“I tink something very bad is about to happen,” Ireland’s Maura Higgins worries at the top of this week’s The Traitors, an episode that host Alan Cumming pre-teased as “the best moment of Traitors TV history” in a chat with AwardsRadar. Hyperbolic, maybe, but he’s certainly not far off. The chaotic carnage that occurs at that banquet table is far more heated than the platters of left-out poultry our players were forced to consume for dinner. (Seriously, what is going on with the food in that castle?!)  

We kick off with token traitor Lisa Rinna—dressed as equal parts French sailor and evil Michelin Man—arriving  at the aforementioned soiree affixed with the cursed amulette with which she will kill off a Faithful in plain sight. (“This is like the Super Bowl of murders!”) Everyone’s already on edge, with marked tarot cards ominously fanned out on the dining table, so Lisa needs to stake out her target strategically. She ixnays the too obvious Colton Underwood, and instead opts for Survivor gamers Yam Yam Arocho and Natalie Anderson, as well as Top Chef host Kristen Kish. 

We don’t find out exactly who Rinna foils with her broach ruse until everyone sits down for dinner and Alan—complete with a heavily-filled wine goblet and pearl-encrusted eyebrows, naturally—arrives with his hooded henchmen. He informs our players that, yes, their worries were warranted and that someone has been cursed by a Traitor that very evening. However, two vials of antidote are available, so long as the Faithful correctly deduce who was poisoned in plain sight. Was Stephen Colletti’s slicing of that roast simply a nice dinnertime gesture or a harbinger of doom? What about the tarot card printed with Kristen’s portrait? Was it picked from the deck as a warning? And was Lisa Rinna’s cheek bisous the kiss of death?

Paranoid that they were unknowingly poisoned, Kristen, Natalie, and Tara Lipinski are all adamant that they should be the ones to drink the antidote, but none more so than Natalie. She is out of her seat and racing against the Olympic figure skater to snatch the remaining vial after Yam Yam gets the first one. In the end, though, all of that shouting and shoving was for nought, because Alan dramatically reveals that it’s Yam Yam himself who had been marked for death by Lisa. In a last-ditch effort, he desperately implicates the RHOBH star to the room as he’s hauled away by the guards. 

Rinna is, unsurprisingly, a bit rattled by Yam Yam’s pronouncement. (“I don’t know if I’ll recover from this but I’m Lisa Rinna—bring it on.“)  As for her fellow Traitors, Candiace Dillard Bassett is trying to diffuse the situation not only between Lisa and the Faithfuls but also between Lisa and Rob Rausch following last roundtable’s big betrayal. “We’re a well-oiled machine moving in tandem…I don’t want that to break up because Rob is an idiot,” says the Potomac personality.

The problem for the Traitors is that Rob actually isn’t an idiot, and he’s playing a pretty ruthless game. He knows that Yam Yam all but signed Lisa’s death certificate on his way out, but also that if you want to be a legendary Traitor—the kind that Rinna thinks she is—you have to be willing to spill the blood of your own. 

So while the rest of the Faithfuls have their eyes on Natalie and her curiously aggressive behavior at the banquet—made even more suspicious by her Porscha-esque slip-up about “murdering” gamers—Rob doubles down on his backstabbing campaign against Lisa. That cold-blooded competitiveness helps fuel his win in this week’s mission, which tasked the players with gathering gold pieces set out across a steep hillside. The win adds $17,800 to the collective prize pool but also gives Rob the chance to win a dagger granting him two votes at any of the next four roundtables. Using his self-proclaimed “human lie detector” skills, the Love Island-er correctly deduces that it’s Natalie who’s hiding the dagger-marked tablet, thus giving him the coveted advantage. “The fact that he can pull this power out at any time to sway the votes is scary,” Natalie worries. And it’s not just the Faithfuls who should be concerned. When Rob returns to the castle, he makes an alliance with several non-Traitors to not reveal to the other housemates that he has the dagger advantage. Rausch is going rogue, you guys. 

At the roundtable that evening, Lisa brings up Natalie’s verbal slip-up to redirect some of the heat on her, but she’s not successful in snuffing out those flames. And with a fiery final vote from Rob, Rinna’s time in the turret has come to an end. “Rob, damn you,” a tearful Lisa says. “The end of Housewives was so difficult for me…but I’m so grateful for this entire experience.” 

Rob managed to out-Traitor Rinna, but it looks like he’s going to have a tougher time taking down Candiace, who vengefully voted for Rausch at the roundtable in a pointed throwaway vote. “I have no idea how Candiace and I are going to work together moving forward…seems to me like we’re not,” Rob laments. But Candiace is more than ready for a fight. “The Christian woman in me is just clutching her pearls. I’m aghast,” she says of Rob’s serpentine ways. “But the bad bitch that is Candiace is ready to play a motherfucking game. I have to take the snake down and cut him off at the head.”   

Stray observations

• As a TV fan, the joy of The Traitors is watching the most random people from across the reality universe befriend each other. Because exactly how do we have Survivor winner Yam Yam Arocho demanding Stephen Colletti of Laguna Beach fame to “hold my hand, bitch” in emotional support? Incredible. 
• No disrespect to Alan Cumming’s always sensational tartan moments but outfit of the week undoubtedly goes to Maura’s ’60s mod situation at castle breakfast. 
• We need many more cutaways to Alan’s sweet pup Lala lying in her gilded dog bed eating “Faithful Bitz,” please and thank you. 

Christina Izzo is a contributor to The A.V. Club.