It is very satisfying to watch Kate’s reaction as the Traitor standing before her slips off her hood and reveals her identity. Kate’s eyes twinkle as she shakes her head and smiles appreciatively. “You sly fox.†What’s stopping us, as a society, from remaking The Sting with Kate Chastain and Phaedra Parks?
Phaedra — whose lipstick is a perfect shade of Virginia Avenue/States Avenue/St. Charles Place Monopoly magenta, at least in the dungeon light — issues her ultimatum: Join or die. “You’re smart, you’re clever, and I think you’ll make a crazy cool killer with me,†she elaborates, a sentence I am jotting down for my future wedding vows. Unsurprisingly, Kate accepts. “Awesome,†Phaedra says, like she just helped her pick out a used car. “Great choice.â€
But Kate is surprised, and a little disappointed, that Phaedra is the only Traitor remaining. (Working with Dan, she tells Kate, was like “eating dry milk with toast, with no butter, no jam, no nothing.â€) She’s even more surprised and disappointed that Phaedra doesn’t have a plan already.
It’s around now that we’re treated to some truly hilarious B-roll of Peter, shirtless, curling dumbbells, and staring at himself in a mirror. That Peter agreeably went along with what was no doubt a producer’s idea for some wacky B-roll makes me think of the 30 Rock wisdom that the “just for fun†photo is the one they’ll always use. He should’ve just opened his mouth a little and tried to look like Lindsay Lohan.
Of course, Kate and Phaedra would love to kill him (who wouldn’t?), but wouldn’t it be just like Peter to have gotten his hands on the shield? It’s too risky. So will they murder Kevin, who they find annoying, or Trishelle, who they also find annoying? Of course, unbeknownst to Kate and Phaedra, it’s actually Trishelle who won the shield.
Excited though she is to turn heel, Kate’s transition isn’t exactly seamless. At breakfast, MJ, in a full-body print situation that I am going to call bullfighter chic, immediately clocks that something is wrong with Kate, whose metallic trousers have failed to pull focus away from the obviously quite panicked expression on her face. “Are you good?†she asks. “There’s, like, something amiss.†That said, I don’t think we see any players explicitly speculate as to whether a new Traitor has been recruited after Parvati’s banishment, do we?
At last, Trishelle strolls in, having taken up the headband mantle in Parvati’s absence. The gals killed Kevin. ByeeeEEEEEeee.
The stink of death hangs around Peter (who says The Traitors is a “billion times more stressful†than The Bachelor), and Kate and Phaedra are eager to encourage the others to take a deep, lung-expanding whiff thereof. Only Trishelle and John (who calls his in-game allies his “colleagues,†which I love) remain truly confident of Peter’s innocence, but they’d need five votes out of the nine remaining to banish Phaedra instead. And the Bravo Bloc is, in the immortal words of the poet Manzo, as thick as thieves. What about CT? Peter asks where he’s leaning with his vote, and without hesitating, he answers, “Honestly, you.†(Why is CT so hot?)
For today’s mission, the players are escorted to a beautifully spooky old stone church that, I don’t mind telling you, I wouldn’t mind being ritualistically murdered in. They enter to find hooded figures awaiting them, wearing gold masks, carrying staffs, and generally giving off a very Sleep No More vibe (it’s the Scottish play, after all!). Then, extremely disappointingly, the creepos peace out with zero explanation, and we are left with this season’s most boring mission yet. Each of the player’s names has been rendered in the form of a stained glass window suspended in mid-air. They take turns shooting at the windows with a crossbow (sure), shattering them until only a single window remains. Whoever’s name is the last standing wins a shield. But every missed shot will deduct $250 from their $25,000 prize pot.
They are bad at this. Very bad at this. It wouldn’t have surprised me if John, as a former member of the British government, had some shadowy crossbow/Most Dangerous Game experience in his past, but no such luck.
It takes more than $3,000 of botched shots for them to finally land on a strategy that works: Rather than randomly jumping around among the windows, they should adjust the crossbow as minimally as possible relative to the last shot in the hopes of dialing in their accuracy. Phaedra — whose one-eye-closed, mouth-scrunched facial expression when she aims is functionally the same as the mascara-applying facial expression universal to all humans — decides to abandon the three intact windows conveniently lined up next to each other in the top row, which the crossbow is already aimed in the vicinity of, and instead try to take out Trishelle’s, the only window remaining all by itself in the bottom right corner of the grid. This odd choice — objectively pretty bad strategy, unless, of course, you are a Traitor who might prefer it if Trishelle didn’t have a shield — does not go unnoticed by Trishelle or by Phaedra’s own good buddy and/or soulmate, I don’t know, let’s not rule anything out, CT. Uh-oh.
CT ultimately claims the shield, and the gang banks $15,250. Back at the castle, the cast is served a repast of “dirty macaroni and cheese†that becomes the topic of so much conversation that I’m briefly convinced it will come up again in pivotal, game-changing Chekhov’s dirty macaroni and cheese fashion. It does not. We will never know what was so dirty about it.
It’s clear by this point that Peter will be up for banishment alongside Phaedra — and no one on his side is optimistic about how the numbers will shake out. Trishelle sits down with Kate, MJ, Shereé, and Sandra to make her case against Phaedra. Her points are compelling, but I think her bedside manner could be a little less aggressive (once again: social-advantage Housewives). “You don’t think that that is, like, compelling evidence?†she asks, raising her eyebrows and pursing her lips incredulously. MJ insists she’ll have an “open mind,†even as far as her fellow Bravolebrities are concerned. We’ll see about that.
John speaks first at the round table, outlining the reasons why Phaedra, an otherwise “magnificent person,†is a Traitor — both of the confirmed Traitors accused her, and her total disinterest in finding and banishing Traitors herself is increasingly odd at this late stage of the game. QED: She should be banished “until eternity.†I really appreciate how it is physiologically impossible for John to go more than three sentences without making an unnecessarily grandiose proclamation. I never would’ve guessed how much I’d enjoy him on this show!
Phaedra encourages him to “bring it down a notch†because “this is not parliament.†She reminds the group that both of the Traitors they’ve banished so far colluded with John’s “bromance friend,†Peter, who sure seems to have a lot of secret, closed-door meetings. Peter protests that wanting to have private conversations is valid in a game that literally has the word Traitors in the title. He also cites the shield that saved Bergie as evidence that he’s a Faithful — if Peter had been a Traitor, he wouldn’t have wasted a murder opportunity because he would’ve known for sure who had immunity.
Then Phaedra says this: “What you might’ve forgotten, Peter, is this is not The Bachelor, and I don’t have to kiss your ass for a rose.†By the time you are reading this, there is a distinct possibility that someone will have already cross-stitched those words onto a pillow and listed it on Etsy.
Based on Peter’s reaction, The Traitors has just become a trillion times more stressful than The Bachelor. If they don’t get this right, he says, the Traitors win. (He’s correct.)
The players are split 4-4 between Peter and Phaedra (who CT — a single tear runs down my cheek — does vote for, even going so far as to brandish a diagram of the stained-glass windows he drew on his chalkboard). The deciding vote comes down to MJ — and, of course, that’s right where the episode ends. The producers have no regard for my emotional well-being.