Sometimes working from home gets boring and as I work online, I can put a TV program on and mostly follow the plot. Recently I’ve binged every season of Traitors available on the streaming service Peacock. 

The plot of the show is pretty simple. At the beginning of the season, several people are chosen to be Traitors and the rest of the participants are Faithfuls. If Traitors are found out, those remaining can recruit another Traitor. All of the contestants work together to add money to the prize pot, but only those left standing at the end can claim the money, unless there is still a Traitor in their midst, then only the Traitor or Traitors get the money.

The group regularly meets to banish people from the game. Ideally those that are Faithfuls would be able to sniff out the Traitors and get them out of the game, but then new Traitors can be added so it’s an ever shifting mark. The Traitors also have the power to ‘murder’ one of the Faithfuls during the night. That participant leaves the game immediately.

I started with the US version, then watched the UK version, the NZ version and finally the Australian version. Sometimes I root for the Faithfuls, sometimes for the Traitors. Depends on who is more likable and who is playing the smartest. And of course, I imagine how I would play it if I were on the show.

It is tough to see a Faithful who has made it to the end find out that the person they are standing there with is a Traitor and they won’t see any of the prize money. It’s one of those games where you have to work together and trust those around you, all the while suspecting that they could be a Traitor plotting to get you out of the game, or a very smart Faithful who is on to you. And as always, there is no honor among thieves, er, I mean Traitors. They frequently backstab each other to make it further in the game.

This last season of Australian Traitors was my least favorite. In fact it was awful. Maybe it was the edit, but most of the Faithfuls seemed rather dim-witted and the main Traitor came out looking like a narcissistic psychopath. If this was a person I knew in real life, I doubt I would trust him with anything after that performance. By the end, I loathed that guy. Not just hated. LOATHED. I wouldn’t have continued to watch except I was waiting for this guy to get his comeuppance.

Most participants have a bit of humanity about them, so much so that the viewer likes them and hopes they do well, keeping in mind that it is a game. Even the Traitors are generally likeable people that you would want to be friends with. 

Not this guy. I wanted somebody, anybody, to take him down. But every time someone came for him, he was able to turn the tables back on them. He was suspected at every vote from early on, but he was never voted out.

I can’t claim that he is a narcissistic psychopath in real life, but watching that show, highlighted how people like that operate. Even his fellow Traitor who swore he would never be able to trust him, was schmoozed back in line with promises of faithfulness.

This guy was the king of gaslighting, deflection and misdirection. The minute someone accused him of something he turned it around on them, making it seem like they were the one who was deceiving the rest of them. This is the cult leader who could get everyone to drink the koolaid.

Watching Faithful after Faithful fall to this guy was frustrating. Why couldn’t they see how he was manipulating them, the viewers wondered? But to be fair, we had behind the scenes information. We got to see him scheming. When his fellow players looked into his face, they saw just a charming guy who was continually wrongly accused.

I can’t be too hard on the others, although it looks like they are just clueless, but isn’t that what a narcissist does? The others are just normal people who are assuming he is as normal as they are. They think they should be able to see a clue in his face, the way he spoke, his mannerisms. When normal people lie they tend to give themselves away by one of those things. But he never wavered. He could lie and manipulate without a twitch of the eye.

I think a collective cheer went up from the audience when he was finally served a dose of poetic justice, by the last Traitor he had recruited. At the end of the game three Traitors remained. The rules state that when three Traitors are left, they each have to make a choice called the Traitor’s Dilemma. If each of the Traitor’s chose ‘share’, then they would all share the pot equally. But if one or two of them chose ‘steal’ then those that wrote ‘steal’ would split the pot. Unless they all wrote ‘steal’, then none of them would receive anything.

Mr. Narcissist assured his fellow traitors that they would all share the money, but he had no plans to do that. He wrote ‘steal’. The second Traitor said he knew there was no way he could trust the first one so he also wrote ‘steal’. You can see those two standing there thinking they are sharing the prize money, because they are confident the third Traitor wrote ‘share’.

I like to think of this last Traitor as a mama bear type. She was on to Mr. Narcissist and would have led a charge to get him voted out. That’s one reason he recruited her. The other was because he was so confident that he could schmooze her too. She would choose to share the prize pot with them. And then he could pull the rug out from under her and take it away. He thought he deserved it all. He had done all the work to get them to that point.

When she revealed ‘steal’ meaning none of them would take the prize money, she said that Mr. Narcissist had looked her in the eyes and assured her that they would all share the prize with the same expression on his face that he had used to lie to all the Faithfuls. That’s how she knew he was lying.

The whole thing made me think about people who have narcissists in their lives. All of the gaslighting, deflection and misdirection. The ability to lie without any change in demeanor. They are hard to spot because normal people aren’t like that. We look for the familiar and we think we see it in them, so we believe what we are being told by them.

If you want to educate yourself on what a narcissist looks like, watch this season of Traitors. And if you do find yourself dealing with a narcissist, look for a mama bear who can call him on his BS. Or at the very least, serve him up a dish of poetic justice.