron Claw, such a triumph. The Iron Claw is, like many films released in the lead-up to the Oscar nominations, based on a true story. It chronicles the lives of the Von Erich brothers, professional wrestlers who were mentored by their tough-love father, rose to fame in 1980s Texas, and were eventually plagued by tragedy. Usually, these biographical movies lean into the drama, exaggerating the shocking stuff for the big screen. The story of the Von Erich family is almost unbelievably tragic, however, as five out of six brothers met an early death, several by suicide. Durkin even removed one of the real-life brothers from his script, deciding (correctly) that one more death would be too much for audiences to take.

I realize that doesn’t make The Iron Claw sound like a tempting choice this Christmas season. But it is the kind of big, weepy, macho film that just doesn’t get made much anymore, a soaring power ballad that should prompt a lot of loud sniffling in the theater. Durkin is a somewhat challenging, arty filmmaker whose prior films left many things unspoken; The Iron Claw is more broadly appealing without losing anything that makes his work so unique. It’s rich with feeling, shrouded in darkness, but not despairing as it digs into the trials the Von Erichs faced, without merely dismissing the family as cursed.

The notion of a family curse is baked into the brothers’ lives from birth. Their father, Fritz Von Erich (played by Holt McCallany, a walking cinder block sporting a permanent scowl), was named Jack Adkisson in real life but took the “Von Erich” pseudonym because his initial wrestling character was a villainous Nazi, an easy figure for postwar audiences to boo. When the film opens, in the late ’70s, Fritz has already lost his first son at the age of 6 in a freak accident; his second son, Kevin (a beefed-up Zac Efron), is thus expected to follow his dad into the family business, and quickly becomes something of a local legend around Dallas.

[Read: A gory amalgam of truth and spectacle]

Fritz is fond of informing his sons which of them is his current favorite, running down his list at the breakfast table while reminding them, “The rankings can always change.” Durkin summons a grunting alpha nightmare environment, a hothouse of muscle-bound teens and 20-somethings all vying for the attention of their stony father and icy, remote mother, Doris (a magnificent Maura Tierney). Along with Kevin, there’s Kerry (Jeremy Allen White), a potential Olympic discus thrower who gets diverted to the family business after the American boycott of the 1980 Games; David (Harris Dickinson), who has a particular flair for the sport’s showy dramatics; and Mike (Stanley Simons), a moon-eyed musician who is roped in out of sheer familial obligation.

To wrestling nerds, the Von Erichs have a titanic legacy, and Durkin does his best to represent that by exploring the sport’s crunchy, amateurish pre-corporate age, when regional live events were the big moneymakers and television was largely ignored. Yes, the fights are scripted, but the athleticism is real and punishing. More important, as Kevin reminds the audience early on, a fighter could only succeed in the ring if the audience (and, by extension, Fritz) loved what they were doing. The Iron Claw manages a tricky balance, depicting the ups and downs of everyone’s careers and acknowledging the required showmanship, but without getting too much into the behind-the-scenes politics.

The real drama of The Iron Claw, obviously, is the awful fates of the Von Erich children, a swirling combination of bad luck, possible substance abuse, likely undiagnosed depression, and very, very lousy parenting. Although Dickinson is effortlessly charming and White brings the fiery intensity viewers will associate with his performance in The Bear, it’s Efron, as the ostensible top dog Kevin, who is burdened with the film’s big dramatic arc. Kevin is not the brightest and possibly not even the most talented of the Von Erichs, but he is the most well adjusted, and Durkin charts his difficult journey to realizing the poisonous circumstances of his upbringing.

Efron is very talented given the right material—he’s a charming doofus in the Neighbors films, and appropriately emo in the DJ dramedy We Are Your Friends. His work in The Iron Claw feels like a major leap forward, or at least a perfect match of skill and plot. As Kevin’s life drags on and his brothers’ lives are cut sadly short, Efron powerfully demonstrates the character’s perseverance and eventual acceptance that, no, he is not fated to a similarly destructive end. Durkin might be the feel-bad filmmaker of the decade, and I mean that in the best way possible: He can depict tragedy with sensitivity and grace, and somehow not let his films be overwhelmed by their darkest moments.

The White House and Senate continue to work frantically toward a deal to supply Ukraine before Congress recesses for Christmas. Supposedly, all leaders of Congress are united in their commitment to Ukraine—so the new speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, insists. Yet somehow this allegedly united commitment is not translating into action. Why not?

The notional answer is that Republicans must have a border-security deal as the price for Ukraine aid. But who on earth sets a price that could stymie something they affirmatively want to do? Republicans have not conditioned their support for Social Security on getting a border deal. They would never say that tax cuts must wait until after the border is secure. Only Ukraine is treated as something to be bartered, as if at a county fair. How did that happen?  

Ukraine’s expendability to congressional Republicans originates in the sinister special relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.

Pre-Trump, Republicans expressed much more hawkish views on Russia than Democrats did. Russia invaded eastern Ukraine and annexed Crimea in spring 2014. In a Pew Research survey in March of that year, 58 percent of Republicans complained that President Barack Obama’s response was “not tough enough,” compared with just 22 percent of Democrats. After the annexation, Republicans were more than twice as likely as Democrats to describe Russia as “an adversary” of the United States: 42 percent to 19 percent. As for Putin personally, his rule was condemned by overwhelming majorities of both parties. Only about 20 percent of Democrats expressed confidence in Putin in a 2015 Pew survey, and 17 percent of Republicans.

Trump changed all that—with a lot of help from pro-Putin voices on Fox News and right-wing social media.

At the beginning of Trump’s ascendancy in the GOP, even his future allies in Congress distrusted his pro-Russian affinities. Kevin McCarthy, a future House speaker, was inadvertently recorded in a June 2016 meeting with other Republican congressional leaders, saying, “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump.” Some in the room laughed. McCarthy responded, “Swear to God.” (Dana Rohrabacher was a Republican House member from California, a notorious Putin apologist, and a joke figure among his caucus colleagues; despite almost 30 years’ seniority in the House, he was kept away from major committee assignments.)

If Trump had not caught a lucky bounce in the Electoral College in November 2016, he’d have gotten the Rohrabacher treatment too. After the Access Hollywood tape leaked, many prominent Republicans, including then-Speaker Paul Ryan, distanced themselves from Trump. In the election, Republicans lost two seats in the Senate and six in the House. Trump himself received a shade over 46 percent of the popular vote—a slightly larger share than John McCain got amid the economic catastrophe of 2008, but less than Mitt Romney in 2012, John Kerry in 2004, and Al Gore in 2000.

[Anne Applebaum: The American face of authoritarian propaganda]

Even if Trump had lost, there would still have been an enlarged constituency for American Putinism among far-right ideologues and social-media influencers. As early as 2013, the prominent social conservative Pat Buchanan had written a column that seemed to hail Putin as “one of us,” an ally in the fight against abortion and homosexuality. Buchanan-style reactionary nationalism exercised a strong influence on many of the next generation of rightist writers and talkers.

By the mid-2010s, groups such as the National Rifle Association were susceptible to infiltration by Russian-intelligence assets. High-profile conservatives accepted free trips and speaking fees from organizations linked to the Russian government pre-Trump. A lucrative online marketplace for pro-Moscow messages and conspiracy theories already existed. White nationalists had acclaimed Putin as a savior of Christian civilization for years before the Trump campaign began.

But back then, none of this ideological or opportunistic pro-Putinism was all that connected to the world of electoral politics or mainstream conservative thought. The future Fox News star Tucker Carlson—soon to be Russia’s preeminent champion in U.S. mass media—publicly avowed his sympathy for Putin only after Trump’s election.

But once Trump became the GOP leader, he tangled the whole party in his pro-Russia ties. A telling indicator came in January 2017, when Trump’s nominee for attorney general, Jeff Sessions, denied—under oath, yet falsely—that he had held two meetings with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, during the 2016 campaign. This lie made little sense: As a senator on the Armed Services Committee, Sessions met with foreign ambassadors all the time, and he was never in the slightest implicated in any Trump-Russia impropriety. Why not tell the truth?

The answer seems to be that Sessions had somehow intuited that the Trump campaign was hiding some damaging secret about Russia. Without knowing what that secret was, he presumably wanted to put some distance between himself and it.

The urge to align with the party’s new pro-Russian leader reshaped attitudes among Republican Party loyalists. From 2015 to 2017, Republican opinion shifted markedly in a pro-Russia and pro-Putin direction. In 2017, more than a third of surveyed Republicans expressed favorable views of Putin. By 2019, Carlson—who had risen to the top place among Fox News hosts—was regularly promoting pro-Russian, anti-Ukrainian messages to his conservative audience. His success inspired imitators among many other conservative would-be media stars.

[David A. Graham: Republicans are playing house]

For Republican elected officials, however, the decisive shift seemed to come during Trump’s first impeachment. Trump withheld from Ukraine promised weapons in order to pressure Kyiv to announce a criminal investigation of his likely election rival, Joe Biden.

After the impeachment trial, 51 percent of Republicans surveyed by Pew said that Trump had done nothing wrong. The key to understanding how they could believe that is the concept of “undernews.” During the Obama presidency, more extreme conservative media trafficked in rumors that Obama was secretly gay and having an affair with a male aide, or else that Michelle Obama was secretly transgender. This rubbish was too lurid, offensive, and stupid ever to be repeated on Fox News itself. But Fox hosts regularly made jokes and references that only made sense to viewers who had absorbed the undernews from other sources.

Undernews made itself felt during the first Trump impeachment too. The official defense of Trump, the one articulated by more high-toned hosts, was that the extortion of Ukraine did not rise to the level of impeachment. After all, Ukraine got its weapons in the end: no harm, no foul. In the undernews, however, this defense was backed by an elaborate fantasy that Trump had been right to act as he did.

In this fantasy, Ukraine became the center of a global criminal enterprise masterminded by the Biden family. Trump, the myth went, had heroically acted to reveal the plot—only to be thwarted by the Deep State’s machinations in Washington and Kyiv. Believers in the undernews reimagined Ukraine as a pro-Biden mafia state that had cruelly victimized Trump. They burned to inflict payback on Ukraine for the indignity of Trump’s first impeachment.

This delusory narrative was seldom articulated in venues where nonbelievers might hear it. But the delusion shaped the opinion of believers—and the behavior of those who sought votes from those believers: congressional Republicans.

At first, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 appalled almost all elected officials in Washington. A congressman named Mike Johnson, then a Republican backbencher, spoke for many: “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine’s sovereign territory threatens the greatest destabilization of the world order since WWII and constitutes a national security threat to the entire West,” he said in a statement published on the invasion’s first day.

Johnson voted for the first aid package to Ukraine a month later. Then, in May of that year, Johnson reversed himself, joining 56 other Republican House members to vote against a $40 billion package. This was Johnson’s explanation for his coat-turning on Ukraine:

We should not be sending another $40 billion abroad when our own border is in chaos, American mothers are struggling to find baby formula, gas prices are at record highs, and American families are struggling to make ends meet, without sufficient oversight over where the money will go.

These excuses did not make much sense in 2022. They make even less sense in 2023.

The current aid request for Ukraine proposes $14 billion for U.S. border security, including funding for some 2,000 new asylum officers and judges. Because the great majority of asylum claims are rejected, more officers means faster removals and less incentive for border-crossers to arrive in the first place.

As for the baby-formula problem that Johnson cited, that was long ago solved. Gas prices have dropped below $3.20 a gallon nationwide (and to just $2.75 in Johnson’s Louisiana). Wages are once again rising faster than inflation, while Americans’ purchasing power (adjusted for inflation) is erasing the losses it suffered during the pandemic. The complaint about oversight was always untrue, even silly, because almost all funds for aiding Kyiv are actually spent in the U.S. to make and ship the supplies Ukraine needs.

So long as Kevin McCarthy led the House Republicans, the relationship between their leadership and Trump was one of fear and submission. Once Johnson replaced McCarthy, the relationship between the speaker and Trump shifted to active collaboration. McCarthy helped Ukraine as much as he dared; Johnson helps Ukraine as little as he can. Johnson still talks about resisting Russia, but when it comes time to act, he does as Trump wants.

[David Frum: Why the GOP doesn’t really want a deal on Ukraine and the border]

A majority of the House Republican caucus still rejects attempts to cut off Ukraine. A test vote on September 28 counted 126 pro-Ukraine Republicans versus 93 anti. Three-quarters of the whole House favors Ukraine aid. But Johnson and his team now control the schedule and the sequence of events. That group responds to the steady beat of the undernews: Ukraine = enemy of Trump; abandoning Ukraine = proof of loyalty to Trump.

As Trump nears renomination by his party in 2024, the displays of loyalty to him have become ever more obligatory for Republicans. Solidarity with Ukraine has faltered as support for Trump has consolidated. Make no mistake: If Republicans in Congress abandon Ukraine to Russian aggression, they do so to please Trump. Every other excuse is a fiction or a lie.

* Photo-collage image sources: Scott Olson / Getty; Juan Medina / Getty; Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times / Getty; Justin Sullivan / Getty.

White House national security adviser tours Middle East after Biden warns Israel about 'indiscriminate' bombing of Gaza.

A remark by Donald Trump at a Fox News town hall this week triggered a row over authoritarianism.

At halftime of college football’s Big 12 Championship last weekend in Arlington, Texas, two students met on the field for a competition that would have, in its way, higher stakes than the game itself. It was time for the Dr Pepper Tuition Giveaway.

The promotion has been held at major conference championship games since 2008. It works like this: Students wearing Dr Pepper–branded jerseys have 30 seconds to lob as many Dr Pepper–branded footballs as possible into a giant Dr Pepper–branded can with a circular hole cut into its side; whoever sinks the most wins $100,000 for tuition or to help pay off student loans. The announcer then asks the winner what this means to them, and the winner thanks some combination of their friends, their family, God, and Keurig Dr Pepper Inc. The runner-up gets $20,000, and third-place finishers, who are eliminated the day before in a preliminary round of football-tossing in an empty stadium, receive $2,500 in tuition money. They are not mentioned on the telecast.

As an exercise in corporate branding, this is fairly standard. Basketball games have their sponsored half-court heaves; hockey games have their center-ice shots; baseball games have a truly bewildering array of inter-inning promotions. The Dr Pepper Tuition Giveaway appears to be well liked by fans, and students who participate are not inclined to have regrets. But still there’s something dark about this entertainment. More than 40 million Americans have student-loan debt, amounting to at least $1.6 trillion in all. That burden may affect their choice of when to marry, have children, or buy a home. A tuition giveaway—with students’ futures set against each other on national TV—turns this crisis into a spectacle.

This year’s Big 12 edition pitted Ohio State’s Gavin White, who’d use the money to pursue a degree in meteorology, against the University of Pennsylvania’s Ryan Georgian, who needed it to launch a career as an entrepreneur working “to help address social inequalities.” They aren’t quite the anonymous fans picked out of the stands who might win some halftime cash if they’re really lucky. The tuition giveaway’s contestants are defined by need: Students apply to participate in the promotion by uploading a 60-second video explaining how the prize would enable them to pursue their goal of becoming a teacher or a pediatrician or a scientist at NASA.

On game day, the announcer then shares the finalists’ backstories with the crowd, just before the competition starts. They might ask a student what the prize would mean to him, and the student might reply, “This tuition money would take a huge financial burden off my family.” (That exchange, from the 2019 SEC edition of the giveaway, has stuck in my mind.) It’s all a bit grotesque, the way students’ dreams and desperation are leveraged for our entertainment.

Any tuition money is a boon, even when it comes from an utterly inane but high-stakes contest for the casual enjoyment of spectators and, by extension, the enhancement of the Dr Pepper brand. When I spoke with past winners of the event, they had nothing but positive feelings to share. Reagan Whitaker, who won last year’s SEC edition of the giveaway, told me that she still keeps in touch with both of her co-finalists, and with the Dr Pepper reps she met at the event. (She used the money to help pay for her enrollment at Vanderbilt University, where she is studying to be an audiologist.) This year, the company arranged for Whitaker to go see the SEC Championship again, even though she wasn’t competing for financial aid. A representative for Dr Pepper declined to comment on the ethics of the event, saying only in an email that the company “has awarded over $17.5M in tuition to deserving students over the past 30 years and has a vibrant alumni network that the brand continues to keep in touch with.”

This line was straight out of the company’s promotional materials (and, seemingly, the script given to the announcer at each tuition giveaway), which emphasize that Dr Pepper is in the business of giving money to “deserving students.” The competition’s official rules do not specify any standards for determining which students deserve to be finalists beyond an evaluation of their videos. As for which finalists are deserving of $2,500 and which are deserving of $100,000, that’s a question of who can throw the most footballs into a giant Dr Pepper can in 30 seconds.

The participants have weeks to prepare for the toss. Because time is of the essence and the giant cans are only five yards away, the chest-pass technique is the most popular, though you’ll occasionally see a classic overhand throw or even an underhand toss. White told me that he spent an hour every day perfecting the technique for his toss (a chest pass capped off by a flick of the wrists, though he tried one-handed, underhand, and overhand throws as well) and transfer (better to keep your eyes fixed on the target and grab the next football blind than to look into the bin as you do so). His opponent, Georgian, practiced in his backyard with a detached basketball rim. Whitaker said she built her own giant-can replica from PVC pipes and a hula hoop. She spent more than 40 hours training.

When the shot clock hit zero at the Big 12 Championship on Saturday, White and Georgian were tied at 10. “Oh my goodness! Are you kidding me!?” the announcer said. “We get overtime from Dr Pepper here!” Remarkably, even after the 15-second overtime, the contestants remained deadlocked—16 all. Which meant a sudden-death double-overtime shootout. White won the Dr Pepper–branded–coin toss and went first, but he missed his shot, and Georgian sank his for the win.

Or so it seemed. Almost immediately, viewers began pointing out online that the referees had made a counting error in the first overtime period. They’d given Georgian an extra point, meaning that White should have been the out-and-out winner there and then. The competition never should have gone to a shootout. Fans demanded #justiceforgavin, and that afternoon, the company, presumably realizing that a La La Land–Moonlight–style rescinding of Georgian’s title would not be a good look, awarded both contestants the full $100,000. Georgian walked away with an extra $80,000 in tuition money—probably good for at least a couple of semesters at a private college—because of a counting error.