The Traitors Recap: Secrets Revealed
Whose tarot card did Rob R. and Lisa decide to burn? It’s a question not only I but also their fellow Traitor, Candiace, wants the answer to. Since she was busy coordinating the suspicious conga line to distract everyone during the murder in plain sight, she missed all the action and has since been nervous that Rob C. will catch on to their plot. Since these two traitorous factions weren’t able to confer, they weren’t able to consider that Rob C. was on to them when making this decision. Lucky for them, though, Lisa and Rob R. decided to kill him anyway. Was it because he’s a threatening game player, or because Rob R. wanted to be the only Rob in the castle? I’ll let you be the judge of that.
But when his murder is revealed at breakfast, Candiace (who was hoping and praying for his death) delivers a tour de force performance. “NOOO!” she wails. Academy Award. “Rob was my homeboy,” she tearily says, before they cut to her gleefully hooting and hollering in her confessional. She even makes a toast in his honor at the table, which, in my opinion, might have been pushing it, but nobody seemed to flag it as being suspiciously excessive.
It probably helped that the table was distracted by an argument that broke out between Yam Yam and Michael, who was continuing to cry over not being given Yam Yam’s shield as a handout. “I didn’t realize that a Traitor could have had the shield,” he says to Yam Yam with a mouth full of food spraying everywhere, once again unabashedly exposing that he’s too dumb to know how the game works. Yam Yam shuts him down with ease because smack talk is simply not one of Michael’s strengths. And the more he tries and fails, the more visibly annoyed the rest of the table becomes with his presence. He might just become the first player banished purely because people are tired of hearing his voice.
Luckily, Alan arrives dressed as bisexual Heat Miser to put us out of our misery, but he’s there with a twist. While he’d normally be bringing the players to their first mission, he tells them that today they’re heading straight to the roundtable. Gasp! A roundtable in the light of day just feels wrong, like when the Super Bowl halftime performer has to do the show in the sunlight. Everybody scatters to confer, but ultimately the names being thrown around are the same: Ron, Donna, Yam Yam, and Michael (who, god willing, will be packing up all of his sweat-stained clothes and heading home soon).
When they arrive at the table, Donna lays out a case against Michael (who always seems to have a film of spittle around the corners of his mouth) — pointing out that historically, Traitors like to make a big show of wanting a shield so it looks like they need one, which is exactly what he’s been doing. She also points out that Rob C. voted for Michael just before he was killed, and adds that she thinks he’s either being as annoying as possible so the Traitors will keep him around as a distraction, or he is a Traitor himself. Drag him, Mama Kelce! She adds that she doesn’t think he’s actually as ignorant about the rules of the game as he seems, which is such a good point to bring up. If you recall, one of the first things this ghoul brought up upon entering the castle was that he had studied this game, and yet at every turn, he seemingly had zero idea how it was played. A deliberate strategy? Or have all of his brain cells corroded away after years of huffing his own scent? We can only assume the latter.
He maintains that not only is he a Faithful, but he also alleges, “I’m the best looking, smartest, dopest, faithful Faithful.” So here’s the thing — no. Every single descriptor he uses is, of course, empirically incorrect, and displays a level of delusion so intense that I have genuine questions about how this person passed the show’s psych evaluation. I’m praying that this vote finally puts us out of our misery.
But when the votes were finally cast … I almost threw up. I can’t believe this is happening to me. By a nearly unanimous vote, Donna Kelce was banished. I will never forgive every single last member of this cast for this absolute insurrection, which they clearly all planned without telling me. They let their poor judgment take control, abandoned their morals, and worst of all, condemned me to more time than I have to waste my life watching Michael Rapaport be an idiot on this show. I can’t believe they’d do this to my girl Donna. She steps up to the circle of truth to reveal to them that she is, in fact, a Faithful, as I’ve always known her to be, but then she announces with pizazz and flair, “You’ve got yourself a TRAITOR.”
Oh my god. Donna Kelce was the Secret Traitor. She’s been the one pulling the strings and telling the other Traitors who they can kill, all in calculated silence. “It’ll be just a hoot, I can’t wait,” she says in a flashback upon being given this secret role. This was brilliant casting. She’s crying happy tears at the end, thrilled to have gotten this experience at all. And even though all of the players who voted for her turned out to be right, I’m still mad at them. But I guess it’s no surprise they turned her in, ‘cause us traitors never win (to quote her future daughter-in-law).
The good news is that our traitorous trio is now just that, and they seem to have a good thing going. But before they can meet up in the turret, it’s mission time. The players all pair up, with one of them getting locked in a cage while their partner has to find and stack ten skulls to free them. Finally, a television show that locks Lisa Rinna in a cage for the safety of those around her. I suspect many of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills had been campaigning for this for years. Think about how much easier Kim Richards’s life would have been. But the thing that’s really distracting me during this whole challenge is watching Johnny try to free Eric, if you can even call it trying. The entire mission ends, and he didn’t even manage to find his ten skulls, let alone stack them up to free his partner. And he’s an Olympian! A humiliating display.
That failure means that Eric, along with Lisa, Kristen, Ron, and Caroline — all of whom were also left unfreed from their cages — are up for murder. Since we know Lisa is a Traitor, that leaves four players at risk. But rather than our usual murder by way of envelope, our potential victims are taken out into the woods in the dead of night, blindfolded, and tied to a tree while our Traitors decide which of them to kill. They make a fair case for each of them. No Housewives have been murdered yet, so killing Caroline would take some potential heat off of Lisa and Candiace. Killing Ron would create some good confusion since everyone thinks he’s a Traitor, Eric would similarly seem like a random choice that would lead to some chaos, and Kristen is just a good ol’ fashioned threat. For some theatrical flair they take to the woods to carry out their mission in person, with each of their blindfolded hostages pleading their case. Well, except Ron, who uses the opportunity to essentially dare them to kill him and demands that they show their faces. While we don’t yet know who they’re killing, we do know that Ron Funches needs to be cast in a psychological horror film as soon as possible.