It’s down to the wire, so off come the pocket protectors

The voice-over introduction to each episode of “Beauty and the Geek,” Ashton Kutcher’s reality hit on the WB, claims that the competition is “a social experiment, designed to find out if seven beautiful women and seven geeks can help each other to become a whole lot more.”

As a made-for-television clinical trial to examine what happens when you combine brainy, awkward men and attractive, uneducated women, the show hasn’t lived up to its banal promise. In fact, it has presented something much more interesting: the backbiting hierarchy among social outcasts.

The 1996 Todd Solondz film “Welcome to the Dollhouse” perfectly illustrated the angry power dynamics that fuel the world of nerds. In the movie, whatever indignities Dawn Wiener, the seventh-grader also known as “Wiener-dog,” is subjected to at school, she then enacts on anyone she deems worse off than she is, such as a delinquent classmate and an effeminate neighbor. The lesson: However much of a loser you are, there is always someone more pathetic.

That stratification has emerged as the main narrative thread on “Beauty and the Geek.” And on Wednesday’s finale, viewers will see a showdown between the opposite ends of the nerd spectrum, as exemplified by Richard and Chuck.

Richard is a traditional “Revenge of the Nerds” type: His pants are hiked up to his chin, he wears thick glasses and he talks with a nasal, Woody Allen-inspired cadence. Chuck, on the other hand, looked too normal at first glance to be considered one of the geeks. So what if he was in medical school studying functional neural imaging? That just means he’s smart. Then Chuck’s nose began to bleed. Two nosebleeds later -- both by the end of the first episode, both caused by nerves -- it was obvious that Chuck is a nerd in remission. Somewhere along the line, probably during the summer between high school and college, he started working out and forbidding his mother to buy his clothes. Richard symbolizes the fate he narrowly escaped.

We first saw Chuck’s burgeoning dislike of Richard in the second episode -- he patronizingly told Richard that if he isn’t going to act seriously, no one will ever take him seriously. Chuck and his game partner, Caitilin, have done well in the challenges, which has allowed them on several occasions to choose which couples have to compete against each other to stay on the show. In episode three, Chuck picked Richard and Mindi, his partner, to contend with another beauty-geek pair. To Chuck’s dismay, Richard and Mindi won.

By the end of the fourth episode, Chuck and Richard simply hated each other. Chuck, having won another challenge, had the power to send a couple to the elimination round. Richard appeared with a blindfold on and a fake cigarette, imitating someone appearing before a firing squad. When Chuck selected him and Mindi, Richard yelled, “I go down with honor!” Chuck looked at him witheringly. “You go down with ridicule, Rich,” he said.

The fact is, Richard is annoying. He puts on a nerd version of a minstrel show -- his act is all funny voices and desperate bids for attention. It’s enjoyable on television, though in person you might want to kill him. But it’s impossible to side with Chuck, given how pompous he is. In last week’s episode, after a challenge that involved hiking, fishing and pitching a tent, Chuck kept nagging Richard to stop playing with the campfire. He said to the camera: “Campfires for me tend to be a pretty special time.”

On Wednesday’s episode, these geeks and their accompanying beauties will contend for the show’s $250,000 prize. Whatever the result of the actual game, Chuck lost our sympathies in front of the fire.

“Have you ever been tested for ADD, Rich?” he asked. Chuck wasn’t speaking out of concern, he was speaking out of malice. And he wasn’t done. “I just feel like your life would probably go a little smoother,” he said, “if you had a little bit of control over your impulses.”