Our long national nightmare is over. After a week of agonizing over a brutal cliffhanger, we finally discover how Britney voted. Throughout the past week, I became increasingly convinced that the cliffhanger was merely a tactic to build suspense and that we wouldn’t be fortunate enough to see her turn on Danielle. Thankfully, I couldn’t have been more wrong. When Britney turned that little chalkboard around, she tearfully admitted to eliminating Danielle from the game. “You did it to me again,” Danielle said, referring to the similar betrayal that had occurred between them on Big Brother.
This is cinema. This is history repeating itself. It represents broken bonds and a culmination of the audience’s frustration while watching Danielle, which suddenly becomes worthwhile for this moment alone. To succeed on “The Traitors,” players need to either be good at the game or be entertaining to watch. For much of the season, Danielle has managed to do neither. Her moves often lacked logic and sense, but fortunately for her, “The Traitors” relies more on chance than strategy—so her poor choices didn’t derail her. Those poor choices might have been easier to overlook if she had been entertaining us along the way, but her constant complaints were rarely engaging. However, all those hours spent watching Danielle create chaos this season have now culminated in this dramatic blindside, making it all worthwhile.
While the audience cheers for the surprising turn of events, Britney isn’t celebrating her own victory because it wasn’t her intention for things to unfold this way. She voted for Danielle, believing that Dolores had already sealed her fate. Britney wouldn’t have cast her vote that way if she had known she would ultimately be the deciding vote. As Danielle walks toward the circle of truth, maintaining her composure for the first time all season, a distressed Britney looks at Dolores and mouths, “What the heck?” Dolores responds with a look that seems to say, “What are you looking at me for?” Trying to interpret Dolores’s vote based solely on her facial expression was Britney’s critical mistake—it’s challenging enough to determine Dolores’s voting intentions from her words, let alone her expressions. Figuring out how Dolores will vote is like trying to catch smoke with your hands.
Danielle reveals her identity to the group with a hair flip. In her confessional, she admits that recruiting Britney was a mistake. Somewhere, Carolyn is kicking back in glee right now.
While there won’t be a murder tonight, we still have more business to attend to. We haven’t yet discovered who our Seer is! In a surprising turn of events, the title goes to Britney, which means she doesn’t have to worry about being exposed as a Traitor. However, no one can truly rest easy in this game. Despite having eliminated Danielle, Dylan suggests that Danielle could have been a Traitor as well, especially given how betrayed she appeared. He also cautions everyone that if Britney is indeed a Traitor, she might lie about the identity of her chosen Seer during the powwow.
She ultimately decides to meet with Gabby, and who wouldn’t want to? A one-on-one dinner with Gabby sounds like a dream! I’d be too busy giggling and having a great time to even think about asking if she’s a Traitor or a Faithful. However, when the topic does come up, Gabby reveals her Faithful status. But will Britney be truthful when she shares this information with the rest of the group?
Yes, the answer is yes! At breakfast, Britney informs everyone that Gabby is, in fact, a Faithful, which is a good strategy all around, which wins Gabby over, who heek like she was given a very nice ticket to winning the game. It also cancels out Dylan’s theory about her accidentally accusing someone of being a Traitor. But Dylan’s head is still spinning and he is contemplating everything, including the fact that Britney and Gabby can be both Traitors, and this whole thing was a bad play.
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.
For the Fire of Truth, there is a big surprise that shocked me: ALAN’S BEJEWELED SNUGGIE IS BACK! This is nothing but good news, and it is wonderful to see things getting better around here. For the final four players, who need to decide if they want to finish the game or banish once again, they all (in a boring way) decide they want to go to the end together. Because they are all Faithfuls, all four of them get the prize. Earlier in the episode, Gabby did give us a mini-spoiler when she said if she wins, she might use the winnings to prepare a wedding with her girlfriend, Robby Hoffman. Since the two literally just revealed they had in fact recently gotten married, that comment was quite a premise of good things to come. With all four of them coming out on top makes it the most Faithfuls whom have won, but with no backstabbing or banishment at Fire of Truth, does end season on an anti-climax but nice note. At least now we’ll get to see the reunion and the drama we’re left wanting.
g.
