Monday, June 16, 2008

The Mole, Week 3

Time to catch up with The Mole...

As of last week, I'd dismissed Nicole, Bobby, Craig, and Victoria as suspects. Nothing happened this week to make me reconsider any of that. Tonight, Ali left voluntarily and Bobby was eliminated. That leaves me with five suspects: Kristen (who was after last episode my number one), Clay, Mark, Alex, and Paul.

I'm inclined to dismiss Clay and Mark as suspects because of their refusal to attempt the "Dress Code" challenge. If you're the Mole, you're there to "play" even more than the players themselves are. You want to be in there stirring it up in every single challenge, whether you're actually trying to win one to divert suspicions, or trying to sabotage. To simply quit without trying is simply not a Mole move.

Furthermore, the justification for quitting to "maintain dignity" makes perfect sense from the perspective of a player. The Mole may not know exactly what s/he's in for every step of the way (at least, until the day of), but s/he knows that no matter what, s/he'll be around for the entire duration of the game. Every mission. Every twist. Every turn. In all of those tasks, you can guarantee that you'll have to do something uncomfortable or embarassing. And I would think, having checked dignity at the door before beginning the game, it wouldn't even occur to the Mole to sabotage this kind of game by not playing. S/he'd go for something more subtle.

Let's turn to Alex. Once again, this week he played as hard as he could. Yes, he had the major failure in placing two consecutive apples in the "Fruit of the Luge" challenge, but I think that's Nicole's mistake, not his. (By the way, Nicole's move was so blatantly the act of someone trying to make the players think she's the Mole that there's not a single contestant farther off my list at this point.) But Alex rocked the "Dress Code" challenge. He speaks Spanish (as we knew from last week), and he worked hard to engage every person in sight, pulling together clothes in no time. It's getting harder and harder to look at him as a Mole. His failures in the game seem to always stem from stubbornness, not sabotage.

Then there's Paul. I can imagine that one strategy the Mole could employ would be the stir trouble and chaos and get in everybody's faces. The Mole should lie low, right, so how could it be someone putting himself front and center all the time? But even if you believe that theory, Paul's performances in the missions seems consistently too good for someone who should be causing a little more sabotage. Granted, finding a New Yorker to give him pants was dumb luck, but the Luge event, and the missions of the week's before? No, I say he's a player unwilling to sacrifice ANY money from a pot he expects to win in the end. And because he knows unending successes would take him off the other players' radars, he stirs trouble outside the missions as his way of inviting suspicion.

Which leaves Kristen. She was my number one last week, and remains so now. I point to the Dress Code challenge as new evidence tonight. She basically did not say a word during the entire challenge. As her group walked the city streets, Ali and Victoria were chatting up anyone who would listen, shouting on corners in both English and Spanish, doing anything to find somebody to offer up clothes. Kristen was silent. You could chalk this up to being shy about the situation, wandering the streets of a foreign city in your underwear, but I just don't sense that she's a shy type. I think she was trying to simply vanish into the background. It's a form of passive Mole sabotage, like carrying the wheelbarrow with Bobby last week -- don't actively ruin team efforts to achieve the task, but don't contribute anything either.

How then do I explain the fact that Kristen went 7 for 7 in the Luge challenge, putting $14,000 in the pot? I think it was a situation where the Mole needed a "rock star" moment to divert suspicion. In the previous week, she'd earned an exemption that kept all the money for one challenge out of the pot. Then she worked on a team in the Pigs mission that brought back no pigs to put money in the pot. A "double failure" like that attracts suspicion, so it was time to change that up by being a hero. And it worked out incredibly well, since by mistakes or penalties, none of the other teams actually got 7 out of 7 correct in the Luge mission.

So basically, I'm locked in on Kristen now, until she gets executed and proves me wrong.

But I should also say that if I were a player in the game, it's only now, after tonight, that I'd really start to tailor my answers to her when taking the quiz. I have a "quiz strategy" for the early game that I'd employ if I were on the show. The game starts with 12 players -- 10 other contestants I'm trying to beat.

Put simply, some of those contestants are going to be stupid. They're going to form a suspicion very early on, base all their quiz responses around it, be wrong, and get eliminated. My goal is not to do well at the early quizzes; there's no reward for that. I'm simply out to make sure I do even just one question better than the person who gets eliminated. To achieve that, I'll play the odds.

If the question is "Is the Mole male or female?" then I answer based on however many there are more of left in the game at that point (discounting myself, of course).

"Did the Mole drive a van on the way to the mission?" Hell, no! Only two people in the group did, so even if one of those two is someone I think is the Mole, this early on in the game, I'm going to answer no, no, no.

"During the Dress Code challenge, was the Mole in an all male, all female, or mixed group?" Well, the two all-male groups had only two players each, so the odds say it was an all-female or mixed group; pick one of those.

I figure you can easily survive two eliminations, probably three, and maybe even four, all without ever having to zero on a suspect. Just play the odds on any question that will let you, then play a hunch on any question that won't. ("Who was the Mole's partner in the Luge mission?" or "Who is the Mole?") Keep one guess ahead of the player getting eliminated, and you're fine.

Of course now, with only seven legitimate players left in the game, the time to play the odds has probably passed. But then, I've got my suspect now.

Let's see how that pans out for me next week...

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

This week, I'm pretty much in agreement with everything exposed here by the good Doctor.

I'd add something else against Kristen: either she's a very bad actress (if she is the Mole), or she's having a hard time reacting naturally to events happening around her.

Several times this week, when we were showed her facial reaction to what was going on, it looked very fake or somewhat exaggerated. The worst moment for that was when they showed us her reaction is the spa when they were told of the new mission. They even showed that reaction TWICE -- once before the commercial break, and once immediately after. And it looked soooo phony.

Now, Craig is an interesting case. I'm not sure I buy the "found the exact dry cleaner by accident" story. We'll see how this pans out, but it seemed awfully convenient that, since nobody had decoded the message at the bottom of their little cards, Craig just *happened*, at the very end of the challenge, to stumble upon the location where all their clothes were kept.

Which brings up another point: Victoria broke the rules during the Luge challenge, but Craig broke them during the clothes challenge.
The rules specifically said that players were supposed to have locals GIVE THEM THE CLOTHES OFF THEIR BACKS. That's not at all what Craig did (and his teammates, by extension). So what are we to make of that? What it okay for Craig to break the rules because he's been told to "find" the clothes, or did the producers just slip on that one?

FKL

Anonymous said...

One more thing: of course I like seeing beautiful women. And I've got nothing against their standing there in black, tight underwear. And I guess sexy high-heel boots can be fun, too... but this was way too much of a ratings stunt for me. I mean, come on.

FKL

DrHeimlich said...

FKL -- I was going to mention Kristen's unbelievably fake facial expressions, especially the one you singled out. Glad you did it for me. Yes, she looks like she's constantly trying to convince a group of friends she had know idea they'd thrown her this surprise party she just walked in on. I don't buy it for a second.

And I too thought that the "clothes off their backs" issue was going to earn them a penalty. In the end, I suppose it turned out to be okay because the clue to find the dry cleaners had been planted there in the game, where no "in-game exploit" had been placed for the Luge mission.

Anonymous said...

I think you might be over-thinking Nicole's purposeful sabotages. it sure seems obvious to "us" since we are longtime fans of the show and understand how the mechanics work, but maybe the producers want to "dumb it down" a bit for the people who are watching for the first time? I still wouldn't count her out yet...

the mole