The Traitors Recap: That Girl Is Poison
“Guys,” Parvati happily chirps, “My first murder!” Quick, somebody snap a photo for Grandma’s scrapbook!
All that remains on the traitor docket tonight is the matter of selecting a victim. Who’s well connected and well liked? Janelle. Who’s athletic enough to get all the shields they want? Deontay. Then again … Who openly aired his suspicions about a traitor, has the most-valued opinion in the game, and comes with a built-in ally in the form of his real-life girlfriend? Yikes. If I were Marcus, I’d sleep with one eye open tonight.
Every time they do these staggered entrances at breakfast — letting the contestants walk in only in small groups for maximum dramatic effect, as everyone else waits impatiently to find out who’s been murdered — I can only think about how starving I would be and how it would make me want to bludgeon the producers from keeping me from my stale scones for even a moment longer. Anyway, Phaedra calls out, “Who did you kill, John?!” when he walks in, and I crack up.
Marcus is declared dead on non-arrival. “Shit,” Larsa says.
Alan strolls in wearing a beret (Did I just spend a full five minutes Googling the difference between tams and berets? Yes, because I love you) and a polka-dotted ascot. But for once, his isn’t my favorite outfit of the day. While everyone else is trying their hardest to channel country-estate prep in tweed and argyle, John has mysteriously elected to wear a bright blue button-down with electric guitars, roses, music notes, and golden skulls printed all over it.
Trishelle opines that a traitor must have spent time talking to Marcus and getting to know how smart he is if they considered him a threat. She floats Dan as a possible traitor for being so reserved right in front of Parvati, who’s savvy enough to hold her tongue. She knows it’ll be conspicuous if she’s the only one in the room to defend him.
Larsa, meanwhile, suggests that a man must have murdered Marcus — while staring Dan down extremely unsubtly.
I think back to Marcus’s conversation with Dan the night before (the one that likely sealed his fate as a target). There was a third party in the room: Maks. He seems perceptive; I’m curious to see if he’ll come out swinging against Dan. But before he can, someone comes out swinging (figuratively, thankfully for Maks) against him. Deontay asks Maks what he thinks about Marcus’s murder, but Maks hesitates to weigh in. This rubs Deontay the wrong way. It’s also worth noting that Maks has already not been doing himself any favors through his off-putting habit of walking into rooms where people are talking, declining their invitations to join the conversation, and stiffly backing away.
The next mission takes place at night in a cemetery. In a confessional, Tamra says two sentences, in rapid succession, that I will think about for the rest of my life.
No. 1: “Going up to a graveyard is my biggest fear.” To clarify, her biggest fear isn’t ghosts, or zombies, or even the general idea of death. It’s not being trapped or lost in a graveyard. It’s … going up to a graveyard.
No. 2: “I do not [sic], and will not, be buried alive.” I do not buried alive either, for the record.
The gold is buried inside in graves, tombs, and crypts (marked with the names of last season’s already deceased contestants, plus Bananas and Marcus). The contestants will have to use tools hidden throughout the cemetery to break into them. Meanwhile, two searchlights rove around the grounds. If a contestant is caught in a beam, they’ll be eliminated, including whatever gold they’re holding onto. Half of the players start in the graveyard; the other half wait off to the side as substitutes to rotate in as the A team gets eliminated.
They’re off to a bleak start. The searchlights are relentless, taking down player after player before anyone can find any tools. Finally, CT spots a hammer, but he’s eliminated just as he starts to use it.
And then a hero comes along. Who but Bergie (I keep wanting to call him Bertie; the kid has big Wooster energy) should proclaim to the group that he sees a pattern in the way the lights move and that if they would only listen to him, he could explain how to travel freely among the graves? I have the self-awareness to know that it would have taken at least ten minutes of his continuously pleading for me to take Bergie seriously (as it does for the group), and I’m not proud of that. He’s right. Once the group finally gets with the Bergie program, they, at last, start raking in the gold. When Bergie gets eliminated, he’s celebrated with a big round of applause. They have him to thank for tonight’s $19,000 addition to their prize pot.
Tamra retrieves the first shield from the tomb CT started to break open; Pete finds the second; and Janelle gets her hands on the third, which Ekin-Su believes rightly belonged to her, resulting in an argument somehow even less interesting than the Great Trishelle-Peppermint War of 2024.
By roundtable time, Dan is well aware the others are coming for him. He speaks in his own defense: “I know I’m quiet, but if that’s a crime, so be it.” He hopes they’ll view his more reticent nature as an asset because when he does take a shot and name a name, he wants it to be taken seriously. MJ nevertheless remains eager to put Dan “in the hot seat.” If they all played the way he did, she says, then there’d be no conversation at all. There would be no show!
But before any more momentum can gather against Dan, his guardian angel, Deontay, takes the floor. He swears that Dan is “1,000 percent a faithful,” but he’s not so sure about someone else in the group, someone whose behavior he feels has changed. Deontay truly has a flair for the dramatic: “This man is charming. This man is intelligent … And this man that I feel is a traitor … [He turns dramatically to stare at his subject] is you, Maks.”
Sandra chimes in to add that she thought she saw Maks laughing after Peppermint was banished. He shrugs it off. He was simply “having a reaction” in the moment, he says, then clumsily segues to the tension between Janelle and Ekin-Su. I don’t think either woman is necessarily accusing the other of being a traitor, though; they’re just annoyed and annoying. Maks’s obvious deflection doesn’t play well in the room.
Pete and Kevin concoct a fun little Chaotic Good scheme of voting for one another despite being pals in order to suggest (nonexistent) tension between them that might convince the traitors that, too busy squabbling with each other, they’d be good candidates to keep around.
It’s too early for Parvati to turn on Dan, but she nevertheless does something brilliant: She too votes for Kevin (citing his acting background as a possible advantage for traitordom) but also includes a crossed-out D on her chalkboard that quietly broadcasts she also seriously considered voting for Dan. I love my genius wife.
Ultimately, Maks gets 10 of the 18 votes. Dan, Ekin-Su, and Kevin each get two; in the traitor’s case, those are from the increasingly (and correctly) suspicious Larsa and MJ. Janelle and Peter each get one vote. At this rate, the roundtable would have better odds of banishing a traitor if they pulled a name out of a hat. The Shirley Jackson of it all!
When Maks reveals he’s a faithful, Dan emits the fakest “What?!” of all time. Deontay, on the other hand, scream-exhales in frustration and bangs on a wall. We eventually find him lying down, hardly able to talk. “My heart … I can’t do this no more, man.” I am growing very fond of Deontay, but just to be safe, we are 100 percent sure that he knows people aren’t literally being murdered and banished, yes? Phaedra, of all people, tenderly comforts him.
But before the traitors can rest too long on their laurels, they’re informed of a twist. There will be no secret turret meeting tonight. Instead, they must not only do their plotting as they mingle among the faithful but even worse, they have to commit the murder in plain sight. I love this. Not only does it feel like a sorely needed way to rebalance the game a bit in favor of the faithfuls, but I can’t get enough of the Clue direction this takes.
The weapon? A poisoned chalice, hidden inside a hollowed-out volume of Shakespearean tragedies in the castle library. Whichever faithful’s lips touch the chalice first will be murdered, though there’s no telling when the slow-acting poison will actually take effect. There is no question as to which of the three traitors will screw her courage to the sticking place. Parvati feels like a “trained assassin,” with “zero adrenaline” running through her veins. The leader of the Black Widow Brigade was born for this.
After exclusively killing men so far, Dan wants to murder a woman (feminism <3): MJ. But is that too obvious, now that she’s gunning for him? Phaedra has made it clear that they are not to murder her fellow RHOA Shereé, but … what if Parvati went ahead and did it anyway, without her cooperation? Forgiveness not permission, etc.
Parvati, who is good at this to the point of it being a little concerning, congenially volunteers as a bartender, stepping behind the bar where Sandra, John, and Shereé, et al., are hanging out. But Phaedra soon joins them, and she is watching Parvati like a hawk, no doubt ready to “accidentally” knock the glass out of Shereé’s hands if it should come to that.
No. Too much heat. Parvati wisely sees herself and her chalice (it doesn’t help her cause that the cup looks awfully rusty) out. The kitchen would make a much more interesting crime scene, anyway.
She enters to find Trishelle, MJ, Bergie, Pete, Janelle, and Dan (staring at Parvati with his eyes — you guessed it — wide) all hanging out. Watching her look from face to face and work through this problem in real time, I am legitimately giddy. Who should she kill? Who could she kill? For once, murder is as much about convenience as it is about strategy. And time is of the essence — she needs to act before the clock strikes bedtime.
Unfortunately for us, we’ll have to wait till next week to find out who gets caught in the Black Widow’s web.