Review: The Traitors, "I Will Bury You Under The Sand" | Season 2, Episode 4
It had to happen eventually, but we didn't really want it to be now, did we?
The chaos of The Traitors as a game raises some interesting questions. Let’s take the opening scenes of this week’s installment, where intrepid Dylan continues to aggressively pursue the traitors. When he sees that the door to the secret room by the bar is open, he immediately goes in and decides that something is afoot. He scours the room searching for something that has changed, unaware that the traitors’ kill list for the coming execution is sitting inside the tiny coffin where they put it. The cliffhanger last week made it seem like Gabby was going to catch them in the act, but in the end Dylan is the only one who seems willing to put his neck on the line to play the game. Which brings us to the question: what would have happened if Dylan had opened that coffin and found the list?
It’s possible, of course, that the list had already been removed by production to avoid this likelihood. But the “collaborate in plain sight” twist makes it possible that they could be caught, and while the most chaotic version of the game has never really manifested, the possibility is always there. And it makes it especially insane for Jeremy to feel like there was anything he could have done to stay in the game: his tearful goodbye talking about his desire to support his family would make more sense if he had been playing Survivor, but how could you reasonably expect to walk into this game as a faithful and have any type of control? The dynamic within the cast might have boiled down to gamers vs. housewives, but the actual competition doesn’t give the former side a distinct advantage at surviving day-to-day.
This is immediately evident in “I Will Bury You Under The Sand,” when the aftermath of Jeremy’s murder throws suspicion onto Nikki and Ciara when the players sniff out the possibility that a traitor could have been in the coffins. It’s a vindication of Rob’s refusal to support putting Carolyn in a coffin, and Wes seems to narrow in on Nikki immediately based on the “fake wrestling” argument. As ever, anyone who spends any time as a public figure is probably capable of “performing” enough for what this game requires, but the story sticks because in this game survival is just letting someone else get targeted that isn’t you. Dylan has an absolutely correct theory, but he immediately registers he doesn’t have enough support, and that there’s no way to stop the entirely wrong theory about Nikki from dominating the roundtable.
…unless an ultimate gamer steps into the spotlight to try to bend the game to his will.