The latestest episode of The Traitors went down about as I expected. Lisa Rinna was already wounded when she took the big risk of wearing the amulet and performing a murder in plain sight at the black banquet, a somewhat perverse gathering vaguely inspired by the 1440 murder of William and David Douglas. Playing the role of the doomed Earl, Yam Yam yelped Rinna’s name as he was dragged from the table, and it was clear from thence that the housewife’s fate was sealed.
I wanted to share these exceptional artistic renderings of the event from Drunk Drawn:
Did anyone really expect Rinna’s fellow taitor, Rob, to come to her defense after he had already voted to banish her in the previous episode? His strategy is clearly to shore up his faithful bona fides by correctly identifying and eliminating a genuine traitor, which he did. But he’s playing a dangerous game.
His alliance with the other remaining traitor, Candiace, is clearly at an end (see my previous entry about Peter Turchin and the crack-up of the elites). She named him at the round table, signaling the beginning of a war that will end with one of them walking away from the table. Candiace has been very good at driving the narrative on this show and she has an advantage here. She can essentially expose Rob’s game at the round table, right up to the point of revealing herself as a traitor, and never utter a lie. Yes, he is a traitor. Yes, he threw his fellow traitor under the bus to gain your trust. Yes, he’s playing you all with his dagger alliance. Rob will have to deny all with a straight face. Can he do it?
That will all depend on whom the other contestants trust more: Rob or Candiace? And while the sources of trustworthiness are complicated, I do suspect that the former has his own built-in advantage in the fact that so many of the other people in the castle want to fuck him. It’s absolutely the thing blinding Johnny Weir and Colton Underwood. They know that the game just won’t be as fun without those bedtime eyes gazing from across the table. I believe political consultants refer to this as the “hottie factor.”
It’s one of the reasons why Democrats seem poised to select a vapid model right out of central casting as our candidate for the 2028 presidential election. Gavin Newsom looks like the president from a 90s disaster movie, and his chiseled features will certainly inspire confidence in millions of Americans who look back wistfully on that post-Soviet victory lap.
But in a society of abundance like ours, at what point does the magic of the superficial wear off? I suspect it has everything to do with the electorate’s perception of the stakes–a difficult thing to gauge when everyone from the president on down habitually speaks in the superlative. Everything is “the best,” “the greatest,” and “the most.” Our last three presidential elections, we have been told, would be the most significant in our lifetimes. Can we really blame voters for becoming desensitized?
It seems that only a novel new plot twist, say a vast and tawdry conspiracy of powerful politicians, celebrities, and business leaders, will pull our attention away from reality TV and force us to refocus on the awful reality of America in the 21st century.