Our long national nightmare is over. After a week of stewing over a brutal cliffhanger, we finally find out how Britney voted. Over the course of this past week, I became more convinced that the cliffhanger was just to build suspense and we weren’t lucky enough for her to actually turn on Danielle. Thankfully, I couldn’t have been more wrong, and when she turned that little chalkboard around, she tearfully admitted to knocking Danielle out of the game. “Did it to me again,” Danielle says, referring to the similar betrayal that played out between them on Big Brother.
This is cinema. This is history repeating itself. It is bonds being broken. And all of the frustration the audience has had watching Danielle is suddenly worth it just for this moment alone. To be successful on The Traitors, you either have to be a good game player or make good television. For much of the season, Danielle has done neither. Her moves were often devoid of logic or sense, but luckily for her, The Traitors is a game of chance more than anything — so making poor moves didn’t hinder her. Poor moves would have been forgivable if she had been entertaining us while she made them, but whining is rarely entertaining. That being said, all of those hours of watching Danielle wreak havoc this season have paid off in the form of this dramatic blindside.
But while the audience is rejoicing in this twisty turn of events, Britney isn’t reveling in her own win because she didn’t intend for it to go this way. She voted for Danielle thinking Dolores already sealed her fate, and she wouldn’t have done so if she had known she would be the deciding vote. As Danielle walks to the circle of truth, keeping her composure for the first time all season, a distraught Britney looks to Dolores and mouths, “What the fuck?” Dolores looks back as if to say, What are you looking at me for? Trying to gauge Dolores’s vote based just on her facial expression was Britney’s fatal mistake — we can barely gauge Dolores’s votes from her words, let alone her expressions. Trying to figure out how Dolores is going to vote is like trying to catch smoke with your hands.
Danielle reveals her identity to the group with a hair flip, and in her confessional tells us that it was a mistake to recruit Britney. Somewhere, Carolyn is kicking up her feet in glee right now.
While there won’t be a murder tonight, there’s still more business to get to. We still haven’t found out who our Seer is yet! Well, as if things couldn’t get any better for Britney — the title goes to her, meaning she doesn’t have to worry about being exposed as a Traitor. But nobody can truly ever rest easy in this game, and despite knocking out Danielle, Dylan is floating the possibility that she, too, could be a Traitor — especially given how betrayed Danielle seemed to be. He also warns everybody that if Britney is a Traitor, she could lie about the identity of whomever she chooses for her Seer powwow.
She ultimately chooses to convene with Gabby, and who wouldn’t? A one-on-one dinner with Gabby? A dream! I’d be too busy giggling and having an absolute blast to even remember to ask if she’s a Traitor or a Faithful. But, of course, when the subject does come up, Gabby shares her Faithful status. But will Britney be honest when telling the rest of the group about this meeting?
The answer is yes! At breakfast, Britney tells everybody that Gabby is, in fact, a Faithful — which is a smart move all around. First, it wins Gabby over, who feels like she was bestowed a beautiful ticket straight to winning the game. Second, it nullifies Dylan’s theory about her wrongfully accusing someone of being a Traitor. But Dylan’s mind is still racing, and he considers everything, including the possibility that Britney and Gabby could both be Traitors and this whole thing was a little performance all around.
That’s just one possibility of many — but just about everybody seems to agree that there’s still a Traitor left in the game. Dylan is trying to get Dolores and Ivar to put their beef to bed and focus on getting Britney out, who in turn has her eyes set on Dylan.
But first, it’s mission time, which means Lala is dressed like a little queen with a gorgeous velvet robe. Less important, it also means our players have to do some sort of heist challenge to collect the remaining prize money. There’s math, there’s running, there’s cars — but just as I was ready to deem this the most boring mission yet, a helicopter swoops into view. Our players have to dangle from the helicopter and drop their winnings into a blazing ring of fire to double their earnings. Now we’re talking! Getting to see a Real Housewife airborne is the main reason why I watch this show. “If I was supposed to be flying, I’d have wings,” Dolores says, but nonetheless, they all take to the skies for a challenge that feels specifically designed to expose their hair-extension tracks.
While that proved to be a fun bonding activity for our remaining players, as soon as they’re back down on earth, the war wages on. Britney and Dylan waste no time going after each other, trying to rally everybody to their respective cause ahead of the roundtable. Everybody is so on edge that Dolores even threatens to kill Dylan if he ends up being a Traitor, and rightfully so!
Speaking of Dolores, this feels like a good time to highlight some of her greatest hits from this episode. First, she said that Danielle deserves an Oscar for her performance as a Traitor, citing “the way she carried on and convulsed on the floor after they voted Carolyn out.” Then she gave us another great moment when asked if she was emotional over it being their last breakfast: “I’m not emotional, that’s for pussies.” Queen. And, lastly, I simply have to bring up the fact that she’s dressed like Liza Minnelli for the majority of this episode in a sparkly red pantsuit.
And speaking of fashion, when it finally comes time for the roundtable, everybody is in their best looks — which makes me wonder about all of the outfits that our eliminated contestants didn’t get to wear. I mourn for them. But there’s business to take care of. At this point, we’ve heard Dylan and Britney’s arguments against each other, but we haven’t yet seen how they’ll present them. The cases they each make and the evidence they present are very similar, but while Dylan is his normal sweetie-pie self, Britney comes for blood and eviscerates him. He’s taken so aback by it that he hardly knows what to do with himself.
It’s a phenomenal showing from Britney, and her strongest argument comes courtesy of Dylan himself when he suggests that she was recruited as a Traitor at some point. She retorts by saying that if anybody was recruited, the logical choice would have been to recruit him, not her. And she’s right! But as we know, Danielle wasn’t making logical choices. When all is said and done, even Dylan knows that he was chewed up, saying it feels like he brought a knife to a gunfight. But will Britney’s strong showing at the roundtable be enough to keep her in the game?
Nope. Britney’s moment of weakness was her response to Danielle’s banishment, and it came back to bite her. Even her expertly executed attacks on Dylan weren’t enough to get that out of people’s minds, and they all voted to banish her (and thus the final Traitor) from the game. But, because this is the final roundtable, she leaves without revealing her true identity — and she hopes she set a fire on her way out.
When it comes time for the Fire of Truth, there’s a massive revelation that left my jaw on the floor: ALAN’S BEJEWELED SNUGGIE IS BACK! This is a huge victory all around, and I’m so glad to see it becoming a staple of this show. When it comes time for our final four to decide whether to end the game or banish again, they all (boringly) decide to go to the end together. And since they’re all Faithfuls, all four of them snag the prize. We did get a mini-spoiler earlier in the episode when Gabby said if she’s victorious, she might use the winnings to get married to her girlfriend, Robby Hoffman. Since the pair literally just revealed that they had, in fact, recently gotten married, that comment was kind of a foreshadowing of good things to come. With all four of them coming out on top, it marks the most Faithfuls who have won — but with no backstabbing or banishing at the Fire of Truth, it does end the season on an anticlimactic, albeit nice, note. At least the reunion will give us the drama we’re left craving.
More From 'The Traitors'
- The Traitors Has a Glaring Flaw When It Comes to the Actual Game
- Dylan Efron Is Still Cool With Being Known As Zac’s Brother
- In Memoriam: The Traitors Season 3(’s Hats)