Is The Traitors’ ultimatum a bad game element?

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The Traitors: New Blood is somehow almost done with its season. Compressing this format into broadcast TV’s 42 minutes continues to fail the show and its players.

As much as I appreciate the show’s atmospherics, they throw the balance way off. Why did we have to watch James and Oliver Phelps finger the puzzle pieces for what felt like several minutes? Couldn’t we get to see some of the players who are still being ignored instead?

That said, this episode had a lot of content:

• Joe banished, and revealed as a traitor;
• Katie recruiting Shane;
• Ben’s murder;
• a challenge allowing the traitors to sabotage while others were blindfolded, which I really liked as it gave the players some actual physical evidence about the traitors’ physical identity and decision-making, all in one;
• time for conversation, Victor’s faces, and Jay’s tears;
• and Tiny Traitor and Mega Traitor, which are both hilarious.

And yet! It still feels like a lot of drawn out nothingness and not very much detail. Just look at Morgan’s exit interviews, where she talks about how much she knew that we never saw.

So I don’t have too much to say about it—which isn’t helped by the fact that I’m writing this on my phone. (Thursday, I fell coming up the three stairs we have coming into our house; I did this while holding my laptop, which was dumb, and wearing my laptop glasses, which is also dumb. I somehow managed to fall on both my face, my arm, my hand, and my laptop screen all at the same time, cracking its screen so badly it no longer functions. And I’m an elder millennial so doing things like this on my phone feels like a Gen Zer trying to address an envelope.)

So, I’m curious what y’all think about the Traitors ultimatum twist, which I was thinking about during that extended scene.

In a competition for money, why would anyone say no and choose to instead leave the game, losing the chance of winning any money?

I see the ultimatum as yet another thing that gives the traitors too much power.

I’d love to see some faithful have a kind of immunity from ultimatums. Perhaps it’d allow the person to see a traitor and go back into the game with that knowledge? That would make their credibility an issue; would anyone believe Victor if he said Katie gave him an ultimatum and she’s a traitor?

Or, less severely, maybe the person who’s given an ultimatum can either accept or reject, in which case they get a clue to the traitors’ identity. Either way, the traitors would have to gamble on being more exposed.

The final next week is two hours, but actually two episodes back-to-back, so I don’t know how they wrap all this up in a satisfying way. I hope they stick the landing, though.

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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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