This is the messiest, most foolhardy season of The Traitors US yet

I don’t always agree with Boston Rob’s assessments on The Traitors, but he was completely right when he ended episode six telling his fellow traitors, “This is a disaster.” He echoed that earlier in an interview: “It’s a shitshow, dude.”

“This is the worst group of traitors that I’ve ever seen,” he also said. “What’s wrong with these people? All of them.” I’d argue that includes him, too, for going after Bob the Drag Queen way too early. As Ciara said, it was Rob’s “way of putting his dick on the table.”

Nothing can impede a Boston Rob dick-slap down, just as, on this season of The Traitors US, nothing can get in the way of the players doing their damndest to damage their own games.

It is so messy—and so fun to watch, like looking through glass at a bunch of kids having a food and feces fight.

The latest dramatic Traitors US season 3 roundtable, starring Rob Mariano, Danielle Reyes, Derrick Levasseur, Tom Sandoval, Carolyn Wiger, and others (Photo by Euan Cherry/Peacock)

At the center of this is the traitors’ war with each other. “There’s nobody that I want to murder other than you two right now,” Carolyn told Danielle and Rob at the start of the episode, and nothing changed by the end.

The banished player, Wes, might as well have walked around the roundtable and written his name on everyone’s chalkboard, that’s how easy he made it to vote him out. I was actually surprised Rob got votes considering how stupidly Wes behaved.

“I’m one of the greatest reality competition players of all time. Quantitively, I’m better than everyone here,” Wes said. Then, just to make sure everyone stayed friends, he added, “I don’t care about any of you,” gave them the finger, and said, “fuck all you guys.”

Sure, he’s won more seasons of The Challenge than others have one their shows, but The Challenge a game that involves giving other meatheads concussions between bouts of drunken assaults, all inside a format that regularly seems to be produced by people who themselves are competing—to be the world’s most incompetent producers.

After Derrick laid out a straightforward case for Rob being a traitor, Rob first called out his fellow traitors in order to point to Wes: “I heard your name Danielle, I heard your name Carolyn, I heard your name Dolores, and they all came from Wes.”

That immediate deflection seemed like a misstep itself—lying guilty liars deflect instead of answering questions directly, never mind calling out his fellow traitors—but it worked.

That’s because Wes responded to people saying how “aggressive” he was by, oh, threatening everyone. 🤨 “Wes buried himself,” Derrick told Britney. Yep.

Wes even overshadowed his own excellent argument against Rob, pointing out that, after Bob the Drag Queen called out the three new guys, Rob immediately told Wes they’d have to target Rob. But that was lost once Wes said that anyone who “makes that mistake” of voting for him, “I’ve got my eye on you.”

If the traitors murder Derrick, all the sanity will exit the castle with him, and we’ll be left with players like Dylan, who were once strong but now are surgically attached to Boston Rob’s Back Bay; Tom Sandovol, whose eyes are basically already out of his skull; and Sam, a monster who doesn’t like brownies.

By the way, why are the traitors not purging the castle of this dead weight? We’re just going to leave Tom and Sam and Ivar around until the end, really?

Rob Mariano, Wes Bergmann, and Derrick Levasseur enjoy their final moments of Traitors safety and peace with each other earlier this season (Photo by Euan Cherry/Peacock)

“It’s not rocket science,” Derrick said of the evidence against Boston Rob, and he’s right. Of course, this game is so tough that Derrick is also wrong about something else: Britney, though I’m glad for that because their confrontation was quite funny, when, to each other’s faces, she called him “such a dirty scumbag liar” and he called her a traitor.

Derrick’s case against Rob was clouded by all the other nonsense, so much of which was on display at the roundtable.

We were geared up for Derrick and Wes versus Rob, and then Dolores mentioned Tom calling her out, and then invited him to target her by mocking him to his face: “I don’t think any of it will make sense, so I’m okay with it.”

Derrick interrupted Tom, thank Alan Cumming, by saying, “We got too many other things. Let’s wrap it up.” He laid out the case for Rob, and then instead of piling on that, the other traitors helped Rob out.

What the heck was Carolyn doing calling out—and then voting for!—Danielle at the roundtable?! 😑 And why did it not occur to Carolyn that Danielle may have actually been keeping her traitors’ tower promise to reset their relationship, and that all Danielle’s talk about Carolyn came from the previous day?

And what the heck was Danielle thinking targeting Carolyn earlier? Oh, right: that’s her plan to get rid of Boston Rob. 🥴 I understand her fear about Boston Rob—she deferred to him yet again for the murder, going along with Bob Harper. But her Carolyn obsession has given Rob even more cover.

As if that wasn’t absurd enough, Danielle admitted, in the turret, that she told other people Carolyn was gunning for Britney because—and this is a direct quote—”you brought it up to kill her, that’s what I meant.” Ah, so, the evidence you’re giving other people that someone is a traitor is what they’re doing as a traitor that you’ve seen because you’re also a traitor.

Alan Cumming with Bob the Drag Queen on The Traitors US S3, E2 (Photo by Euan Cherry/Peacock)

Amid all this, the players took a break to earn $30,000 in a mission that I first thought was bringing back Bob the Drag Queen, because when they arrived there was a very tall traitor standing in a field. (Bob is a very tall man, though not quite 24 feet, like this cloaked figure.)

What did the players competing for a cash prize do? Didn’t bother to prioritize the cash. Each of the three groups skipped the boxes to go for shields; as Chrishell said, safety is better than money, because safety means having your face on yet another episode of television.

The challenge was highly suspicious, and its timing seemed as fake as the fireball part of that explosion. They spent more than half their 30 minutes searching for shields instead of bothering to earn money. So in 15 minutes they transported and dumped 1,500 pounds of not-at-all-gunpowder into an enormous barrel using just small buckets and bags from containers scattered around the woods?

The producers’ overuse of shields and this challenge aside, the events of episode six felt like watching some kind of bizarro, Stupidville version of The Traitors.

I think that points to the strength of this format: The Traitors creates intense paranoia, because several people must lie. Everyone knows this; unless they’re a traitor, they can trust literally no one, yet they must do that to progress in the game.

I understand Peacock’s reality TV star version is not everyone’s favorite—I, too, would prefer a civilian season, and am glad we get that thanks to the UK edition. But the added layer of players’ preexisting relationships and reputations makes that tension even thicker.

The Traitors US 3 has been an entertaining ride, though it’s such a wild contrast so far from seasons one and two, when we watched some players skillfully navigating these incredibly difficult circumstances—first Cirie, by herself; then CT and Trishelle as a pair—while others understandably tripped up (especially in season one, when they had no idea what was going on).

The difficulty of navigating this game was certainly on display at the roundtable, which was not an epic Rob vs. Bob-style fight, but people racing to stab each other in the back, missing, and hitting themselves. Let’s see if they can find other targets in the next episode.