Two Are Dead, Two are Banished, and Alan Cumming Is Still Extravagantly Scottish: Welcome to The Traitors, Season 2
The first three episodes are a conniving delight.
The Traitors has officially started back on Peacock, and I already feel betrayed — a three-episode drop is a LOT to digest right off the top, and on the same weekend as the Emmys. Alan Cumming, how could you do this to me? To ME, PERSONALLY. I thought we were pretend-friends! Good news, though: This show is still a divine blend of reality-show shenanigans and high melodrama, presided over with Shakespearean panache and purple prose the likes of which could only work delivered by our favorite Scottish scamp.
A quick logistical note: I wrote and edited this one episode at a time, so there won’t be spoilers as you read; I did not opine with any foreknowledge. Also, it’s long. I’m so sorry. I tried. Three episodes! It’ll get easier going forward, and I’ll have more room to talk about the castle and people’s outfits. Finally, I laid a few things out up top, like the identity of the traitors and the Faithful, before getting into the plot.
To the uninitiated, The Traitors stars Cumming as the “owner” of a castle in the Highlands who invites a gaggle of people to compete for $250,000, an amount they can augment by succeeding at weekly challenges. The catch: He designates a few of them as traitors whose job it is to make it to the end and snatch the loot — by sabotage, if they so choose, and by the nightly “murder” of a Faithful. The Faithful can fight back: At their roundtable, they must banish someone they don’t trust, and hope they’ve correctly sniffed out a traitor. Season 1 pitted familiar reality TV faces against a handful of regular folks, but season 2 jettisoned the normals — and I think that was a good move. The finals came down to Cirie Fields (Survivor and more) and two unfamous folks, and they trusted her so much and the money was so consequential to them that they began weeping with joy when they thought the game was over… and then she revealed herself and stole it all. I think it was really, REALLY hard for them to come to grips with it.
This season, so far, remains a campy hoot. My notes say, over and over again, “What the f is this song!!!!” Love Island, also on Peacock, is scored front-to-back with plaintively crooned lyrics that are too on-the-nose, and this show takes the same approach; they’ve found or written songs that specifically say things like, “SOMEONE’S A TRAITORRRRR,” and, “THERE’S A TRAITOR IN MY HEART.” It is raining musical anvils up in here and I already have a concussion. The first episode also had fire cannons, a detonation, drummers, and two different berets; the second, a field of ominous scarecrows they had to tear apart for treasure, all presided over by this man:
Truly, it’s the Eurovision of reality shows, a camp spectacle punctuated beautifully by Alan putting real heat on any word he can. Murderrrrr. Fraudsterrrrrr. This man can insert a curled Scottish RRRRR even into words that don’t have any. He described his performance as him playing Moira Rose from Schitt’s Creek playing Alan Cumming, and he’s an international treasurrrre we must protect at all costs, even if it means encasing him in bubble wrap — which, honestly, if you can do it in plaid, is probably something he’d be into trying. Speaking of which, let’s start with what I think everyone wants to know: What’s Alan wearing?
The Cumming Attractions
My notes for the cold open read, “He begins with a poem and a cape,” which is how all things should start, and then a band of about ten hooded percussionists greet the contestants in front of the castle. This is the kind of homecumming I want every time I come back from the store; clearly I am wasting my driveway. Anyway, Alan’s clothes are one of the most delicious parts of the show. Johnny Bananas, at one point, is shown asking Alan how it would feel if he, Bananas, challenged him for Best Dressed, and Alan purrs, “I’d say, ‘BACK OFF, BITCH.’”
Alan opened the season in a red velvet suit, this tartan scarf, and a flowerrr worrrrthy of Carrrrie Brrrradshaw, but BETTER because I bet he’s an actual good friend. And he doesn’t try to pull any pandering “Love One Another” bullshit like Julie Chen1 spouts at the end of Big Brother, like, honey, that entire show is about loving oneself first. Please appreciate how hilarious it looked when he was standing outside doing an intro and everyone else was in plainclothes:
His flower is out there VERY begrudgingly. It wants no part of loch swimming.
Here, Alan is dressed as a Dickensian school child as imagined by Dame Vivienne Westwood. The Scarecumming next to him frankly also looks quite dapper, although someone should tell it that ruffs — even burlap ones — are SO 500 years ago.
And that’s just delightful. Polka dots AND plaid! And a beret! Also, what’s their flower budget on this show?
Who’s Who?
The First Traitors
Dan. Phaedra at one point refers to Dan having won Big Brother twice, but this is not accurate. He won, and then came back four seasons later and finished second. Anyhoo, I always loved Dan because he’s smart and he’s self-aware, and he gives good bite — he is far less shouty in interviews than he was in the Big Brother diary room, bless — and thus I have mixed feelings about him being a traitor, because I don’t want him to leave and he’s one of the few people on the cast list whom they OUGHT to eject IMMEDIATELY. The man wriggled his way out of an easy eviction by staging his own Big Brother funeral, for God’s sake, complete with his own eulogy — which he did AFTER being in solitary for 24 hours. You dinguses KNEW he was using that time to strategize and you still let him get in your heads! He can TALK! Even if he were a Faithful, they’d still need to beat him.
Phaedra. She is an early MVP in terms of sound bites. Of the Survivor contestants, she said, “Those people eat rattlesnakes and live in the jungle and hike naked, for God’s sake. I’ve never done any of that. I glamp. *pauses, arranges fur around her* And I barely glamp, honey. I glamp at the Ritz-Carlton.” Is she confusing Survivor with Naked and Afraid? Because there is not a ton of naked hiking on CBS, though I’m open to a policy change. Now, I don’t know my Housewives — she was on Atlanta and is now on Married to Medicine2 — but this is how Jessica explained her to me: “Phaedra is a crackpot who used to be married to a REALLY handsome man who turned out to be a felon and she MIGHT have been in on it. She's also a lawyer who poorly represented Bobby Brown and stopped being a lawyer to be a Housewife/maybe become a mortician. She has two of the cutest children I have ever seen on television and took sensual pregnancy boudoir photos that involved pickles. I am like 65% that it was meant to be funny and 35% not.” That entire paragraph deserves a Pulitzer.
TBD: A third traitor will be recruited the first night.
The Faithfuls
Of the 21 contestants on the show, only FIVE are under 40. YES, MIDDLE AGE! It’s our time to shine. Dan is 40 on the nose, and Phaedra is 49. Janelle, 43, is primarily famous for four Big Brother seasons, plus other assorted stuff that includes — and no one has brought this up yet! — winning a reality show LITERALLY called Snake In The Grass as part of a team with Traitors season 1 winner Cirie freaking Fields. This seems like relevant information when you are trying to root out a competent liar, although for now she is a Faithful. From Survivor, we have former winner Parvati (40) and two-time winner Sandra (49), both of whom I would want to get rid of on reputation alone: smart, persuasive, sneaky. The Challenge sent over Trishelle (43), who is also a Real World: Las Vegas alum; someone who voluntarily goes by the name Johnny Bananas (41), whom Phaedra decided looks like a repo man; and a dude named C.T. (43) who looks like your uncle’s bookie at the track:
Ekin-Su (29) from Love Island UK seems like a nice sort, but you can tell she came from a show where they’re required to ask each other leading questions about their romantic entanglements, because she frequently pitches hypotheticals to get people talking, like, “If you were a traitor…” She also announces that people think she’s not smart, “but I believe in aliens, I have conspiracy theories, I love cartoons, [and] I can twist my arm all the way back,” concluding that her quirks are what make people relate to her. Sadly, she lost me at “conspiracy theories.” Your Romeos are Peter (The Bachelor/ette, 32) and Carsten “Bergie” Bergersen (our baby at 24) from the past season of Love Island USA. Bergie would have been both an ingenious AND awful pick as a traitor, because this man has no game and no cool. In Fiji he was the jovial Minnesota boy with zero experience, to the point where one girl — I think the one he ended up with, and they’re still together — gently informed him that he could kiss with tongue if he wanted, and he seemed rocked by this suggestion. Unlike most dudes on that show, he seems to be an actual nice person, but he also comes off as if he has the naïveté of someone who has only ever left his house twice. Which for a guy who played college football3 is a real achievement.
The Housewives franchises donated Tamra (56) and Sheree (53) and Larsa (49), ex-wife of Scottie Pippen and current maybe-fiancee of Michael Jordan’s son Marcus — who is ALSO present and is a wee babe at only 32. Former world heavyweight champion Deontay Wilder (37) is here for reasons no one totally understands, but he seems delighted by it and does insult the boxing world by noting that it’s ALSO full of liars and snakes and traitors. ZING. Maks, 43, from Dancing With The Stars, seems puzzled by his own presence there. Kevin from Bling Empire, 40, says and does almost nothing off the top, other than commit the sin of not having heard of The Challenge, to Janelle’s astonishment. (Of course, a mere breath before that, someone else referred to HIS show as Bling Nation, so.) MJ (Shahs of Sunset, 51) is another early nonentity. Rounding it out, we have Peppermint from Drag Race (43) and John Bercow, 60, a former speaker of the House of Commons. If you aren’t sure why you recognize him, perhaps it’s because John Oliver featured him in a priceless clip of petty Parliament shenanigans and then devoted a montage to him upon his retirement that has become my new parenting strategy. ORDAAAAH.
Episode One
Three early suspects emerge from the traitor selection ceremony (in which Alan wanders around and touches people on the shoulder while they are blindfolded). Larsa announces that she has magical hearing and therefore