(WARNING: This post contains spoilers for The Traitors Season 2, Episode 5.)
The Traitors rarely disappoints, but on Thursday night, the ingeniously campy Peacock show outdid itself with a challenge so ridiculous that it might just go down in history as the funniest gambit in reality television history. Looking back, the foreshadowing to this inventively humiliating challenge was hiding in plain sight the whole time, right there on host Alan Cumming’s feathered sweater.
For those who’ve never had the pleasure of watching, The Traitors Season 2 has rounded up a gaggle of 21 reality TV alums, all of whom hope to split a $250,000 cash prize. But while some of them are Faithfuls, an undisclosed few are Traitors, each of whom will take the money and run if they make it through the last elimination. Each week, the entire group gathers to vote on which suspected Traitor to “banish” from the castle before our treacherous Traitors meet in the castle turret to “murder” one of the Faithfuls overnight.
This season, Big Brother winner Dan Gheesling, Real Housewives of Atlanta alum Phaedra Parks, and Survivor legend Parvati Shallow are wearing the Traitor cloaks, and while the group has been closing in on Dan for a while, he’s so far managed to emerge from roundtable after roundtable unscathed. That could soon change thanks to an ingenious trap from former Bachelor Peter Weber—a sly little trick that hatched out of this week’s delightfully silly challenge.
You could tell that Cumming had something new up his sleeve when he showed up at the castle with a cheeky grin on his face and white feathers poking out from his plaid blazer. (If there’s one thing you can count on Cumming to serve at the breakfast table each week, it’s an eye-popping look.) Once the group realized the Traitors had murdered former Real Housewives of Orange County star Tamra Judge, it was time to roll into a bird-themed challenge designed to leave all of us squawking.
Scattered around the castle grounds were a series of gazebos outfitted with bird whistles. Half the players needed to run from stall to stall in pairs to blow the whistles and listen for a specific bird call in response. And now, for the best part: Once they heard the call, the players needed to call back to those left at the castle and imitate the call as accurately as possible, so that they could run around the building looking for the replica bird with the same call. The total potential prize for this illustrious task? $15,000.
So basically, this week, Peacock and Alan Cumming forced a bunch of reality stars to play “Telephone” with a bunch of random bird calls. It’s inspired. It’s inspiring. It’s basically the best thing to happen to any reality television fan since they perfected the genre in the early 2000s. And best of all, Cumming spent the entire challenge mugging for the camera while this flock of C-listers ran back and forth through the castle looking for the right replica birds, clucking and cawing out the strangest sounds they’ve (probably) ever made in their lives. Just incredible stuff.
While Trishelle Cannatella (of The Real World: Las Vegas) says she’s “not really an outdoorsy type of person” nor into bird-watching, she was actually shockingly good at this game. Her partner, Love Island USA star Carsten "Bergie" Bergersen, was not the best vocal mimic, so he mostly left the task to Trishelle, who nailed it every time and earned them a perfect score. As awkward as this arduous avian task might’ve been, the group managed to score $10,000 out of a possible $15,000. Not bad! Crucially, all three traitors found themselves in the group back at the castle, which allowed the Faithfuls to concoct a devious little plan.
Along with the bird gazebos, the players running around the grounds also had the chance to seek out two coveted Shields, which each protect a player from being murdered for one night. While birding partners Janelle Pierzina and Peter Weber did not find the Shields like they’d hoped, Peter came up with a brilliant tactic to thwart the Traitors: What if they pretended to have the Shield while urging those who actually had it to keep quiet?
Bergie and Trishelle, who actually found the Shields, were more than willing to play along. Then, Peter decided to tell a couple people that he suspected to be Traitors that he and Janelle had the Shields. By doing so, he hoped he’d convince them to waste the night’s “murder” on someone immune from death. The folks he told? Dan and Parvati. Uh-oh!
Dan’s had heat on him for a while, because everyone else has noticed he never speaks up about possible suspects. For some reason, he’s refused to change his strategy, but that seems bound to backfire before long. Parvati, meanwhile, has mostly stayed under the radar, but she did manage to piss off the Housewives (including Phaedra) last week when she suggested that one or all of them is probably a Traitor. She and Phaedra called bygones this week in the tower after Phaedra’s ominous threat. But if Peter manages to trick the Traitors into murdering someone with a Shield, it could confirm his suspicions and mess things up for both Dan and Parvati down the line.
At the roundtable, at least, Dan once again emerged unscathed this week, thanks to Bling Empire star Kevin Kreider. While several members of the group (including Peter and Bergie) had been eyeing Dan as a possible Traitor, Kevin went after Janelle. Janelle echoed several compelling points about Dan, but she also threw The Challenge star Chris “C.T.” Tamburello and Survivor star Sandra Diaz-Twine under the bus as potential suspects. This did not go over well, so most of the group voted for Janelle.
That included a new player in the season, Kate Chastain, who joined the roundtable for the first time this week as a surprise contestant. Fans who’ve been with the show since its first season likely remember the Below Deck star, who did not win last season but loved to stir the pot. This time around, she’s lying low, at least for now, so she voted with the group.
And so, it came time for the Traitors to reconvene in the castle tower and decide who to kill next. Parvati, ever the smart cookie, immediately figured out Peter’s plan once Dan confessed that Peter had told him he had a Shield. “Why would he tell you?” she asked Dan. “He must be lying and trying to sniff us out.” Dan doesn’t think Peter’s “savvy” enough to try something like that, which further proves that he will not be long for this world as a Traitor. While Parvati wisely advised that they “murder” someone who was not running around the castle grounds, and who therefore has no chance at a shield, Dan was dead-set on going after Bergie—which, unbeknownst to him, would be a disaster for the Traitors because Bergie does, in fact, have a Shield.
“I feel very confident Bergie doesn’t have a shield,” Dan says. “This murder is either gonna win me the game, or it’s gonna lose me the entire thing.”
Phaedra and Parvati do not seem confident, and we can’t know for sure, but it seems like the group consensus has fallen on Bergie. Even more ominous is that Dan has finally promised his fellow Traitors to say a name at the roundtable, but he refuses to say who. Will he try throwing, say, Parvati under the bus? After all, Peter told her about the Shield as well; if Dan’s able to spin things enough, he could send her home, solidifying trust among the Faithfuls. It would be a bold move, but also possibly his worst idea yet. If there’s one thing Survivor fans know about Parvati, it’s that she’s both cunning and absolutely ruthless. What’s that quote from Macbeth again? Ah, yes—“Fair is foul, and foul is fair.” (Although this week, perhaps it should be spelled “fowl.”)
