This article contains spoilers for The Celebrity Traitors
It was such a simple mission. Blow up the heads of the pumpkin scarecrows bearing the names of the people you didn’t want to receive a superpower. Easy! And what did the Faithful go and do? Explode everyone’s scarecrows except Maya Jama’s, James Acaster’s and King Kenny’s – collectively known as the Traitors.
The result of handing all the power in the game to the Traitors will end in disaster for either Sharon Rooney or Joanne McNally. The prize – a dagger granting its owner, Kenny, two votes at the Round Table – in the hands of Traitor Kenny means that either one of them faces banishment, so the Faithful are about to lose one of their own. Again.
Meanwhile, it has been generally accepted that Maya, James A, and Kenny couldn’t possibly be Traitors. Why? Beats me – no one has explained why they believe them to be, in the show’s parlance, 100 per cent faithful. Despite all their talk of “we have to look at everyone”, not one person has ever put the three of them under the microscope. In fact, of the remaining players, only the three Traitors and Faithful Romesh Ranganathan have never had their names written on a Round Table slate.
“Well they successfully banished Traitors Richard E Grant and Hannah Fry,” you might argue. But we can discount Richard’s early exit from the game as any sort of success on the Faithful’s part – once he declared his Traitorhood to the entire room, he was an easy get, no sleuthing required. And Hannah’s banishment was arguably a Traitors’ mistake, rather than a result of successful investigation – of course they would recruit the smartest of the lot.
Speaking of Hannah, things would have been very different had she stayed a Faithful. Speaking on the spin-off show The Celebrity Traitors: Uncloaked, the mathematician explained the Alan Turing-inspired calculations she would have used to crack who the Traitors were. Traitors will always cast a “burn vote” in the first three Round Tables, they’ll never sit with each other at breakfast, and when they vote for another Traitor, they will never have voted for them before. Guess who fits into every single one of her theories?
At this point in the game, the Faithful are usually hot on the Traitors’ lying tails. At least one person has usually figured out the whole game and is desperately trying to convince their teammates that the nice, quiet one really is murdering the group one by one. But not on the celebrity version of The Traitors. In this game – and especially in this series – the Faithful are incapable of catching the bad guys.
The lack of tension is making it a tough watch. Take this week’s cliffhanger – after a tied vote at the Round Table, we know that either Faithful Sharon or Faithful Joanne is getting banished. But the result will be the same whatever happens, and the only bearing it will have on the game is that the rest of the Faithful will think whoever survives is a Traitor. All to say, the Traitors are likely to get another heat-free Round Table and a pass to the final.
The thing that makes The Traitors so brilliant is the twists and turns; the shocks that the players nor viewers can see coming. But right now, it’s easy to predict how the rest of the game will unfold. I can only hope that either Maya, James A, or Kenny slip up in the next episode and that one of the Faithful finally clocks them. Time is running out to turn this series around, and if one of them doesn’t pull their socks up, we’re in for a very dull finale indeed.
The Celebrity Traitors continues on Thursday at 8pm on BBC One