This article contains spoiler content.
January has relinquished its title of ‘Worst Month of the Year’ (November, it now falls to you). For the past few years, January has been a time when TV connoisseurs like myself gather three times a week to watch The Traitors. Whether you’re new to the series or a long-time Claudia Winkleman fan who follows everything she does, one thing is certain: The Traitors is fabulous television.
So fabulous, in fact, that I have had to rewrite this article to make up for some unexpected plot twists. I was originally convinced that Minah had the game in the bag. The Traitor proved herself to be one of the best, up there with last year’s winner Harry Clark. Starting rumours that didn’t trace back to her, never explicitly naming names, letting the Faithful dig their own graves; she played a clever game. The Faithful just couldn’t help voting out their own.
That was until she made the fatal blunder of recruiting Welsh-accent-faking Charlotte to join her as a Traitor. After Minah had successfully thrown two of her fellow Traitors, Armani and Linda, under the bus, she was feeling fairly confident. Little did she know that Charlotte was planning the same fate for her.
As for the Faithful this season, it would have made for better viewing if they could engage their brains and ditch the herd mentality. They might have done well to remember the old mantra of ‘treat others as you would like to be treated’, as their actions towards Faithful Kasim bordered on bullying. Poor Kas resorted to eating his lunch alone after they refused to talk to him, believing he was a Traitor. Their reasoning? He had a glimmer in his eye and, as a doctor, it would make sense for him to be ‘saving lives in the day and killing at night’. I would love to conduct an intelligence test on whoever came up with that one.
However, in an unprecedented turn of events, some changes to the rules flipped the game on its head and helped the Faithful to a victory. Firstly, in the penultimate episode, Claudia gleefully announced that whoever won the most money in the mission would gain the power of The Seer (cue audience ‘oooh’). In a move never seen before in the show, The Seer was able to reveal the true identity of one player in a secret meeting. When Frankie became The Seer, nobody expected her to choose Charlotte, her best friend in the show, and more importantly a traitor!
I thought that it would make for a rather boring final if Frankie walked into breakfast the next morning and revealed that Charlotte was a Traitor, with Charlotte going ‘Yeah, you got me’. How wrong was I? Charlotte was not going to go down without a fight, resulting in a ruthless game of ‘she said/she said’. The remaining Faithful were understandably baffled as both Frankie and Charlotte tried to pin the blame on each other.
The second rule change meant that during the last roundtable and the fire pit banishments, the banished players could not reveal their true identities, making the game almost impossible as the players had no way of knowing if they were making the right decisions. I wonder if the end outcome would have been different if Charlotte had revealed that she was a Traitor, as per previous series’ rules.
The series was unmissable viewing as usual, along with the visual podcast The Traitors: Uncloaked, and the highlight of my otherwise bland January. Claudia was fabulous as usual, and made me wonder if I should buy a cape and some fingerless gloves (I know the answer is no but I’m still tempted). Now I find myself at a loss for what to watch – something you don’t expect to hear a Film and TV Editor to say, I know.
The Traitors is available on BBC iPlayer now.
