Pardon me, Traitors New Blood? Waiting a week to resolve this mess?

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“I could look like the craziest person ever, or I’m gonna look like a genius,” Victor told Tomica during The Traitors: New Blood episode seven.

Why not both? Everyone’s favorite sweaty boy is remarkably astute, picking up on the traitors and their (often comically bad) attempts to hide their status in the game. He’s one of the smarter faithful players we’ve ever seen. But his antics and outbursts are like putting a dog into a fish tank.

Even Alan Cumming had enough. When Victor’s scarecrow head exploded and kicked him out of the challenge, he paced and pouted so much Alan held up his megaphone and said: “Don’t be a sore loser, Victor. It’s not a good look.”

If Victor ran around tearing other people’s hair out, it’d be less grating. And I’m rooting for the guy, because he’s right! And I can’t imagine how frustrating it’d be to not have anyone believe you, while meanwhile Abby convinces everyone that the lasagne they had for dinner means Lauren is a traitor because both start with L.

Back to dogs, and not Lala: everyone’s favorite puppy metaphor, eye candy Mark, was the traitors’ choice for the latest murder.

“It’s time to start a storm,” Tomica said when the traitors decided which player to murder. Cue the storm, which had all the intensity of a hamster farting into a pile of ground pepper.

Everyone liked Mark; the game moves on. Maybe it’s the truncated episodes, but once he was gone, no one cared any more, perhaps because they were too busy trying to baffle me.

Consider these fumbles from this episode alone:

• “I didn’t give anyone fruit,” Tomica insisted to Victor—which should be a tell because she revealed the mechanism of murder that even Victor does not.
• But that was nothing compared to what Tomica did next: suggest Katie was a traitor. At the Roundtable, she first denied it, and then admitted it: “If I said Katie, I misspoke. I meant Kriste.”
  • Tomica knows this was not good: “I messed that whole thing up, and that’s on me,” she said in an interview. “Y’all, names are not my jam.”
• Tomica also tried to get Fruitgate off of her by putting it on Joe: “He ate a whole apple!”
• Then Katie voted for Tomica to be banished.
• Abby insisted her lack of murder means Wyatt is a traitor. I think Abby’s confidence pains me because I’d probably be that wrong, too. And it actually made Abby a target: “She’s systematically introduced every single person we’ve voted out so far,” Kriste said. Oops.

Is anyone playing this game well? Victor being banished means that more people think he’s trying to distract from being a traitor than just tearing his hair out over everyone else’s failure to listen to him.

But Victor has a possible savior: the pardon. A player earned it at the challenge by collecting the most gold from scarecrows, though three players are ineligible because others targeted them. Blown up were Victor, by Shane (Victor: “you’re stupid!”); Morgan, by Clyde (Victor: “What are you doing?!”); Wyatt, by Abby L. (oh Abby).

The pardon seems to me like The Traitors’ version of Werewolf/Mafia’s governor role: a player who can save a person eliminated by the players. There’s also a lawyer role, a player who identifies one person overnight, and if that person happens to be voted out the next day, they’re saved.

In The Traitors: New Blood’s version, the person who got that power can immediately opt to save the banished player. But they don’t even know who that is yet! And we won’t until next week, because NBC’s strategy of driving us all completely insane with these episodes is continuing.

Also continuing: the players saying hilarious things! Some of my favorites:

• Victor: “Fruitgate’s not over.” I think I need a t-shirt that says Fruitgate. Maybe I should make one.
• Victor: “The fruit shall set you free!”
• Mark’s analysis of events in the game: “Killing me was just really not cool.” And that’s why Alan said, “Oh Mark. So pretty—pretty dead.”
• Ben, describing the game: “We’ve gone off feelings. Doesn’t work. We’ve gone off vibes. Doesn’t work. We’ve gone off facts. Doesn’t work.” You need some adjectives here, Ben: petty feelings, bad vibes, wrong facts.
• Clyde: “When you’re a teacher, you are always right.” Hey look, the teacher was wrong!
• Kriste, auditioning to be on The Real Housewives, “Who the crap is doing this? Because it’s ruining my vacay.”

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• Andy Dehnart is a writer and teacher whose reporting and criticism has appeared on NPR and in The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Vulture, The Atlantic, Salon, Playboy, The Daily Beast, and other publications. Andy’s work on reality blurred has won an Excellence in Journalism award from NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists (2023) and an L.A. Press Club National A&E Journalism Award (2021), and was honored with Florida Society for Professional Journalists awards (2015, 2021, 2023). He’s president of the Television Critics Association, and a member of NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists, GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics, and The Authors Guild. He holds an M.F.A. in nonfiction writing and literature from Bennington College, and his memoir-in-progress, I’m Here to Make Friends, was longlisted for the 2022 First Pages Prize.

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