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...