Think Outside The Box
Season 4
Episode 9
Editor’s Rating
3 stars
***
The newest Traitor joins the turret, and their first order of business is helping Rob terrorize the figure skaters.
Photo: Euan Cherry/PEACOCK
“Sup, playa,” Rob says as he reveals to the always-befuddled Eric that he’s not only a Traitor but a Traitor seeking to recruit him to his ranks. And how do you say no to “Sup, playa”? With death as the only other option, Eric is, of course, onboard to become a Traitor, which means he has to murder — and the three people that our new Traitorous pairing is choosing between are Natalie, Dorinda, and Stephen.
But before their choice is revealed at breakfast — which Mark arrives to dressed like a Peaky Blinders stand-in — the room chats about their suspicions, and it looks like the momentum is hurtling toward Johnny, especially after Candiace pushed so hard for him to get a shield last week. But if he is a Traitor, like they all suspect, who would Johnny have recruited? Well, obviously, Tara, who doesn’t help her case by vouching for him the second she joins everybody at the table. As for Johnny, he seems just as aware that he’s on shaky ground, so much so that both his personality and his hair have deflated.
The same thing happened to me when it was revealed that in a move to sow the seeds of confusion, our beloved Dorinda Medley — after a triumphant return to the show — was murdered. But when one door closes, E! and Bad Bunny open a window. Dorinda’s murder comes just days after she was hired to replace Jill Zarin on The Golden Life, so she’ll be back in front of the cameras in no time. I just wish they had given her a few martinis for her exit interview.
Speaking of other programming, I once again am tickled by the perfect timing of Johnny and Tara’s big episodes coinciding with the Winter Olympics. It’s a dream cross-promotion for Peacock, but better yet, it finally gives us the chance to see them in action as a pair. While their insistence on keeping their distance was smart gameplay, it’s much better television when they’re together, so I was relieved that we finally got to see Tara rushing to Johnny’s side in his hour of need. She doesn’t just warn him that he’s being talked about but also tries to redirect the castle’s attention away from him and toward Stephen. The problem with this is that Tara has already widely established that she has a bad gut and is often wrong about the game. So now her claims based on her gut unfortunately don’t hold much weight, and Kristen quickly dismisses her hunch against Stephen. To make matters worse, Kristen adds that she’s actually suspicious of Tara herself. First they came for the Housewives, now they come for the figure skaters.
Alan greets them for their mission, with his hair dyed for a gender reveal, and tells them that they have to get into boxes, where they’ll answer questions about the Traitors’ opinions. Another day at the office. The catch is that the Traitors have to sneak out of the creaky boxes to submit their answers, and money is earned if the players correctly guess how the Traitors answered. As they’re asked who’s most useful or manipulative, Rob and Eric quickly hatch a plan to put Tara for every answer so the Faithfuls won’t be able to glean any new information about who they are from this game. Putting strategy over financial gain, they terrorize Tara until the group finally catches on and they all put her name to win a buck. Well, all of them but Tara and Johnny, who somehow missed the memo.
The final question the Traitors have to answer is which four players they’re shortlisting for murder that night, and they select Natalie, Tara, Kristen, and Johnny, who get locked in their respective boxes as a result. Rob and Eric figured that the castle would assume that at least one of the boxed players was a Traitor themselves, and thus were attempting to set Johnny up. But this plan might have backfired, because seeing Johnny’s defeated body language on the ride home actually convinced Natalie that he might not be a Traitor after all.
Back at the castle and knowing that they’re both in trouble, Johnny and Tara decide to throw their initial strategy away and start operating as a team. No more will they hide their top-secret best friendship in the shadows! They vow to become a “we” once more and “go out in style” as a team. And they waste no time, with Tara kicking off the roundtable saying, “I’m a Faithful. I can promise you Johnny’s a Faithful.” It’s a claim that makes Maura wonder how she could possibly promise that on Johnny’s behalf, at which point they explain their closeness to those not in the know. That includes Mark, who seems to have never watched the Olympics in any form and is thus shocked when they say they’re best friends who would trust each other blindly.
As a team, they’re able to pivot the conversation to Stephen, first bringing up the suspicious solo meeting he had with Candiace and accusing him of putting up a wall over the past few days. Natalie then chimes in to once again bring up how strange it was that Lisa gave him all of her gold during that mission from a few weeks ago. Those two pieces of concrete evidence, in a game where votes are far too often decided on weird vibes, put the nail in Stephen’s coffin. But what also helped ensure his banishment was Johnny and Tara’s decision to act as a unit, thus splitting the non-Stephen vote. Moving forward, it could prove to be a useful strategy to keep either of them from getting the majority vote — especially if Peacock wants them around through the Olympics.
With Stephen out of the game, the Traitors are left to decide whether to kill Johnny, Kristen, Natalie, or Tara. Per usual, they have to act like all four are equal possibilities for production reasons, but let’s be real. They’d be fools to kill either Johnny or Tara, whom the entire castle is more suspicious of than ever, and whose continued presence would thus keep the heat off of them for two more roundtables. They could instead fan those flames by killing Kristen, who already made it clear that she thinks she’s up for murder because she told Tara she suspects her. And if framing Tara wasn’t enough reason, after the roundtable Kristen also confronted Eric for being oddly quiet and told Rob and Mark that she’s suspicious of him, adding, “If I’m murdered tomorrow, just look at Eric.”
On one hand, letting her live could take that heat off of Eric, but Rob also now has the ability to do something similar to what he did to Candiace. He could let Eric kill Kristen, have the castle first banish Tara and Johnny at the next two roundtables, then remind Mark of Kristen’s warning to knock out his fellow Traitor so he won’t need to split the prize money. But when the players make plans, Alan Cumming laughs — so even though Rob is particularly well positioned, there’s still plenty of time for things to go left.
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