If my voice is shaking, it is not through nerves,” Harriet fumed on The Traitors last night. “It is through anger that you have taken me for such a fool.”
Yikes. The latest episode of an already vintage series of the BBC juggernaut was absolutely bursting with marmalade-droppers. First, Harriet told Traitors Stephen and Rachel, who were hiding in a confession booth, of her intention to take down her number one suspect. “I think we all know that the gig is up for Rachel,” she warned, with a face of stone. “I will have no compunction in going after her. There is nothing you can do to stop me.”
The following morning, there was the breakfast table confrontation. “I am not going to allow a day of any further machinating and web-weaving around me, because I have had enough.” Cue everyone choking on their pain au chocolats. Then there was the clinical attack at the roundtable, followed by the mind-boggling pushing of the self-destruct button, where Harriet encouraged her fellow players to vote for her so she could stand up and say she was a Faithful – therefore adding weight to her case against Rachel.
In the midst of all this, Harriet revealed to the castle that she used to be a criminal barrister, and that she now writes psychological thrillers (her book sales have shot up by 96 per cent since the series launch). Well, only a bestselling crime writer could make television this good – and this god damn quotable. (Quick plea, though: can everyone take this game a bit less seriously? Harriet, with her slow-clapping and eyes like daggers; Rachel with the pre-show FBI training – “I have profiled every single one of you,” she told the other contestants, somehow with a completely straight face. Guys, calm down!)
But last night’s events expose a flaw at the centre of this brilliant show: intelligence is a weakness, and playing the game well puts you at risk. You only have to look at the Traitors’ reactions to Harriet’s assertiveness and experience to know that. “She’s scaring the life out of me,” Rachel told Stephen, her face slick with sweat. “She’s a really dangerous player,” he agreed. “We should not have let her last this long.” Stephen was right. She is perhaps the strongest player we’ve yet to see on the show – her takedown of former Traitor Hugo in the battle of the barristers was epic, and she hit the nail on the head when she guessed the Fiona vs Rachel fallout was a Traitor-on-Traitor showdown.
The writer knew herself that she needed to keep her background a secret until now. “I kept it quiet from the start because, as a Faithful, I’d have been walking around with a big fat target on my back,” she said.
Harriet is not the first smart player to fall foul of the game for ostensibly playing it well. Look at Kasim, the doctor from series three, whose intelligence was seen as a suspicious trait and got him banished. Or sales exec Ross, who was eliminated far too soon in this season, despite knowing he’d been framed and putting across a very convincing case to prove it. And perhaps the cleverest person to step foot in Ardross Castle, Stephen Fry, was a fairly early casualty in the celebrity edition too. It seems that, too often in this game, as soon as you start to play it well and stick your head above the parapet, your time is up.
Unfortunately, it means that as the show enters its later stages, viewers are left with contestants who have coasted through by flying under the radar, and who actually don’t have a scooby what’s going on or who the Traitors could be. They just know who they like, who their new best mates are, and are inclined to follow their hearts over their heads and vote on that basis, while they continue to be picked off one by one. The problem is, they’re a lot less fun to watch: it’s so frustrating seeing contestants clutch at straws and blindly go with the herd at the roundtable, and much more entertaining to see a player who actually follows clues and builds up a coherent case. But those players don’t tend to get far in the game.
Harriet was angry that the Traitors had taken her for a fool. But actually, the best thing for her gameplay would have been to be just that, and stay out of the Traitors’ line of fire.
