A toast: to poison, paranoia, and the enduring human instinct to overthink every little sip. After last week’s slice of triumph courtesy of a seemingly awakened group of Faithfuls, “Playing Chess” is the episode where The Traitors: New Blood reminds viewers that old habits die hard. A celebratory feast withers into a poisoned-chalice standoff, the castle turns on itself in real time, and a promised showdown bubbles, but doesn’t come to a full boil. The hour certainly has its moments, but we’re mainly left with a largely forgettable episode that saves its biggest sin for the very end.
The episode opens with everyone dressed to the nines and filing in for the celebratory banquet. Longtime fans of the franchise see the feast for what it is: a Trojan horse for certain peril. But for now, the group is allowed to momentarily set the game aside and bond over Scotch eggs and cheese. The players take a moment to tenderly recount their time in Scotland in a way that we haven’t quite seen in the U.S. version since season one. Ben expresses gratitude for the men who have accepted him in friendship. Nurse Abbey B. emotionally shares how the experience allowed her to do something for herself after having to manage her daughter’s healthcare. They talk openly about how the prize money could change their lives. A lovely pause, no doubt, and the sincerity throughout the group is genuinely moving.
This, naturally, is the perfect time for Alan Cumming to swoop in and shift the mood radically. He announces that dinner will end “with a nightcap and a deadly little game with the Traitors” in the courtyard. Flash to two hours before dinner, where we see Traitors Joe and Katie being informed of their next task. The pair must choose someone to murder by way of a poisoned chalice, which will be part of a deadly “toast.” There is a catch: The players can choose to sip from their own cup or switch with a willing player. They can certainly aim to murder someone, but there’s no guarantee that the person they choose will stick with their cup. Additionally, the Traitors are immune to murder, meaning they can sip from the poisoned chalice all they want and not experience the very permanent effects. If they can’t get a Faithful to drink the poison, then a murder simply won’t take place.
As soon as the group learns of the rules, panic spreads. They only have two minutes to decide what to do with their cups, which doesn’t leave a ton of room for discussion. Once the timer starts, all Kumbaya-adjacent feelings fly out the window immediately to make way for instantaneous suspicion and chaos. Kriste quickly picks up her cup without discussion, deciding that she’d rather take a chance with her current standing in the castle and drink from her own cup. This causes Ben to openly question her lack of overt panicking as the paranoia wastes little time settling in. Victor is frantic (who’s shocked?) and challenges Joe to switch cups with him. Joe, of course, refuses to trade. In fact, nobody is willing to trade with Victor, and him pushing others like Katie and Abbey to take his cup without offering a solid enough reason why they should basically sacrifice themselves only further alienates him from his castlemates. In the end, there’s only one switch—between Joe and Shane—before time runs out and Alan raises his glass “to consequences.” Everyone seals their fate with a sip, and Joe celebrates the fall of another Faithful in a confessional where he can finally exhale.
The toast is a brief yet effective grenade in an otherwise quiet game—and to be fair, it’s hard to say what a better Faithful strategy would have been in such a high-pressure scenario. Victor’s desperation for survival is understandable and very real, but if there were any traces of goodwill earned by him leading the charge against ousted Traitor Tomica earlier that day, his bulldozing and tunnel vision during the chalice game have all but eradicated them. For the rest of the Faithfuls, the toast confirmed who they believe is the most vulnerable—and that’s clearly Victor, based on everyone’s hesitance to accept a trade from him—and how much they’re willing to protect the only person who has successfully outed a Traitor (apparently not much). They’ve seemingly forgotten, in this moment, that Joe was also implicated in Victor’s pursuit. Rather than test that theory by perhaps encouraging him to take Victor’s cup, they instead resort to spur-of-the-moment estimations based on extremely human moments like, for instance, Kriste maybe not being so keen to risk her relative safety and trade willy-nilly. The sheer panic made for an entertaining enough watch, but it came at the expense of any progress the Faithfuls made at the roundtable mere moments ago.
The breakfast table is a little smaller the next morning, but there’s still plenty of room for theories and speculation. Abbey, as it turns out, does at least seem marginally suspicious of Joe, pointing out his flip-flopping defense of Tomica. She’s also still simultaneously eyeing Victor as a potential Traitor while certain that his murder would indicate that Joe is a Traitor. Ben revisits his theory that Kriste’s calm approach to the toast is a hefty clue while still keeping a silent eye on Katie. He also brings up the very first roundtable, where Kriste was extremely vocal against Madeline, the season’s first banished Faithful, and has been fairly reserved since then. At no point do they consider that Kriste likely learned her lesson from her first major blunder and course corrected to prevent further Faithful bloodshed, because this is not the place to grow from your mistakes.
The rest of the players file in and Victor, the Fireproof Faithful, slinks in having survived the night. Morgan, unfortunately, can’t say the same. She’s the one who received the poisoned chalice from the Traitors for no other reason than her murder would literally point to nobody. To echo Katie here: “Sorry, diva.”
Before they head to their mission, the castle breaks into conspiratorial clusters. Jay and Joe have a very laughable conversation where Jay still considers Victor Suspect No. 1 and Joe, ironically, points out Kriste’s now unseemly defense of Tomica at the roundtable. Jay doesn’t question the fact that Tomica’s most vocal defender is being a bit of a hypocrite here, he’s just thrilled to have a buddy. Even more headscratching is Kriste’s turn on Wyatt—a suspicion inspired by Abby L., who Kriste openly called out at a previous roundtable for being so famously and consistently incorrect. Getting a hunch wrong in a giant guessing game is fine, but the path to this particular hunch is incredibly hazy. (And hi, did we not just determine that Abby’s murder was a tool to frame Wyatt?) We then have to endure awkward flirtation between Katie and Victor while the former urges the latter to join the growing mob against Kriste. But never underestimate the power of a very jittery man on a mission, for Victor is still very set on going after Joe. His methods may be a mess, but the tenacity remains admirable.
We are then dragged to a haunted cabin in the woods for another mission. The premise: The group must reunite departed spirits with the beloved treasures they left behind. Remarkably, these spirits are able to operate a landline phone, which they will use to communicate clues about said items to the players. The team will then have to find the items and deliver them to a cloaked reaper in exchange for $9,000 per delivery. There is also an opportunity to grab a shield. The mission itself is mainly an opportunity for production to flex their budget and creativity, turning to pulsating walls and the obligatory shower of live bugs to inform the creepy atmosphere. Aside from some fun visuals and the $18,000 out of a possible $27,000 they manage to add to the winning pot, the big takeaway is that Victor secretly nabs the shield for himself and, thankfully, keeps his mouth shut. If there was ever a time that I wanted a shield to do its thing, block a murder, and cause a little drama, my god, NOW WOULD BE THE TIME.
Victor does, however, resume his generally mouthy nature to apply some pressure to Joe. A version of the confrontation we have been promised since last week finally arrives, and it plays out exactly as you’d expect from these two: Victor arrogantly convinced, Joe mildly perturbed, neither giving an inch. Victor insists he has Joe clocked (and he has, we know, we know) while Joe demands evidence. “You’re just going off of fruit,” Joe tells him, attempting to dismiss Fruitgate. “That’s all you got. You don’t have facts.” A fair enough hit and also entirely beside the point, because Victor’s rebuttal is the only résumé beat that matters in this castle: “I’m the only one that’s been right.”
And while all this sniping, mudslinging, and accusation-lobbing is swirling about, nobody has even begun to approach or challenge Katie in a truly substantial way. Ben might be suspicious, but he has yet to bring it to the only table that matters and the lion’s share of his televised conversations have been about implicating Kriste or absolving Victor. The other women have a strong friendship with her, Victor’s at least mildly smitten with her, and she’s been the most congenial voice of reason in the bunch while laying out the bulk of the Traitors’ existing strategy. The Traitors may not be playing a sterling game and she’s had her own setbacks, but Katie’s keeping this turret afloat more than she’s given credit for while also mitigating the heat against Joe, which is now largely relegated to one persistent person.
Only time will tell whether or not her work was in vain. We make our way to the roundtable but the moment we grab a seat, the episode ends. The epic Victor vs. Joe showdown we were promised in episode 8? Dragged out to episode 10 with only a couple mildly tense exchanges to satiate us. That’s the major issue with “Playing Chess”: Strip away a few entertaining minutes involving a secretly poisoned chalice and you’re left with little more than some idle chat and a polite grudge match between two dudes. Tomica’s banishment, for the more observational, would have triggered a revisit of happenings around the castle through a different lens. (“Maybe the fruit thing has some juice” yells a savvier player in my wildest Traitors dreams) But we’re sliding back to the same wispy logic and cheap editing ploys that have made this season an uneven watch thus far, and the breaks in momentum land less like suspense building and more like stalling. Maybe we’ll fare better in the next episode.
Stray observations
- • Castle Twins sighting: seen preparing the haunted cabin, then hightailing it the hell out of there. Sure.
- • A note I made as soon as Alan mentioned a poisoned chalice: “The Ominous Pop Playlist is either getting ‘Toxic’ by Britney Spears or ‘Poison’ by Bel Biv DeVoe.” Britney was on the money, the other was just wishful thinking.
- • Kriste to Abbey, after the nurse talks about finally doing something for herself: “Mom to mom: You have complete permission to fill your own cup.” Her menopause defense at the previous roundtable might have been a big miss, but Kriste championing Abbey in that moment (as well as attempting to validate a very real experience while defending Tomica, to a degree) was meaningful in a way that extends beyond the game.
- • Pocket grapes. Ew.
- • As long as we’re revisiting things that happened in week one, is the castle ever going to revisit Xavier likely getting murdered while battling for a spot in the turret, which could put Katie, who he directly called out, back in the hotseat? No? OK.
- • Another mission moment: Abbey unhesitantly diving head-first into a toilet full of diabolical muck for one of the items. Gross and badass in equal measure.
- • It’s not fair, but there is something kind of funny about the castle finding Wyatt vaguely untrustworthy. Again, maybe don’t announce that you were really fiending to be a Traitor next time.
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