The Traitors: New Blood players are not okay

With just four episodes remaining, it’s clear The Traitors: New Blood’s players have been done dirty by the schedule and structure of episodes.

The edited version is ignoring key details (like Clyde’s fruit allergy that led everyone to ignore Victor’s theory) to why everyone did an immediate 180 on Victor just after voting him out!

But from what the players who’ve been eliminated from the game have been saying, the experience itself was quite tumultuous:

• Abby L. “I was going crazy”
• Tomica: “I was exhausted. I was tired. It was hard.”
• Michael: “I am suing every person who voted for me … I’m not kidding”

Yes, The Traitors: New Blood players are not okay. Interestingly, it’s the first traitor to be voted out who seems the most together.

Tomica said Joe and Katie turning on her was not a big deal: “I was actually slightly expecting it,” told EW. “And good luck to them. Kudos. I want my Traitors to win. So if they had to do it, they had to do it.”

Her last day wasn’t easy, though, especially being stalked by Victor in the castle. Tomica—who’s a commercial airline pilot, flying Boeing 777s for United—said in her EW exit interview that Victor’s stalking “was insane” and reminiscent of the way some people treat her at work. “This is something I deal with in the industry. You get treated a little different even in my industry as a woman. It’s like, ‘So you felt you can do that and run behind me and do all that, but you don’t do it to Joe?’ So yeah, that was really frustrating.”

Tomica also gave us a good reminder: “After that funeral, I was exhausted. I was tired. It was hard. It’s a lot harder than the internet where people keep saying, Well, if I would’ve done it… Sure, buddy. Sure. Sure. It’s hard.”

I have no doubt! The physical toll is also something Michael discussed with EW: “Your mind knows it’s a game, but your body doesn’t. So your emotional responses in your physicality are real. You are having cold sweats, even though someone’s throwing a fucking apple, right? Like that’s not a real fight or flight situation. No one’s actually dying in those coffins.”

Yet now, months later, Michael repeatedly says he wants his fellow players to die because they voted him out. “I’m still mad. I’m still coming for their fucking wigs. Are you kidding me? I am suing every person who voted for me at that Roundtable. They are getting served. I’m not kidding. I am so mad at all of them,” he told EW.

Asked by Decider’s Hope Sloop about what his traitor strategy would have been, Michael started his answer with this:

I don’t want to look at Victor any longer than I have to. I think he’s a stupid bitch. I hope he dies in a fire. If he ever comes to my neighborhood in New York, I think he should cross the street if he sees me coming. Honestly, I blacked out who he is. I think him meeting me in the castle was probably the most interesting thing that’s ever happened to him.

That is just a wildly disproportionate and unacceptable response. And he doubled-down with Parade’s Mike Bloom: “I hope all the Faithfuls fucking die in a fire, and I hope Joe wins.”

That’s the end of a long explanation where Michael reveals the depth of his pain over this game:

…it was so hard for me to be surrounded by so many queer people who were fucking coming for me, eating me alive. When I grew up so alone and figuring out my sexuality all by myself, going through the horrendous grief of your best friend killing themselves, no one really understanding why that grief was so real, because of my sexuality, because I was the only other fucking gay person I had ever met.

To then turn around and have someone like Joe have my back. Someone who looks and sounds like every homophobic asshole that I’ve ever encountered in my youth, was extraordinarily healing in a way that I’m still coming to terms with.  

Michael says Joe got in touch via production, wanting to reassure him that what Joe said about gay people was genuine, even though he was playing as a traitor. Explaining that, Michael told Parade, “I don’t know this guy. I only knew him in the castle. I don’t have his phone number. I don’t know his last name. I don’t know his Instagram. I can’t find this person. I just had this crazy emotional journey with.”

That’s nice—yet Michael, who acknowledges not knowing anyone or how to find them, is to this day pissed that his fellow players didn’t call him. “They’ve had three months since we wrapped to call me and let me know, Hey, love you. Wanna be friends with you. This is the shit I did that you’re about to see on camera,” he told EW. “Why am I finding out at my own viewing party that you had my name in your mouth? So I am still mad. I stay mad. I don’t forgive and I don’t forget.”

That wild level of anger and vitriol—whether it’s performative to get himself on other shows, or unprocessed emotions after months—makes Abby’s post-show confessions seem downright charming.

“I was going crazy because every single thing was a clue to me. And so I just felt like I was a computer that was running out of RAM and I was just overheating and I needed space,” she told EW’s Dalton Ross. She’s not kidding:

“And when I would get home at night into our rooms, I would write down every single piece of information I’d learned that day, whether it be who voted for who, or who said whose name. And I really thought that if I put all this information into some sort of matrix and logiced it out — like, solving a system of equations or something — I could figure it out, because that’s what I thought when I was watching previous seasons of The Traitors. But I think in hindsight, maybe my scientist training and scientist background hurt me in that way because I was way too analytical about it. I should have just gone more off my gut feeling.”

Abby’s analysis encompasses a hilarious range of absurdity, such as:

1. Deducing traitors by with a game of telephone. “I would tell one of them one thing, and if the other person somehow found out,” she said, “I knew that that conversation probably happened in the turret.” Or—what if the person just told the other person at another time? In a car to a challenge? In a room where you weren’t present?
2. Conducting chemistry tests on other players’ shoes. “18th century Scottish castles are made of this very basic limestone material,” she said, and that made her think, “Okay, if the Traitors are walking around on this limestone in the turret, they should have limestone dust on their shoes. So if we can somehow get a sample of the bottom of their shoe and mix it with something acidic like lemon juice, it’ll fizz and we’ll know they’re a Traitor.” She mentioned the same strategy on RHAP.

To her credit, Abby cites this as one of her “crazy, crazy ideas.” And it is, because it falls apart immediately—and not because it’s crumbly limestone.

First, aren’t they all walking around in the limestone castle? And second, how can you understand chemistry so well and not know that the turret is a set? Or that it has a wooden floor, which we can see on TV? The actual location of the turret isn’t clear, but Carolyn said the traitors just waited in the castle until everyone else left (players leave one by one, so they never see each other).

Abby’s obvious intelligence—she’s an astrophysicist!—obviously crumbled when combined with a game that involves identifying liars with extremely limited information. So I guess it shouldn’t be that surprising that The Traitors also left a lawyer wanting fellow players to die.

But I also hope NBC offers players some good aftercare with psychologists, counselors, and/or lobotomists, because some of them clearly need help.

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