Danielle’s nightmare is finally over. After despising her assigned co-Traitors all season, they’re finally all gone, which means she can recruit her pal Britney to the turret. Since the choice is to join Danielle or die, Britney naturally signs up, even though it’s clearly been a tough time to be a Traitor lately. But what will their first move as a traitorous duo be? They agree that everybody except Dylan and Dolores, who they trust, has to go. But who first?
Thankfully, Gabby is safe, likely on account of the bartering with God I did to ensure that very outcome, and it’s Tom Sandoval who gets killed in the night. While this is great news for his nemesis, Dolores, I will miss Tom’s entertaining arrogance so much. Even upon receiving his death notice, he says he saw it coming since he was obviously the most threatening guy in the group. “I didn’t realize I was gonna be so good at it,” he says of his own gameplay, which is beautiful and hilarious given that he was, if you recall, bad at the game. But did he really lose? It’s always interesting to see the impact The Traitors can have on a player’s preexisting reputation, and if anything, I think this show was a brilliant move for Tom because it elevated him from villain to court jester. “For once, you were actually Faithful,” Alan says as he throws his portrait down, a line the show’s surely been waiting to use all season.
After breakfast, we have our typical conspiring happening throughout the castle, but most of the focus seems to be on Danielle and Gabby. Danielle and Dylan have their eyes on Gabby, who, in turn, is rightfully suspicious of Danielle. Ivar’s focus is also on Danielle, so things are pretty evenly split. And in an eerie, cinematic moment, after all this hubbub and running around dies down, our two gals in the hot seat find themselves in the same room, where they sit silently next to each other, sipping their tea.
For this week’s three-part mission, the show is playing the hits — we get clowns, we get dolls, we get bags full of shit. But naturally, there’s a twist — yes, an even bigger twist than bags full of shit. Whoever earns the most gold in the end will become “The Seer,” meaning they will have the power to discover another player’s true identity. This is a huge reward for obvious reasons, but just as much as a Faithful will want this perk to expose a Traitor, the Traitors need it even more to stay safe. Oh, and it’s important to note that Alan Cumming is explaining all of this to them while dressed as William Shakespeare.
In the first part of the mission, they’re joined by 15 clowns because that’s how many it takes to fill the gap left by Tom Sandoval. The players all pop the clowns’ balloons to reveal if they chose one with gold or hit a dead end. Luckily, the players who earned no gold could try again at the next part of the mission with the creepy dolls. Rehashing the rules of how each challenge works and who ultimately racked up some cash is boring, so let me skip right to the most interesting part: In the third mission, they have to fish gold coins out of what appears to be bags of shit. And that’s not just according to my expert eye, that’s according to Dylan, who says, “These bags were filled with the foulest-smelling poop.” Beyond that, the show gives us little concrete explanation for what exactly is inside of these bags, which I find deeply haunting. Where did they get this shit? Is it Lala’s?
When all is said and done, Alan tells them that one of them did ultimately bank the most gold, thus making them the Seer. But there’s a catch — he won’t be revealing this information until after tonight’s roundtable, earning a gasp from Gabby and myself alike. They made these poor reality stars dig through shit, and they won’t even treat them to a reveal?
So, without any Seer just yet, the gang washes up and gets to chatting ahead of the roundtable. Dylan and Gabby, who together have the best handle on the game happening around them, talk through their options, and Gabby makes a strong case to him against Danielle. She even brings up how she almost caught her the night of the murder in plain sight. Even Dylan, who for some reason has found himself under Danielle’s spell, is starting to become convinced. But just as Gabby leaves, Danielle comes for her turn at Professor Efron’s office hours, where he tells her it’s shaping up to be between her and Gabby. It’s when Dylan admits that he’s open to hearing Gabby out that soap star Danielle comes back to play, delivering a melodramatic performance of betrayal worthy of a Daytime Emmy (nomination).
With the Traitors on shaky ground, Britney and Danielle kick off the roundtable by going after Gabby, first bringing up her cliquey group of Bambis. But Gabby is well prepared for this moment and comes alive at the roundtable, saying that Danielle’s attacks on Carolyn felt like they came from a place of inside knowledge, leading her to believe that this was another case of Traitor-on-Traitor crime. A perfect and correct read of the situation from our brilliant Gabby, who also asserts that she was kept around for this very moment. When Danielle turns to her usual defense — simply saying that she’s Faithful — Gabby hits her with a simple “Same,” deflating Danielle’s favorite nonargument.
In better news for Danielle, Dolores comes to her defense and throws out Ivar’s name instead. I love that Dolores doesn’t consider gameplay or numbers when casting her vote; she simply goes off of how she personally feels in the moment. Ivar takes this as an attack on the “token Brit,” just another in the long line of attacks this marginalized community (British people) have faced throughout history.
Is Dolores throwing away her vote like she’s done in the past? It definitely seems that way at first, but something surprising happens when the votes are actually counted. What seemed to be shaping up to be a race between Danielle and Gabby turns into one between Danielle and Ivar when Danielle casts her vote for him instead of the person she spent the whole roundtable attacking. All right, is this the first tactful move Danielle has made all season? We don’t know for sure when she decided to switch courses, but if I were giving her the benefit of the doubt, I hope she and Britney realized that their best course of action wasn’t trying to get Dolores on their side but instead join in on Dolores’s throwaway vote to play the numbers. When Britney also casts her vote for Ivar, it definitely seems like there was some conspiring that happened to get them both on the same page — but even so, since Dylan voted for Danielle, the vote ends up being a tie.
Alan tells them that since it was a draw, Danielle and Ivar will get the chance to make one final plea, and then everybody but them will vote again. If it remains a tie, then their fate will be decided by chance. What exactly that looks like we don’t yet know. A coin flip? Rock-paper-scissors? Perhaps a producer named Chance?
In any case, Ivar keeps his final remarks simple and Danielle uses hers to plead directly to Dylan specifically, basically begging him to change his vote. It’s as these final votes are cast that Britney sees Dolores look to Danielle and nod — which she thinks means Dolores is switching her vote to Danielle. But in her confessional, as she reads deeply into this minuscule piece of body language, Britney says she still thinks she wouldn’t be able to stomach voting for her friend. Oh, I’m sorry, I thought Britney was supposed to be a great game player? It’s finally time to be cutthroat and make a killer move, and she might chicken out because it’s her friend? Boo!
But despite Britney being so certain that Dolores was changing course, when she reveals her vote, we see that, like Dylan, she didn’t waver. Britney’s jaw falls to the ground upon seeing that Dolores still voted for Ivar. So whether Danielle is out or it’s another tie all comes down to Britney’s vote, but just as we get there, the episode ends. I otherwise would have predicted all the votes would stay the same, leading to another tie, but Britney’s intense reaction to Dolores’s vote makes me wonder and hope that something more interesting might have played out. Could her misreading of Dolores lead to her making a big move and turning on her fellow Traitor? Fingers crossed.
