Bit of a damp squib, this year’s Traitors. At its best, it was still able to skim the preposterously giddy heights of previous series, but I spent a lot of the run living with the growing realisation that the cracks in the format are starting to show.
One major culprit, as always, has been the mid-episode challenge; a slab of filler designed to kill any trace of intrigue, like a version of 12 Angry Men where the jurors get up halfway through to spend 20 minutes swanning around in a park. Nor did the new raft of tweaks amount to much, with the reveal of the Secret Traitor coming far too early, and the secret connections (Judy and Roxy, Ellie and Ross) fizzling out without resolution.
However, the biggest accusation to level at The Traitors is that it is a show designed to reward the dull. There have been some spectacular participants this year – James was baffling, Harriet was explosive, Fiona somehow managed to be both at once – but they all got banished the instant they demonstrated any tangible signs of personality. Instead, the final five contestants were two traitors and a handful of people who couldn’t have said more than 500 words between them all series. It didn’t look great.
After James was banished by chance in a cliffhanger from the previous episode, we were left with Jade (whose default characteristic was defensive), Faraaz (who was mute, then tantalisingly perceptive, then mute again), Jack (who suddenly made himself known three episodes ago, like a Star Trek redshirt) and the two remaining traitors.
They were Stephen, who was passive and fond of big collars, and Rachel. And, honestly, thank God for Rachel. She was, of course, the figure who managed to bend the show’s entire gravity field around her. This was the woman responsible for turning The Traitors into – if you’ll allow me to quote Logan Roy – a fight for a knife in the mud.
For better or worse, Rachel’s machinations meant that this year’s entire series was cast in her image. It, and she, was ruthless to a terrifying extent. Even in the final her plotting remained in overdrive, as she worked overtime to convince anyone who would listen that Jade was a bad egg.
And while this is a terrible trait for a human being, it’s a great one for a reality TV contestant. Rachel’s innate untrustworthiness meant that we were kept on the hook right to the very end. All along she had promised Stephen that they would operate as a team, but who in their right mind would believe anything she said?
Luckily, for her at least, she was murderously effective at dispatching the competition. Poor Jade – unfairly vilified since episode one – was banished and fled the room in tears. Poor Faraaz followed, only realising what had happened in the post-banishment interview. And then the traitors ganged up on Jack, at which point it was game over.
The traitors had won, and Rachel and Stephen split the £95,750 loot. Tellingly, the other finalists didn’t join them at the end. This was possibly because they felt too betrayed by the people they thought were their friends. The moral of the story? It’s easy to cheat your way to the top. What a very 2026 lesson to learn.
For all the show’s flaws, the endgame is still quite effectively stressful. Objectively none of the finalists deserved the money – they were either too useless or too duplicitous – but the final 15 minutes made for a properly sweaty watch. I once watched a man put his head inside a crocodile’s mouth, and watching Stephen fret over how much trust he could put in Rachel in those final seconds was a roughly equivalent spectacle.
Hopefully we’ll see some of the other contestants again. James seemed to treat the show as an audition for a bizarre unmade CBeebies show about a vomiting gardener, so hopefully he’ll get his shot. I’ll be interested to see what Jade is like when she isn’t being crushed by ennui. And Stephen, I’m sure, will soon be available to hire for parties as a sort of walking reaction gif.
More than anything, though, this year’s Traitors made me nostalgic for the more innocent celebrity version, where everyone was too worried about their reputations to become as debilitatingly bloodthirsty as this lot. An uneven series saved (but only just) by an excellent finale.
