Dear Reader, I come to you this week not to skewer The Traitors: New Blood, as I have lightly done in previous weeks, but to cautiously praise it. After two fairly lackluster episodes, “It’s Like Fighting Two Pigs Under A Blanket” does the one thing this season has mostly refused to: It lets the game cook. There’s a real breakfast. There’s a mission that actually matters. There’s a turret scene, which was promised to us via last week’s cliffhanger. And there is, at long last, a genuine fracture among the Traitors—one pried open by the player everyone in the castle wishes would stop talking.
In the turret, Tomica, Joe, and Katie weigh their next kill. Victor, while a prominent topic of discussion, is obviously not an option. After all, you don’t axe the guy loudly accusing you of murder, because a dead accuser is a vindicated accuser. So the shortlist comes down to Mark, a person too faithful for his own good; Kriste, whose murder would cause more confusion than unwarranted attention; and Wyatt, because why not?
It’s fortuitous that the Traitors spared Victor and allowed him to see the return of the full breakfast spread (never have I been so excited to see a bowl of boiled eggs). The polarizing Faithful does not disappoint, immediately revisiting Fruitgate and launching an aggressive campaign against Tomica before anyone can finish buttering their toast. With a few more details this time around, we get a better understanding of why he’s so stuck on her over Joe, who’s also in his sights and Niyyah’s actual killer: Victor truly believes he saw Tomica offer Niyyah a piece of fruit that she then ate. He’s obviously wrong about the particulars but he’s accidentally, infuriatingly right about her role in this game. And Tomica may not have successfully murdered anyone, but she damn sure tried. So, maybe the wrong path to getting out a Traitor is better than another dead end.
The breakfast scene, as it turns out, is an excellent summation of what makes Victor a compelling reality TV personality. Victor is genuinely sharp. He’s also messy, evidenced by his stage-whispered accusations right in front of the accused and his too-eager energy. His social game is a wreck thanks to his apparent preference of catching flies with a blowtorch rather than honey. Every move is done at full velocity, whether he’s in a mission or simply reacting to something he doesn’t like. Yes, he’s exhausting to a degree, especially once he feels he’s cracked a case. He’s also legitimately fun to watch and a refreshing break from his more polished celebrity counterparts.
As everyone files into breakfast, the game’s next victim is revealed. Mark, whom the group has dubbed the castle’s labradoodle (Arisa, you were ahead of your time), is the next murdered Faithful, and the grief is palpable. The castle is genuinely upset, with Morgan noting that the circumstances are somehow more serious now than they were three murders ago. Their reaction, of course, proves the Traitors’ point, sealed further by Shane noting that he never once suspected Mark. Ben, to his credit, reads Katie’s calm reaction to Mark’s murder as suspicious.
With Mark properly mourned, the castle breaks off into its usual huddles. Abby L. is doing what she does, framing her survival as evidence against Wyatt. Kriste, in a confessional, voices her theory against Abby L., pointing out that every theory she’s dragged to the roundtable has gotten the wrong person banished. It won’t bring them closer to booting out an actual Traitor, but there’s still hope that a little friendly calling in will help Abby L. see the light.
Elsewhere, Clyde decides Morgan is suspicious for speaking up about Mark’s murder, which seemingly contradicts her quiet nature. Ben, Shane, and Wyatt, meanwhile, form a small bloc that isn’t immediately buying the lingering case against Victor, correctly asserting that he is just playing the game to the nth power. And Joe, doing the thankless work of a loyal Traitor, tries to cautiously vouch for Tomica, planting the idea that his co-conspirator is above suspicion while everyone’s busy litigating Victor’s passion.
This week’s mission is far from a throwaway. After last week’s flat challenge, episode seven hands the players something with actual stakes: a shot at “game-changing power,” which will be revealed later in the day and could tilt the coming roundtable. Contestants rifle through a field of scarecrows hunting for four black hearts, each of which can be dropped into a rival’s barrel to knock them clean out of the running. There’s also an undisclosed amount of gold to recover for the pot, which, at first blush, feels more like a footnote than a feature.
The knockouts land right along the castle’s existing fault lines. Shane takes out Victor, who he deems his strongest competition for the power and is—and I truly cannot overstate this—visibly and vocally livid. Clyde bumps Morgan and Abby L. eliminates Wyatt, dragging their suspicions into the mission. Ben knocks out Katie, a covert warning shot against the one player he’s currently eyeing. When it’s over, the group banks $15,000, and someone walks away with a very hyped power. We just don’t know who won it and what that power is.
But the mission is just the appetizer. The main course is what happens when Victor and Tomica finally sit for a one-on-one chat. What looks like a heart-to-heart chat at first winds up being a moment when Victor’s intensity actually works in his favor. Victor presses her, refusing to let the Fruitgate thread drop, and proceeds to hold it together long enough to make a Traitor genuinely nervous. And a flustered Tomica, it turns out, is a clumsy Tomica. Cracking under the pressure, with no clear exit and Victor’s eyes boring into her, she throws out Katie’s name for allegedly being too quiet. Her own co-Traitor. Unprompted, unnecessary, and entirely self-inflicted.
Reader, I gasped. This is the first Traitor-on-Traitor betrayal of the season, and it wasn’t strategy or a response to any mounting suspicion (because as loudly as Victor is banging the drum on this, nobody is really taking him seriously). It was pure panic, a drowning woman grabbing the nearest person and pulling them under with her. After six-plus episodes of watching the Traitors coast, we finally have a turret beginning to implode, and the fuse was lit by the sweatiest boy in Scotland. Absolute cinema.
We finally get to the roundtable, kicked off by Kriste. She presents her case against Abby L. Abby’s defense: “I didn’t vote for Michael last night.” A technically true rebuttal, but a sparse one, at best. Rather than continue to stand up for herself, Abby resumes harping on Wyatt for no reason other than, to summarize, he kind of stumbled when she asked a loaded question about a hypothetical, totally irrelevant strategy. She is nothing if not consistent.
Then Victor, this week’s dogged vigilante, calls out the castle for not considering Fruitgate despite him being the only one to bring anything even remotely substantial to the roundtable. Jay counters by calling Victor’s anxious energy distracting, which could be character development on his part or an exercise in sheer audacity. He’s admittedly dialed himself down since getting dragged himself a few roundtables ago, so it’s hard to tell.
Tomica puts up a fight after getting called out by Victor once more, playing up the perceived absurdity of Fruitgate. Of course, this prompts Victor to bring up Tomica’s earlier accusation against fellow Traitor Katie. Rather than own the moment, Tomica denies ever saying Katie’s name, insisting that she always suspected Kriste. She then tries to write the misstep off as a mere slip of the tongue (“Y’all, names are not my jam”), but the betrayal is already seeping deep into the young marketing manager’s bones.
The votes are all over the place—one for Abby L., one for Morgan, one for Katie, a couple for Wyatt. As far as these arguments go, none of them appear to be moving the needle except for the enduring suspicions against Victor, which have been percolating since episode one, and the case against Tomica, which was enough to at least move Wyatt. But the most important vote of the night belongs to Katie, freshly scorned and not wasting any time trying to get Tomica out. If you listen closely, you can hear Xavier somewhere in Wesley Chapel, getting the last laugh.
This is the closest the players have ever come to getting a Traitor out of the castle. But never doubt this team’s ability to work against its own interests. Victor’s energy proves to be too much for his castlemates and he is banished… or is he? When he takes his place in front of the room, Alan delivers a final twist: The mystery power from the day’s mission is actually the power to override the vote and pardon a person from banishment, a right earned by the player who banked the most gold. It’s nice to finally know what this power is. It would be even nicer to know who has it and whether or not Victor gets to live to wildly gesticulate another day. Unfortunately, the episode ends before New Blood can earn too much goodwill with viewers this week. This is one of the less forced cliffhangers we’ve had to stomach, but man, this show continues to solidify that some things are just built for streaming.
So, who do you think won the power? Do you think Victor gets another chance to stick around? Sound off below!
Stray observations
- • Arisa was right all along—Victor does give off bad chihuahua energy. And Jay’s “too chaotic to murder” theory is aging pretty well after Mark’s murder. Lots of vindicated players this week, it seems.
- • Another one for the Ominous Pop Playlist: Nancy Sinatra’s “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down),” cued up as Victor’s banishment is announced. This is actually one of the few times where licensing the original track over opting for a cover might’ve been the better call.
- • Castle twin sighting: seen cavorting with scarecrows—one of which appears to be alive. And while we’re talking about the mission… not a huge fan of the lack of transparency around the gold of it all. I know it’s meant to preserve the big twist and it certainly wouldn’t be the first time in reality TV history that a show may have small mechanisms in place for some potential production sleight-of-hand. But c’mon: Be a little less obvious.
- • This episode’s title, “It’s Like Fighting Two Pigs Under A Blanket,” comes from Kriste, who says as much while struggling to extract a bag of coins from the scarecrow. She deserves a lot of credit for her folksy idioms and, far less importantly, her impeccable hair.
- • As much grief as I give Abby L., she deserves some grace for actually trying to participate in the investigation. Abbey B., on the other hand, just appears to be along for the ride. Even when she does speak up, it’s usually just to beg for more info or piggyback off of someone else’s argument. Girl, give us something.
- • Best fakeout of the episode: Under roundtable interrogation, Joe seems like he’s about to abandon his usual middle ground stance and call out something major. Instead, on Fruitgate: “Look, if we’re gonna get into it… I need roughage. If you see me, I’ve been eating more fruit and more vegetables every day, making a conscious effort. But like, I love that you have a theory.” Brilliant Castle Dad defense, no notes.
Keep scrolling for more great stories.