The Traitors Season 3 Episode 5 Recap
Get your popcorn ready, broken alliances and empty assurances set up a fiery showdown.
The Traitors are imploding, a new player is murdered, and another is banished from the castle in the latest episode. To top it all off, the “sus” is growing on Boston Rob after his big swing to take out his fellow Traitor, Bob the Drag Queen. Is the Survivor and Deal or No Deal Island vet now in the hot seat?
Here’s what happened in Episode 5 of The Traitors Season 3, “All This Murderous Power.”
Warning: Spoilers ahead!
The Traitors Begin to Implode in the Turret
Boston Rob defends his decision to blindside Bob the Drag Queen to Danielle Reyes and Carolyn Wiger. How can they trust him after he turned on one of their own so quickly? “I will never come for either of you ever... unless you come for me,” Boston Rob says, citing Bob the Drag Queen’s comment about one of the “new guys” being a Traitor as a direct threat to his game. Empty assurances are made by the three remaining Traitors in the turret, but it’s apparent that they’re all trying to keep things kosher with each other as they figure out their next moves.
On the surface, it may seem like the Traitors are kind of on the same page, but secretly, Danielle is gunning for Boston Rob’s head, Carolyn is over his need to control every game move, and Boston Rob is aware his safety may be in jeopardy. Danielle wants to get Boston Rob banished, but the timing will be key, and Carolyn has similar thoughts of getting her Survivor nemesis out too. If only Danielle and Carolyn trusted each other a smidgen more.
Who Do the Traitors Murder?
They’re all over the place deciding who to murder next. Boston Rob wants to target a player without “any sus,” so Danielle and Carolyn throw out Sam Asghari and Gabby Windey’s names. Boston Rob argues Sam is a wasted murder and Gabby, though she’s part of the Bambi alliance, isn’t a real threat. Boston Rob fights hard to get Robyn Dixon out of the castle (Carolyn, for the record, isn’t into the idea but no one will listen to her), and after intense back-and-forth, he gets his way. Another Housewife out the door.
The ‘Sus’ Grows on Boston Rob
Players are left scrambling after Robyn’s murder, and the attention turns to Boston Rob, who works twice as hard to get rid of some of the suspicion placed on him. He attempts to do damage control, scurrying around the castle to keep in people’s good graces. Boston Rob confronts Wes Bergmann about a rumor that Wes started about his potential status as a Traitor, but The Challenge star does a good job downplaying it. Danielle, still stewing over the awkward turret meeting from the other night, plans out her moves so she can successfully take out “the Godfather” Boston Rob.
The lack of trust between her and Carolyn is proving to be a major obstacle. Because she feels she can’t work with Carolyn, Danielle decides that in order to banish Boston Rob, she needs to blindside Carolyn first. Talk about an unexpected twist.
A Traitor Falls Apart During the Mission
The players gather in a Scottish chapel where Alan Cumming, wearing an extravagant crown headpiece fit for a reality TV king, is surrounded by shelves of urns. This mission is a mental one. Alan recites a riddle, and one player searches for the answer among the urns. The answer is correct if golden ash appears, which adds money to the prize fund. But if it’s gray ash, they’re eliminated. The twist is that only two shields are in play, meaning the winner from each round chooses who they’d like to receive a shield and can remove a player from the board, meaning the final rounds of the mission are the most important.
Logically, a Faithful – or a Traitor pretending to be a Faithful – would try to get the shield to protect themselves from murder. However, that thought doesn’t cross Danielle’s brain when she chooses to protect sole Housewife Dolores Catania, causing Boston Rob and Carolyn to question the move. She makes another suspicious move after she wins a second round, choosing to give the shield to Derrick Levasseur, the player she took off the board moments before, which raised even more red flags.
She knows she’s in trouble, so she tries to deflect – that means moving ahead with her plan to knock Carolyn down. Danielle drops the out-of-the-blue bombshell theory in the car that one of the Traitors is female, and it’s Carolyn.
Who Is Banished?
The roundtable opens with three players up for banishment: Boston Rob, Nikki Garcia, and Ciara Miller. Lord Ivar Mountbatten zeroes in on Boston Rob, questioning him over how confident he appeared in targeting Bob the Drag Queen, but his efforts don’t go anywhere. The unfounded theory, started by the Traitors, that one of those who were placed in the coffins must be a Traitor, rears its head again, bringing the focus back on Nikki and Ciara, who both argue that they are 100% Faithfuls.
Unfortunately for Nikki, she can’t do much, not when her own Bambi alliance turns on her. Before the roundtable, Chrishell Stause had gone to Boston Rob and disclosed that she thought Nikki was acting differently, making her a Traitor in her eyes. At the roundtable, Chrishell says it was a shift in Nikki’s energy that confirmed she is a Traitor. It’s tough to fight back when alliance members make misguided accusations, so Nikki – with most votes cast in favor of her banishment – seems to accept her fate as she becomes the latest Faithful to leave the game.
The former WWE Superstar’s final message is simple. “From this point on, don’t judge people with who they are or how they are or don’t have high expectations on how you think they should play this game. The win for me is I get to go home to my son, the loss for all of you is that I am a Faithful,” Nikki says in the Circle of Truth. Her reveal is crushing to the players, especially those who were (or are?) in the Bambi alliance, sacrificing one of their own for no reason.
The Traitors Are in Big, Big Trouble
If Boston Rob thinks he’s in a better position than he was at the start of the episode, he is sorely mistaken. Derrick is onto him, and so is Wes. But being the gamers that they are, they’re keeping this in their back pocket. Meanwhile, Dylan Efron goes to Carolyn to tell her one vital piece of info – that Danielle is now targeting her. This only sets up the explosive showdown between Traitors Boston Rob, Danielle, and Carolyn, that’s been weeks in the making. Is the “Traitor alliance” done for good?
Stream new episodes of The Traitors every Thursday at 9p ET on Peacock.
