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Just last week on season four of The Traitors, Harriet was hailed as one of the best Faithful to walk the Ardross corridors. Now, after an audacious stunt that credited her fellow faithfuls with perhaps too much intelligence, she’s been banished.
That is how quickly the tides can turn in the Scottish castle.
Harriet left with two Traitors scalps hanging from her belt, while also having a third turret tenant on the ropes.
We will ignore her final misstep on Roxy, because you can’t be right 100 percent of the time.
Harriet has been a Faithful par excellence and her cohort have made their most hare-brained move yet banishing her from the game, even if she was literally asking for it.
The Faithful at large had been as good a bunch as we’ve ever had, even if it was largely down to Harriet’s help and Fiona’s fumble. Never before in the UK show have they caught one of the Traitors so soon into the competition.
Their streak of unmasking two Traitors before we reached the halfway point of the show looked all the more impressive coming off the back of an historically-terrible set of Faithfuls during the celebrity spin-off. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Claudia Winkleman was pulling her fringe out on the sidelines of the roundtables.
But tonight’s episode proved that the Faithful have forgotten who was to thank for all their good fortune so far: Harriet.
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By doing so, they have killed their own winning streak – and given the Traitors a crucial advantage.
Harriet, a criminal barrister turned crime writer, correctly kept her head down at first, knowing she didn’t have enough on Traitor Rachel to bring it to the table. When she did so, in a dramatic breakfast outburst, it was like we had missed something in between – like her subtly planting seeds of doubt among fellow contestants.
I can only explain her decision to reveal her suspicions to the cast as the actions of someone who had grown weary with the plot of this story and decided to go all or nothing.
In the end, she got nothing. It was all incredibly frustrating to watch, particularly because the Faithful are already showing they have not learned the right lessons from her sacrifice.
Pointing her finger firmly in Rachel’s direction over the coffee and croissants had flavours of Hugo and Fiona’s past slip ups. It was a foolhardy move.
But I think Harriet might be the first Faithful on the civilian version who didn’t really care about winning. It’s been reported that she already has a net worth that doesn’t necessitate the cash prize.
She had more in common with celebrity contestant Joe Marler in her noble singlemindedness and, just like him, she couldn’t get the Faithful to rally round her when it mattered most.
Instead, she fell on her own sword to prove her point and guide the Faithful in what she saw as she right direction.
Standing up to face banishment, Harriet admitted it was a kamikaze move and asked that her self-immolation not be in vain.
But, given that several Faithful only wrote her name because she asked them to and the takeaway from the roundtable certainly wasn’t ‘Rachel is a Traitor’, she hasn’t gone out in quite the blaze of glory she had presumably hoped for.
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Revealing she was a Faithful, there was none of the usual performative outrage around the table. There wasn’t even a microexpression FBI-trained Rachel could have read. It was like they knew, which made the decision to banish Harriet all the more rotten.
Sometimes, watching this show, I can’t help but think that they can’t put two and two together.
It is bizarre to me that anyone would pull a move as audacious as Harriet’s, when Fiona had just proven big swings don’t work, and I simply cannot understand why she would ask to be voted off.
This might be another bug of the game having a cash prize: the Faithful are often willing to vote off their own, in the face of logic, if it saves their own skin. But everyone who did so has now lost their strongest player, who was best placed to help the Faithfuls reach the final.
With Harriet having exited stage left, 12 players remain and two of them are Traitors. The scales have tipped in their favour. Rachel is immune to real suspicion, despite Harriet’s best efforts.
And Stephen, the walking, talking personification of a guilty-looking party, is skating through unscathed.
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Meanwhile in the castle, team Faithful is a who’s who of gullibility. They might have had strength in numbers and have come out swinging at the roundtable early in this series, but the sheer ineptitude of this move is staggering.
With Reece gone, James has inherited the title as worst Faithful, with an almost preternatural ability to suspect his own folk and make ill-judged moves, like his sly pocketing of a shield.
Roxy’s full-throated promise to avenge her mum feels like a distant memory, while Ellie’s much-touted psychology training has achieved nothing.
Sam and Jade are too busy fighting off the fact they look like Traitors, to put in an effort into actually finding any.
So, I think it’s safe to say that the Faithful are in real trouble.
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The only person who saw Harriet’s manoeuver for the (ultimately misguided) attempted bluff-calling that it was, knowing it was too much of a risk if she was a Traitor to put herself on the line like that, was Jack.
In my mind, he and Jessie are the only thing stopping the Traitors from picking off the Faithful like fish in a barrel.
If those two go, the Faithful are truly doomed.
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They’ve lost their most formidable player, leaving them in a very vulnerable position moving forward. But hopefully Harriet’s kamikaze move proves to be just her own, rather than one that takes the entire good ship Faithful down with her.
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