Earwigs
Season 8
Episode 7
Editor’s Rating
4 stars
****
The contestants put on their best Marie Antoinette wigs to play a game that riffs on social deduction games.
Photo: Kate Elliott
Dropout’s weekly “behind the scenes on last week’s Game Changer” featurettes offer a lot of insight on a given episode’s origins, development, and production, but they usually gloss over one of the more fascinating issues: how the creators decide what the audience should know, and when. That dynamic varies considerably from installment to installment. In episodes like “Yes or No” or “Tell Us About Yourself,” viewers are completely in the dark, and get to play alongside the contestants, trying to deduce the game’s secrets. Hidden-information episodes like “Lie Detector,” “Bingo,” or this season’s “Night Shift” are cleverly constructed around doling out secret information to the audience to put them ahead of the players and heighten the drama.
“Earwigs” splits the difference in a smart, often startling way. Most of its challenges are built around two secrets, and the audience learns only one of those ahead of time. That means we get to have our Game Changer cake and eat it too: With each mini-game, we simultaneously get the opportunity to play the game and to sit outside it, judging how well the players hide hidden agendas or ferret them out.
The contestants: Zach Reino, Ross Bryant, Oscar Montoya, Jessica McKenna, Becca Scott, Erika Ishii, Persephone Valentine, Isabella Roland
The game: In each round, most of the players get instructions for a mini-game via the earbuds they’re all wearing. But one or more “imposters” don’t get instructions, and have to convincingly play along anyway. Players get points for correctly calling out imposters, or remaining undetected as impostors. Also, after the first round, each mini-game has a separate metagame, where one or more players have a secret goal to meet without getting caught.
The inspiration: The initial mechanics resemble a previous hidden-role Game Changer episode, “The Drinking Game” (season seven, episode five). There’s a little Mafia/Werewolf DNA in there too, both in the simultaneously-point-to-accuse voting system and the “wake up at night” mechanism that lets players with secret assignments identify each other. But the overall structure much more closely resembles the social card game Spyfall, where a group of players is assigned a secret location to discuss, while a spy who didn’t get the briefing tries to convincingly participate, stay unnoticed, and deduce the location.
“Earwigs” starts in classic Game Changer fashion, with the contestants pushed into action before getting any game briefing. It also features a more idiosyncratic kind of fashion: The players are decked out in brightly colored, jewel-bedecked Marie Antoinette wigs and era-appropriate stylized makeup. (Notably, the guys get women’s wigs rather than the period’s radically different equivalents for men.) Most of the players immediately adopt exaggerated foppish courtier characters, complete with hoity-toity accents and hyperbolic graciousness. “We basically have decided we’re roleplaying for the whole episode,” Dropout CEO and show host/producer Sam Reich says, sounding torn between regret and admiration.
The contestants are also all wearing hidden in-ear speakers, a.k.a. “earwigs.” In Challenge 1, the players dance to an earwig-transmitted ditty called “Dance Like It’s a Bit and You’re Mr. Bit Guy,” a hooky song full of rhythmic instructions from Sam, like “Be spaghetti! Whatever that means to you! More al dente! Whatever that means to you!” and “Flick off your friends!”
At this point, neither the players nor the audience knows one player isn’t getting the music or instructions at all, and is just imitating everyone else. When Sam asks the contestants to pick out the impostor, they turn on Izzy, who the camera caught several times during the dance looking baffled and frozen. Six players choose Izzy as the impostor, and not for the last time in this episode.
For most of the challenges, the votes are all over the place. But Izzy is a frequent and consistent target, because she so often seems to be playing a different game from everyone else. She affects a rough lower-class British accent instead of a fop character, performs challenges outside the circle of chairs everyone else sticks to, and brings in the kind of wingnut scofflaw play I usually associate with Vic Michaelis.
Oscar is the actual imposter, though, and he gets to stand and take a bow — after an extended Traitors-style pause, where the players peer suspiciously at each other, backed by thunderous music. (Sam must have coached the players on post-vote-reveal dramatic delivery.) No one pegged Oscar as the imposter, so he gets three points, delivered via a digital scorecard and a voiceover by Taskmaster creator and co-host Alex Horne. Alex serves as an ersatz sports announcer presiding over this game, though I wish he’d been given more room for color commentary and to explain the points system, which changes from round to round without explanation.
Another scoring mechanic is similarly never spelled out for the audience, but it’s a wonderful visual detail: Players get a butterfly decoration clipped into their pouffe-style wigs for every point they earn. “Sprinkle me with butterflies!” Becca cries at one point after scoring. But mostly, the butterfly system goes silently unheralded.
For Challenge 2 and beyond, the players get masquerade-ball half-masks on sticks, sans eyeholes, to use as blindfolds during challenge setups. When the imposters are working together, they get to lower their masks during the setup phase and identify each other. Challenge 2, labeled “Archetypo,” has Sam secretly telling most of the players to deliver lines in the voice of an archetypal noir detective, then a “fairytale witch,” then a used car salesman. Zach is the imposter who isn’t given instructions, but the archetypes are broad enough that he catches on quickly and fakes it well, and only Persephone calls him out during the vote phase.
But Sam introduces a new wrinkle, a “secret second game.” Players have to deduce what it was and vote on who was playing it. This is a hellish quadruple-barreled challenge: The contestants have to simultaneously (a) play the minigame of the moment well, (b) be funny, (c) suss out the imposters, and (d) watch for absolutely any kind of deviating behavior whatsoever. No wonder Izzy gets pilloried so many times just for having the driest sense of humor. And no wonder so few imposters get caught.
The player theories about the secret metagame are quite observant, but no one actually guesses it: Ross and Izzy were ordered to insert the names of as many Sandra Bullock movies as possible into their answers. Between them, they manage to tag The Blind Side, Miss Congeniality, Practical Magic, Speed 2, The Lake House, Heat, The Net, and Bird Box while still successfully playing the archetype challenge.
The editing in “Earwigs” is particularly on point when it comes to hidden information. The flashbacks to secret instruction phases are fun times. (“Lower your mask and find your competition,” Sam tells Izzy and Ross in “Archetypo”’s setup phase. “Now nod to each other menacingly. Gooooood.”) But the episode is sprinkled with other kinds of terrific little stylized inserts. Usually, we’re in on whatever the players are hearing in their earbuds. But sometimes, the editing steps outside that space – for instance, showing us all the players dancing, but omitting the music they’re being fed via earwig. It’s like a large-scale version of watching someone bop to headphone music only they can hear. (Major shoutout here to the YouTuber who created Zac Oyama’s version of that experience from the previous Game Changer episode, “Noise Some Makes.”)
Challenge 3 has the players being given three themes — “joy,” “space,” and “silence” — and ordered to draw pictures on the theme, using their motorized, vibrating “squiggle pens” in their non-dominant hands. That combination makes it impossible to even draw a simple line, giving this round’s fakers, Jess and Becca, the option of drawing gobbledegook and passing it off as something more specific. They seem to out themselves when Becca draws “a pet rock with a palm tree in the mouth” for “space,” and Jess draws four suns “in a sense of balance and giving” for “silence.” Becca does get five accusations. But Jess slips by unsuspected as the metagamer, successfully asking all seven other players “What you thinking?” without anyone realizing it isn’t just a jokey comedy-repetition bit.
Challenge 4, “Bop the Mark” is tag, with the “It” player trying to tap a specific player with a lily, while all the other players play zone defense to block them. The imposters, Zach and Erika, don’t know the game, though it’s easy to deduce. This one’s mostly fun because it’s so physical, yet so decorous. As Ross immediately calls out, this mixture of a child’s game with a sense of politesse, set to a stately, period-appropriate Vivaldi concerto, absolutely does feel like a game that might have been played in an 18th-century court.
Sam drops two swerves after Challenge 4, first asking who was or still is playing a metagame, then asking both the players and the metagamers to “lock in their votes.” Ross, Oscar, and Persephone were all metagamers who weren’t introduced to each other, and who had to make silly faces throughout the game, then point each other out based on the face-pulling, which Oscar and Sephi both successfully do.
Challenge 5 is a rough one: It’s “Never Have I Ever” without alcohol. Players hold up ten fingers, and lower one every time Sam, via earwig, mentions something they’ve actually done. Izzy and Sephi are imposters. When the first never-have-I is “done background work,” and only Erika, Becca, and Sephi cop to this actor rite of passage, Erika calls out all the other players as impostors. “I don’t believe any of you,” Sephi similarly announces, with no information, but impressive confidence and authority. Other prompts ask players to lower a finger if they’ve used a fake ID, milked an animal (“I’m from Colombia,” Oscar says matter-of-factly), had a paranormal experience (“I think I’ll give context after. I don’t wanna give it away,” Sephi says, again with authority), or snooped through a medical cabinet. “I’ve been through all those, but I’ve never been in there just gobbling,” Ross says, in what must have been the weirdest line for Izzy and Sephi to hear out of context.
The final prompt is “had sex in a public place,” which sets off a round of tittering and innuendo, and Sephi’s masterstroke as an impostor: “I bet you would love for us to give you some details, you nasty, nasty pig,” she tells Sam, responding to the group’s overall blush-and-titter while still not actually knowing the prompt or revealing any actual information. She fully slips past everyone’s radar, while Izzy, who’s been quiet the whole round, gets her second six-accusation round. Even Sephi votes for her. (Scorekeeper Alex Horne, in a rare bit of editorializing, calls this pile-up “brutal but fair,” comparing Izzy’s silence to Sephi’s “incredible amounts of absolute bullshit.”)
It turns out there are four metagamers this round: Sephi and Oscar are partners, and so are Erika and Becca. The teams are competing to talk over each other the most, saying “approximately the same thing at approximately the same time,” which involves a lot of anticipation and echoing. Erika and Becca win this one.
The game ends with Challenge 6, “Frog, Fish, Crab,” an improv game somewhat echoing the mutable rules of the venerable theater warmup exercise Zip Zap Zop. Players “send” frog, fish, or crab to each other by saying the word to another player, usually adding gestures and silly voices. Then it’s the other player’s turn to pass frog, fish, or crab to someone else. The players can also make up new rules or events, whole cloth: The only point is to catch out the impostors, who are meant to think they’re playing a real game with actual rules. If anyone appears to botch the gameplay, everyone’s supposed to join in on a big accusatory “Ohhhhhhh!”
Izzy, Oscar, and Zach are the impostors. The first time someone departs from the frog-fish-crab pattern — Jess announces “Under the ocean!”, leaping up to crouch in the middle of the stage — you can see all three impostors hesitate before getting up to join the others. But Zach catches on fast, and takes a risky gambit by making up “Volcano mode!”, where all the players meet at center stage to hold up their arms and yell “Boom!” Oscar emulates him with another round of Volcano Mode a minute later. Surprisingly, though, Oscar’s the one who gets off scot-free, while Zach and Izzy draw three accusations apiece. Then Sam reveals that Izzy, Oscar, and Zach were all playing a metagame as well, getting points for everyone who voted for them as imposters. This is fairly confusing, since Izzy and Zach tie with four points apiece and Oscar gets two points – which doesn’t reflect either the imposter voting that round or the voting throughout the game. I’m still not sure where those numbers came from.
But it winds up not mattering, because of the metagame vote. When Becca says she doesn’t think there was a metagame, and casually suggests voting for Sam instead, the players go for the gag. All eight of them point at Sam, in the game’s only unanimous vote. It turns out that during the opening dance number, Becca was assigned a third-level metagame that ran throughout the entire episode: She gets a point whenever someone votes for Sam.
Hilariously, the players figure out that they were manipulated on the unanimous Sam vote, and collectively decide that was the top-level metagame. But no one suspects Becca, who walks away with an additional seven points, leaping from a tie for last place (with Izzy and Erika) to a clean win, and the fanciest, courtliest, most butterfly-est wig of them all.
The winner: Becca Scott
The prize: “A collection of Sandra Bullock movies on DVD.”
Prize rating: 2/5. Becca points out that she doesn’t own a DVD player, and she’ll have to buy one. Also, judging from the package art, she clearly won this set, featuring Forces of Nature, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Two Weeks Notice, Miss Congeniality and its sequel. Don’t do it, Becca! None of these movies are worth buying and installing a DVD player for!
• Another week without kitschy callback player introductions, thank goodness, given the long player roster here.
• Sam’s masquerade half-mask, which just looks (vaguely) like the top half of his face, feels like a continuation of Game Changer’s endless run of mildly unsettling Sam Reich-themed objets d’art, like Zam the Sam puppet, the Sam bobblehead, the Sam matryoshka-doll set, or the baby-doll-Sam-in-a-baby-Bjorn.
• Ross flawlessly cramming Sandra Bullock movie titles into his “Archetypo” answers reminded me a lot of the similar challenges in “A Game Most Changed” (Game Changer season five, episode five), where he, Joey Bland, and Blaine Swen have to improvise a Shakespeare play while getting points for slipping the names of breakfast cereals, sitcom catchphrases, game shows, and more into their dialogue.
• This is more of a callback for Broadway fans, but during “Archetypo,” I cackled like Persephone when the players were asked to deliver lines like a fairytale witch, and Izzy recited one of the witch’s more convoluted lyrics from Sondheim’s Into the Woods. She also started a trend, with Zach delivering the title line from The Little Mermaid’s “Poor Unfortunate Souls” and Erika contributing what I’m pretty sure was meant to be the melismatic finale of “Defying Gravity” from Wicked, though Erika’s version sounds a lot more like Tarzan’s classic yell.
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