The Mole, Week 9

Tonight was the final episode of "regulation play" for The Mole. Next week, all will be revealed.

As all of you who've been following along with me know, my suspects have been disproven again and again, and now my theories are basically like a fire hose flopping around with no one holding onto it. In other words, don't put much stock in what I'm about to say. But after tonight, I believe I'm slightly suspecting Nicole of being The Mole.

If you're looking for support for that within the missions, tonight's bomb defusing mission offered some. (And what a cool mission that was, by the way!) Nicole was responsible for looking up most of the time zones, and she messed up lots of them -- more even than were later corrected. If you looked at the remaining letters the players had to work with in trying to find the two missing words of the puzzle, they weren't even close.

Furthermore, Craig looked very much not like the Mole in that mission. He pointed out the big clock in the center of the room. He found the pulldown map. I would think the Mole would not want to say anything on those points, leaving the other players to succeed or fail. Also, Craig seemed content to hold the map for the other two to search. There, I would think the Mole would want a position of some control, searching for at least some of the cities so as to deliberately misidentify them.

As for the second mission, and Mark's decision to open the dossier... as I've said, he's been responsible for putting too much money in the pot (almost single-handedly) to be the Mole. He simply can't be. I'll be floored if it's revealed that he is. His observation in the episode was very astute, therefore; if Craig is a player, then he knows Nicole is the Mole, and if Nicole is a player, she knows Craig is the Mole. That leaves Mark with the dilemma, and therefore it's perfectly understandable that he'd open the dossier for any help he could get.

For what it's worth, I believe the one bit of information that would have come from that dossier was the answer to tonight's question 18: What did the Mole highlight on their application? "Visited Thailand," "Hates complainers," or "143 IQ." And if indeed that information was in there, I believe it could bust the whole thing wide open, because if you ask me, it's pretty easy to guess which answer belonged to whom. We know Craig has traveled a lot, making him the likely "Thailand" player, and Nicole must have been the one bragging about I.Q. That leaves Mark as the "complainer hater," which is not as obvious, but does seem consistent to me.

Point being, if the dossier gave you that bit of information, then you could probably guess who the answer matched up with, and thus know who the Mole was before taking the quiz.

If you're looking for evidence outside the missions themselves, this is hardly a lock, but I did find it interesting: we saw clips of both Mark and Craig talking about what they would do if they won the money. We saw nothing of Nicole's plans for the money. Would that be because she knows that as the Mole she has no chance of winning it? Instead, she spoke cryptically (crazily?) of how this would let her move on to "the next stage" of her life -- as though she thinks she'll gain some measure of reality show fame from this that will get her into the television business or something.

If you do want the answer, though, I do believe it was given to us point blank tonight. Going into each commercial break of the show, we see a "bumper" of The Mole logo. As tonight's bumper for the first commercial break came up, there was a very strange, distorted sound that played. My guess is it was a voice played sped up, or backward, or both. If I were determined to know the answer one week early, and had the tools to actually shunt my TV audio into my computer to be able to manipulate the sound, I feel pretty sure there it would be. If one of you readers has the capability and wants to give that a try, go ahead and post your findings here in the comments.

Otherwise.... we'll find out next Monday!