Untangling The Traitors’ Opening Twists
Warning: Spoilers ahead for the first two episodes of season three of The Traitors, now available on Peacock.
The Traitors U.S. returns for its third season somehow even more packed with big-personality reality-TV all-stars than it was the last time, and in the first three episodes, these players hit the ground running — or, in the case of the first-episode challenge, rowing. But there are also a bunch of twists in this initial batch of episodes that, while designed to throw the players for a loop, risk leaving certain viewers in the dark as well.
The beauty of The Traitors’s all-reality-veterans setup is watching pre-existing relationships and reputations clash, but it does require a certain amount of institutional memory to get the full picture. Add to that Alan Cumming’s penchant for theatrically introducing new twists into the game, and we need to untangle some of these threads.
TWIST: Boston Rob wants in
The short version: After the 20 Traitors cast members arrive in front of Alan Cumming’s Scottish castle, Alan arrives with a phalanx of hooded, masked attendants, lined up like an army of druid minions or people ready to get freaky at a Fidelio sex party. After Alan gives his introductory remarks with customary flair, he dismisses the hooded minions … but one remains and is unhooded to reveal the baseball-cap-topped visage of Survivor’s Boston Rob Mariano. Alan gives the 20 gathered contestants a choice: Anyone may step forward and shake his hand, thus entering Rob into the game. But in exchange, they would have to (or get to) banish someone from the game immediately.
The background info: You probably don’t need the collected gasps from the players to know why this is a big deal. You’ve likely heard of Boston Rob even if you don’t watch Survivor (or any of the other reality shows he’s been on, including two seasons of The Amazing Race and one of Deal or No Deal Island). Rob’s legend arose during his second season of Survivor (2004’s Survivor: All Stars), on which he played a ruthlessly backstabbing game, dispatching no fewer than four players who thought him to be their endgame ally, and escorting himself and future wife Amber to the final two. Rob returned to Survivor three more times as a player, winning once, on a season full of newbies who worshiped him (the less said about the season where he and Sandra Diaz-Twine were on-island consultants the better).
Over the years, Rob’s reputation as a ruthless gamer has only become more canonized … as has the sense that you’d be a fool if you allowed him to stick around long enough to plunge a knife into your back. On Survivor’s all-winners 40th season (in which Rob played with Traitors three’s Tony and Jeremy), Rob was eliminated fairly early, mostly because nobody on his tribe wanted to play the fool to his mastermind.
On the other side of the coin, some of these Traitors players have plenty of reason to want to get rid of some of their newly revealed cast members. Recent Survivor alum Carolyn has no trust for Tony, a two-time Survivor winner whose reputation for ruthlessly ditching allies en route to victory almost matches Rob’s. Then there are Big Brother alums Danielle and Britney, with the former holding a grudge against the latter for a betrayal that occurred on a mini-season lark called Big Brother: Reindeer Games. Danielle and Britney have a quick, tearful coming to terms immediately after arriving at the castle, but in their interviews, they both admit that it might be easier just to get rid of each other at the outset.
How it shakes out: Danielle and Britney decide the threat of Rob outweighs their current frenemy status, and Carolyn pulls a billion faces before ultimately losing her nerve. So a perturbed Boston Rob gets escorted away by two of Alan’s masked minions, seemingly to some dungeon on the property (probably the one where Kate met Phaedra last year), to everyone else’s great relief.
TWIST: This season, banished players won’t reveal if they’re Traitors or Faithful in the finale.
The short version: After Alan selects his Traitors, he gives the assembled players the news of a change in the game: In the finale, when a player is banished, their true identity as Traitor or Faithful won’t be revealed, adding an extra layer of uncertainty to the remaining players’ decisions.
The background info: Last season, when Kate Chastain was eliminated in fourth place, she revealed that she was, indeed, a Traitor. Since the remaining Faithful (CT, Trishelle, and MJ) had just dispatched Traitor Phaedra the night before, then Shereé was murdered right after, they knew the chances were miniscule that another Traitor had been recruited, meaning Kate’s reveal all but guaranteed that all the Traitors were gone and the Faithful had succeeded. (And then CT and Trishelle went and banished MJ anyway so they could get more money, which, honestly fair, and MJ should really get over it.) But it was certainly an anticlimactic way to end the game.
How it shakes out: Some viewers might misunderstand this twist to mean that all banished players will keep their Traitor/Faithful status a secret, but Alan clearly states: “Those of you who make it to the Final will no longer reveal whether they are a Traitor as they leave. To determine whether there are any Traitors left in my game, you will rely solely on your instincts.” So to be clear, this only applies to the season finale when the final five are all gathered by Alan’s fire pit.
TWIST: The opening challenge leaves only eight players murder-eligible.
The short version: The first challenge tasks the group of 20 players to board a dragon boat and chart a course across the loch, past a series of pontoons where they will pick up money (up to $40,000) or fuel, which, upon returning to shore, the players who complete the mission will use to light a ring of fire, inside of which said players will be safe from the first murder. The twist is that along the way, in exchange for the money or fuel at each pontoon, two players must volunteer to be abandoned, thus sacrificing safety from the first murder and enduring a cold and wet afternoon on the loch.
The background info: One of the difficulties The Traitors’s first two U.S. seasons grappled with was making the challenges matter. Yes, Kate turned everybody against her in season one by ostentatiously refusing to contribute to the team, and yes, there are opportunities to earn shields along the way, but because the Traitors want to build up the prize pot as much as the Faithful do, the challengers don’t really help when it comes to seeking out Traitorous behavior.
Then there’s the gender dynamics that exist across most competitive reality shows, which make themselves known as this challenge goes on. The first four people to volunteer to be abandoned on the pontoons are Housewives Ayan, Robyn, Dolores, and Dorinda. Back on the boat, Bob the Drag Queen loudly calls this out as bullshit, especially when the men start to suggest two more women exit the boat at the next stop. Some of the men eventually get shamed into stepping off the boat (Sam Asghari and his little spit curl, for one), but it is overwhelmingly the girls, gays, and theys (including Bobs Harper and The Drag Queen) who ultimately volunteer to sacrifice themselves.
How it shakes out: After the group decides to turn back rather than continue on to the final $20,000 pontoon, only eight people end up outside of the sphere of safety… and two of those are Traitors Bob the Drag Queen and Danielle. Which leaves the other six — Ayan, Robyn, Dolores, Dorinda, Sam, Bob Harper — as the only ones eligible for murder. This greatly impacts the first murder, if only because the Traitors aren’t able to target, say, Tony (for being a huge threat) or Tom Sandoval (for being Tom Sandoval). But more than that, all eight of these abandoned players return to the castle, cold, wet, and angry that the other players (mostly the men) wouldn’t sacrifice themselves along the route. Bob TDG — who can’t even be murdered! — is one of the saltiest, though he doesn’t hold a candle to Dorinda, who returns to the castle as the Not Well, Bitch meme incarnate.
In other words: Mission accomplished. The challenge has a huge impact on the upcoming murder and provokes a whole bunch of conflict within the house, forcing people like Dorinda to act against their best interests and make waves early on.
TWIST: The unkillable Boston Rob
The short version: You didn’t think they’d fly Boston Rob all the way from his office beneath Fenway Park to the highlands of Scotland just to deny him entry into the game, right? At the end of episode one, Alan heads out into the woods to meet Rob, his hands bound with rope like a medieval prisoner. Alan then informs him that he will indeed enter the game … as a Traitor.
The background info: Due to Rob’s aforementioned threat level, he’s clearly persona non grata among the 20 other cast members. How, then, to help ensure that the ever-marketable Rob sticks around a while?
How it shakes out: Slipping Rob in after the first murder, and as a Traitor, keeps him somewhat insulated, as does the fact that he is immune from the first banishment vote. As are …
TWIST: Two more players!
The short version: After Rob accepts entry into the game as a Traitor, Alan tells him that he will reveal himself to the players the next day, alongside two other players who will join the game with him: The Challenge’s Wes Bergmann and Big Brother’s Derrick Levasseur.
The background info: We’ve known Wes since his days as the exceedingly pale, unjustifiably cocky frat boy on 2005’s The Real World: Austin. The next year, he’d debut on The Challenge: Fresh Meat, where he’d survive five elimination challenges to finish in third place. Over the next nearly 20 years, Wes has appeared on 14 seasons of The Challenge (winning two) as well as seven ancillary seasons of The Challenge (winning one), plus the most recent season of House of Villains, where he finished as runner-up. Wes’s personality has evolved from obnoxious to knowingly obnoxious over the years, and his mastery of The Challenge strategy is impressive insofar as you’re willing to be impressed by strategy on a show where the popular players just insulate themselves with followers until they make it to the end, year after year. To his credit, though, Wes does possess an ability to cut through the ephemera of a show and drill down to the basic numbers game that will ensure him a path to the end, and that does make him dangerous.
In contrast to Wes’s omnipresence on reality TV, Derrick has only ever played once, on Big Brother 16, where he played a mistake-free season, building an orderly alliance around himself and making sure he was at the innermost core of it at every turn. His IRL job as a cop — which he kept secret during the game — was a great hook for BB producers, who played up Derrick’s ability to read other players. His best attribute was an ability to inspire blind loyalty in his alliance partners, to the point where his top ally — Traitors season one’s Cody — chose to eliminate someone he knew he’d beat in the finals rather than betray his alliance to Derrick, to whom he knew he’d likely lose.
Derrick’s legend in the Big Brother fan community has only grown in the subsequent years, especially once word got around that BB producers would instruct incoming players to watch Derrick’s season for tips on how to play a good strategic game. (Indeed, the last decade of Big Brother strategy has been greatly influenced by Derrick’s “Hitmen” alliance and their structure of a small central group with each member recruiting an ancillary ally to keep them insulated.)
How it shakes out: Wes and Derrick will be Faithful (and as far as they or the other Faithfuls know, so is Rob). All three are presented in the episode-two challenge, where they are suspended in cages above the ground out in the woods, like they’ve been accused of witchery or something. Players have to retrieve tokens to liberate them (to be honest, it’s kind of boring after such a great episode-one challenge). Each of the three new entries also gets a shield to bestow on the player of their choosing to keep them safe from the next murder. And all three are safe from the episode-two banishment vote, which is part of what seems to be a cohesive strategy on The Traitors’ part to keep the big gamer personalities from getting picked off too early.