I am a sucker for social experiments, no matter how crass, and it’s time to admit that maybe you are, too. If we weren’t, Netflix wouldn’t be spinning their wheels month after month, devising convoluted games and deal-making with lucrative real-estate empires (hi, Bryce!) to put a sample size of everyday Americans up in fancy mansions in return for messy, uncomfortable, mindless content. But The Trust should have been left to bake a little longer. Though promoted as a game of greed, most of the contestants seem less motivated by money and more about proving that they are inherently decent people. This in itself is not a terrible concept, but it’s hard to pull off when most of the contestants are outstandingly unmemorable. What’s worse, like most social experiments, the series reveals our inherent biases in choosing whom to trust. It turns out Jake has done a lot of damage from the jump by lumping the only two Black women together with his microaggressive ways, setting the tone for how the rest of the group will look at Tolú and Winnie.
But first, our ever-beguiling Julie opens her offer to learn that she must vote at the next ceremony. Furthermore, $15,000 from the Trust is hers if the person she votes for goes home. Thinking she’d have to plot to get her alliances on her side, Julie returns home pleasantly surprised that Winnie and Tolú are already scheming to get Bryce out.
Although Julie doesn’t want to share news of their offers with the group, she follows suit when Brian vehemently says that they should (bo) — they must!! (boooo) — as it will set a new baseline of trust with the team. Don’t rule out Julie’s intelligence! In uncertain situations, always follow someone else’s lead to inform how one should respond. It’s just psychology 101, babe.
The Trust is currently valued at $273,000. We don’t see many people really salivating over this, which feels like a flaw in the game. Why aren’t we seeing more testimonials (minus a few thoughts from Tolú) from contestants about how they feel about their individual share? Without this input, it feels as if the group mostly just wants to prove to each other that they are trustworthy.
The group is excited to see Brian and Julie return after an evening of Gaspare’s long-winded stories and non sequiturs. Brian immediately tells the group about the new Vault and their tantalizing offers. Julie plays along by lying, claiming not to have taken her offer because she didn’t want the consequences. Our all-too-trusting (gullible?) Gaspare and Jake praise Julie for having proven to herself that she doesn’t have to be selfish, a trait that she often grapples with in private. At no point after this conversation does the group learn that $15,000 was taken out of the Trust because of Julie. Now, I am not a game maker — I am simply one who runs her mouth — but it feels like a missed opportunity not to reveal how much money is taken away from the pot when a contestant decides to take an offer. Any greedy person would want this to inform who to trust, right?
Bryce is toast at the next ceremony, and he knows it. Lindsey gives him a crisis communication plan for getting back in good graces with his teammates. Nevertheless, she cannot help thinking that he doesn’t have the chutzpah to try and save himself. Before they each head off to Cliff’s Edge to cast their votes, Tolú begins the conversation by asking Bryce why he is here. He vows that money is not what defines him and that he is here for the good vibes and friends, but this plea is unsatisfactory. Our tender $1,000,000 veal is meek before the slaughter. Julie, Tolú, and Winnie successfully oust Bryce from the Trust. Bryce wonders if there is someone else who may be in cahoots with the Julie-Winnie-Tolú trio.
Perhaps Gaspare remembered that daycare for his kid costs $24,000 a year, but he finally goes on the offense. Wise to the Winnie-Tolú-Jay alliance, he suggests that the boys knock out Winnie with a good ol’ concerted vote. The boys think they can convince Julie and Lindsey to side with them for this takedown. Jake and Brian approach Lindsey first; she sees safety in this because Winnie and Tolú turned “mean.†Lindsey seems to have forgotten that she is a full-blown adult who is playing a game. “Mean†is something teenagers are because they don’t have fully formed identities yet.
A new test awaits the team in the evening. Sitting blindfolded before a table of candles — three for each person — each contestant will go up one by one and blow out the candle of one person who they believe has been telling the most lies. The game will end when all three candles of one person are blown out.
As decided by Gaspare, Brian, Jake, and Lindsey, this game will now be less about accounting for lies and more about taking good players down. All of them except Brian, who doesn’t have a chance to go, blow out Winnie’s three candles to end the test, but not without the quintessential Brooke boomerang, where she takes Winnie aside and gives her a card to the Vault before everyone takes their blindfolds off. Maybe it’s just me, but that card looks the shiniest it’s ever been.
Winnie calls the group a bunch of cowards — among other delicious things — for never coming correct if they ever had any misgivings about her. The boys look as if they’ve been spanked. In their respective safe areas of the house, the guys and girls then try to determine who blew out whose candles. Julie smartly owns up to voting for Jay just to throw a vote out. Jay reveals she voted for Jake, leaving Julie to realize that Winnie voted for her (ouch). Lindsey lies and says she didn’t get to vote.
Angry for her friend after the candle test, Tolú confronts Gaspare, Jake, and Brian, but it’s slightly combative; little does she know that Brian did not participate in the candle test at all. Meanwhile, Winnie steps away to the Vault. Brooke is inside with an offer that she has to take if she opens it. Winnie says fuck it: $20,000 from the Trust is hers to keep, but she will be sent home if no one is voted out in the next Trust Ceremony. The scales are tipped again, and Winnie has a decision to make about how she will approach the next day. She firmly believes that Jake has to go.
Winnie tells Julie, Jay, and Tolú about her offer, though she tells them she only keeps $8,000. Feeling once again threatened by Winnie’s goal to take Jake out, Julie now feels that Winnie is being too cutthroat. Julie, the only other option is for Winnie to leave! Selfishness isn’t black and white, remember?
The next day, a tropical storm hits the house, and the contestants wait it out, benighted by their own conflicts. The group of very noticeably white men and women share their sentiments about Winnie and Tolú’s friendship. Meanwhile, Tolú and Winnie are sick of Julie’s feminine wiles and waffling ways. They ask her straight up where her loyalty resides: the Union or the Confederate. Julie borrows from Lindsey’s weak arsenal of descriptors and calls them mean. When did we as adults start to equate telling harsh truths with being “mean� As a Hail Mary to wake Julie up, Winnie spells it out for her that Jake has never gone out of his way to defend or even uplift her. She is second to Brian and even Gaspare.
At this point, Winnie’s charisma has taken a beating. She is anxious and discouraged. When she asks Jake and Gaspare if they blew out her candles, they tell her to go to Brian for answers. Winnie then approaches our gentle rancher, or rather, she rattles his doorknob before stomping in. Winnie is shocked to discover that Brian, who simply craves order in the house and some starch for his jeans, wasn’t the third person who blew out her candle. She narrows the culprit down to Lindsey. She’s impressed but pissed.
Come evening, Brooke surprises them with poker night. Each contestant receives a spread of cards that have each person’s name on them. For every time Brooke asks them a question, they play the card that best answers that question; anytime someone plays a card with the contestant’s name on it, that contestant gets a chip. Ranging from questions like “Who is the life of the party?†to “Who do you think is most likely to be here at the end of the experience?†it becomes clear that (1) Jake doesn’t consider Julie for any of the superlatives, and (2) Brian is a big answer for everyone. But the final question is a landmine: Who is the most trusted ally? Lindsey, trying to play as neutral as possible, picks Jay. But the boys are not wily enough to think far ahead. Gaspare and Jake throw in her name. Just as Winnie deduced, Lindsey is being sneaky.
Poker night adds $25,000 to the Trust. Jake unabashedly reaches across Julie to give Gaspare a high five. Brooke then has one more surprise: Jay, who received the fewest chips, gets to go into the Vault. The offer is a no-brainer for her: She receives $25,000 (the very $25,000 that they just played to win, but once again, they don’t know this) from the Trust but has to go home. Mama Jay looks forward to retiring from this hell of a vacation. She hasn’t seen any of the tropical birds she hoped to see.
After Jay departs, the team is called to gather around their dining table. Brooke tells them that Jay took her offer and has left the house. Tolú and Winnie are down a crucial ally.
Immediately afterwards, Julie, Lindsey, and the boys gather in one room, pumped that their plan is unfolding. Winnie and Tolú retreat to theirs, lamenting their loss. Look, I know it is so heavy-handed to say, but the contrast between the two groups is as stark as the beige walls of the mansion: The white women have sided with the men, and the two Black women are excluded from their strategies, deemed untrustworthy loose cannons just for being real about their allegiances and love of winning. I wonder if the allegiances would have looked any different if Tolú and Winnie weren’t so immediately lumped together by Jake and Julie. The only person in the house who didn’t see their friendship as a threat was Mama Jay. The problem with social experiments is that they can really show America’s embarrassing, racist undertones.
The next day, Brian has found some starch just in time for the Trust Ceremony later in the morning. The majority alliance realizes that they have the upper hand, but Julie ruminates on how she said she would never vote for Winnie. Tolú pulls Brian aside to apologize for the way that she spoke to him the other night about Winnie. The timing of the apology is convenient, but Brian overlooks it. He understands the need to stand up for a friend.
The time comes to gather around the dining table. The majority alliance is quiet when Winnie asks if they want to address anything. Then she digs into our biggest snake of the game, who is characteristically rocking side to side in her chair. She calls out Lindsey for spending a suspicious amount of time in the girls’ rooms without openly declaring her allegiance, runs through how she found out that Lindsey was the one to blow out her candle, and points to poker night as telling evidence that she loves to play both sides. Winnie is right; it should scare the group that they do not know where Lindsey stands.
Each person goes out to vote, but Brian receives a surprise from Brooke during his turn: a sleek little keycard that will take him to the Vault for receiving the most number of chips at poker night. I jump at the twist, but I am tired of jumping. The Trust is testing my threshold for curveballs, and I am maybe one surprise away from deeming it anarchic and unwatchable.
To no one’s amazement, Brian is scared of the key card. But to our sadness, Brooke shares that Winnie is going home, leaving six more contestants left in the house. This is the most disheartening loss yet, as Winnie’s game has always been crystalline and honest. To suggest that she was the biggest liar and a problematic cast member feels like an error born of the contestants’ inability to handle criticism and candor. Tolú feels a total sense of loss and dreads that she is next on the chopping block.
In the Vault, Brian is told that if he chooses to look at the offer, he must accept it; otherwise it will be given randomly to someone else. Obviously Brian takes the offer because he doesn’t want to pass a risk off to someone else. He will accept $30,000, but three names will be chosen at random whose votes will be blocked at the next ceremony. From her sneaky cards of names, Brooke picks Julie, Jake, and Brian, but all Brian knows at the moment is that he will walk away from the game at least $30,000 richer. He leaves feeling some guilt about this windfall. Though his starched-up jeans look good, deep down he doesn’t feel the same.
In the morning, Tolú wakes up feeling more resolved, remembering that she’s here for her parents. She will fight because she deserves to be here. On the other hand, Lindsey wakes up feeling uneasy about the way she was eviscerated by Winnie and Tolú at the last voting ceremony. She scolds Jake and Gaspare for outing her at poker night as well as at the candle test.
Later that day, the contestants face one of the last tests of the game: the Circle of Trust. Each contestant is given an envelope that contains their individual voting histories, and they can decide to tell the group about it. For every person who decides to reveal the contents of their envelope, $5,000 is added to the Trust. If everyone decides to share, they will double the money they earn, bringing the winning amount up to $60,000.
Gaspare, Jake, Brian, and Tolú stayed true to their word, so they show their voting histories with no reservations. But Lindsey sways side to side, weighing whether showing her card is worth the doubt that will percolate among her new allies. She decides to show her card, revealing her votes for Juelz, Bryce, and Winnie. The guys are annoyed by her lies of omission. Furthermore, Gaspare is shocked that Lindsey voted out her supposed ally Bryce. He gathers that Tolú and Winnie have been telling the truth all along.
Julie goes last. Everyone looks to her to double the pot, but Julie is worried about what Jake would think about her votes. Ultimately she shares her voting history because she sees it as an opportunity to come clean. For the first time, Brian, Gaspare, and Jake discover that she voted out Juelz, Simone, and Bryce and never voted for Winnie. They show compassion for the moves she has made in the game thus far. Just like that, $60,000 goes into their pot, but not without Tolú pointing out that Lindsey is the only person who has been playing a sneaky game.
At the voting ceremony, Julie openly wonders if there is a future where Tolú and Lindsey can settle their differences in gameplay so that the group can move forward together. Lindsey tries to explain her gameplay as some watery defense against the girls who were mean to her (That word again … ). She also asserts that ultimately she is on the side of self-preservation, to which Tolú points out that Lindsey is here for herself before she is here for the team. The opposing viewpoints remain, and it feels unlikely that they won’t try to cut each other out.
Brian, Julie, and Jake decide not to vote. Lindsey votes for Tolú, alluding to the whatever number of times she has called her names. Tolú also enters self-preservation mode and votes for “Lindsey, the snake.†With the last deciding vote, Gaspare, seemingly the most discerning of the guys, weighs what feels morally right for him. He knows who Tolú is, but he cannot say the same for Lindsey.
Brooke arrives and announces that Lindsey is going home. Stunned faces electrify the room, including Gaspare’s. With one voting ceremony left before they get to the prize, the remaining five players have to decide whether they can stick together. With Brian and Jake at the helm, it feels likely that they will try to get to the end as a unit. Hmm, maybe I do have it in me for one more twist…
The Vault
• In protest, I am not expanding on Jake and Julie’s romance. Watching them flirt all over the house is like listening to a balloon deflate as it flies around the room. The first lie Brian has ever told in this game is when he manages to squeak, “Too cute!†when he sees them snuggling in Jake’s bed.
• In memory of Mama Jay, the biggest hater of the house, I think we should all strive for the bare minimum and be proud of ourselves for “multitasking†when we manage to let out a fart while laughing. So long to our carefree queen.