This review contains spoilers.
Season 4 of NBC’s “The Traitors” ended Thursday with the Traitors winning after the Faithfuls’ sequence of season-long failures to “cut the head off the snake,” as episode four states.
“The Traitors” is a reality TV show that drops celebrities in the Scottish Highlands, splitting them into Traitors and Faithfuls. The show combines aspects of horror, dark academia and dastardly deceit as the Traitors slowly murder Faithfuls while they attempt to identify their assailants.
Host Alan Cumming opened the season by selecting “Love Island USA” star Rob Rausch, “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” star Lisa Rinna and “The Real Housewives of Potomac” star Candiace Dillard Bassett as Traitors.
Alongside them was this season’s twist: A secret Traitor. While a large plot point of the first few episodes, the twist went virtually nowhere as secret Traitor and football mom Donna Kelce was banished by the Faithfuls in episode three.
This season’s drama revolved heavily around the outright success of Rausch, who won the show alone by voting out his fellow Traitor at the last moment. Throughout the season, he chose to betray each of his fellow Traitors at just the right moment to keep his trust with the Faithfuls, making a near-perfect run in which he was rarely ever suspected.
Rausch was barely questioned throughout the season, and he held an imbalanced amount of power across both groups. He was always portrayed as the hero, making it clear that the producers were setting him up for a victory.
Even when Rausch recruited singer Eric Nam as a Traitor in episode nine, the rest of the castle immediately turned on Nam, again clearing the path for Rausch’s victory. Rausch played an excellent game by recruiting an obvious Faithful before immediately allowing Nam to trip over himself and become suspicious, a trick Rausch had used on Rinna and Dillard Bassett before.
It helped that Rausch didn’t mind abandoning Nam to claim the cash prize for himself in the final vote, too. While the season was unfortunately predictable, the show succeeds in its casting — relationships on the show continuously build drama.
Notably, Olympic figure skaters Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir concealed their friendship for the first half of the season. This pinned suspicion on the duo that brought confusion and fighting over why they had been so secretive.
One of the best moments of the season, for the drama that ensued, was a mission where the Traitors answered manipulative questions such as “Who do the Traitors find most useful?” They answered “Tara” for every question, psyching her out and causing the castle to accuse her of avoiding answering.
The castle went into mayhem. Lipinski and Weir revealed their “best friendship” in an attempt to spare Lipinski, raising guards and causing numerous claims that they were a Traitor pair.
This came as Lipinski and “Love Island UK” star Maura Higgins’ storylines of being constantly wrong with their suspicions brought more blame to Lipinski’s name. With Rausch and Nam pinning blame on the ice skating duo and stringing Higgins along as a blind ally until the end, this was the most interesting part of the season.
When Rausch finally told Higgins, his most loyal ally in the castle, that he was a Traitor, it was chilling and heartbreaking. She had jokingly revealed she was a Traitor and watching her find out that everything she believed was a lie was such a jaw-dropping moment.
While expected, watching Rausch’s celebratory run on the show with little to no hiccups was a great change of pace from Season 3’s Traitor failures.
There is a year to wait until the next U.S. season of “The Traitors.” But if the next season is as dramatic as this one, I can’t wait until the killing commences.
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