I’ve never been on a reality show, nor have I ever been a spy or had to hide a secret identity as a mole of any kind, so it’s easy for me to be an armchair expert in how a person in those roles should behave, but I do know that they should not behave like Dan on The Traitors. Nothing personal, Dan, but in the Traitors power rankings, Phaedra Parks and Parvati Shallow are light years ahead of you, and this week’s episode was proof of that.
It’s a real shock to me that anyone on The Traitors (aside from Janelle Pierzina, may she rest in banishment) has not come to the obvious conclusion that Dan is a traitor. All the things that the banished faithfuls have been accused of, like Peppermint mistakenly saying she was a traitor instead of a faithful (who among us has not gotten tongue tied in a time of stress!?) or Maksim Chmerkovskiy nervously smiling during another person’s banishment, are human behavior, not traitor behavior. Yet Dan, he who remains mostly silent and whose only contribution toward making himself appear faithful is his mastery of smell-the-fart acting? I can’t figure out why more people aren’t calling him out. Dan was finally in the hot seat this week when Janelle and The Bachelor‘s Peter Weber started to plant some seeds of mistrust on account of how little information Dan has offered to the faithfuls. At one point Peter literally begged Dan to offer one single name, just one person Dan suspected of being a traitor, and Dan named Janelle, mostly because she’s the only one truly playing this damn game. (I hold firm that Janelle would have made an incredible traitor and things would have been much more interesting if she and not Dan had been selected.) But what Dan said about her – that even if she’s not a traitor, she’s a faithful you can’t trust – feels like it was the nail in her coffin and it got her, and not him, banished at the round table.
It’s not just that Dan is so obviously sus (to quote my fifth grader), it’s that compared to his two fellow traitors, Parvati and Phaedra, he has no game at all. Parvati’s poison chalice murder of Ekin-Su was cold-blooded, a real throwback to her Erik double-cross on Survivor. Meanwhile, Phaedra is playing the game by giving the greatest performance of her life. Sure, she told Parvati she doesn’t act, but if that’s true, then her default setting is simply STAGE PRESENCE, and everything she does is believable.
Contrast Dan’s strategy of pretending he is invisible with Phaedra’s ability to even turn small talk about the weather (“My God, that wind is winding!”) into gold, and he just simply comes off as an unprepared scene partner, while she is not just Inside the Actor’s Studio, she is the actor’s studio. (Telling Janelle, “I hope we can still be friends,” as she voted for her banishment? It’ Phaedra’s world and we are all just putty in her hands.)
Dan was spared this week on account of the fact that Janelle was just a little too outspoken and a little too selfish for her own good (the woman loved her shields, even at the expense of burning bridges with the rest of her faithfuls). But now that he’s under suspicion, I can’t imagine he’ll last that much longer. If he does stay in the game for the long haul I know I’ll have to eat my words, but Peter and Bergie definitely seem like they’re on to him, and I don’t think he’ll be perched in the turret much longer now that he’s entered the banishment conversation.
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