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LAST UPDATE | 24 Sep
*Warning: This article contains spoilers for the final of The Traitors on RTÉ.*
THAT’S A WRAP – the final episode of The Traitors aired yesterday evening and we now know that Oyin, Vanessa and Kelley took the win for the faithfuls.
The season has been hugely popular, with hundreds of thousands of people tuning in to each episode to follow all of the treacherous twists and turns.
The contestants reunited yesterday to watch the final together at a screening held by RTÉ in Ballsbridge, where the finalists sat down for interviews with media, including The Journal.
When it came down to the final five, it was clear that there were alliances between Nick and Ben and between Oyin and Vanessa, leaving the fate of the game largely in Kelley’s hands.
The Journal asked Kelley how it felt to know she would be the deciding vote at the final roundtable.
Kelley explained that she was fairly sure that she was going to stick with Oyin and Vanessa, who she believed were faithfuls, but that even if they weren’t, she “would rather have been played by women than be played by men”.
The final few episodes were a bit of a rocky journey for Kelley. She was accused by Joanna, a banished faithful, of being part of what Joanna described as a group of ‘mean girls’, and has received backlash on social media from viewers.
Kelley said that she has “nothing but love for Joanna” and that she feels some of the remarks she has received online have been unfairly abusive.
One of the positives to come out of the show was the strong friendship that formed between Oyin and Vanessa. They managed to navigate the game together and were able to trust each other in the final – but did either of them ever have any doubts about the other? The Journal asked them.
For Oyin’s part, she said she never had any doubts about Vanessa, but Vanessa found herself second-guessing Oyin after they mistakenly led the banishment of a faithful for a second night in a row (first Joanna, then Faye).
She said there was a moment between them that didn’t make it into the final edit in which Vanessa asked Oyin to tell her whether she was a traitor.
There were some emotional moments in the penultimate episode when the players shared personal stories with each other, including Vanessa explaining how she grew up in Direct Provision, how an injury suddenly ended her promising sports career, and how her father passed away shortly afterwards.
Vanessa reflected last night on the challenging experiences that she’s gone through and how they’ve made her the person that she is.
Traitors Nick and Ben fell at the final hurdle, with Nick being banished at the last roundtable and Ben following behind him shortly afterwards when he was booted out during the end game.
The pair had been quite confident that they could win, making comments to each other during the show that it was “theirs to lose” – which, in the end, they did.
Nick acknowledged that the two of them “got too big for our boots”. Ben said that he believes Nick could have won if he had chosen to recruit someone else as a traitor other than him, while Nick explained how he made his decision about who to recruit.
There were moments during the game where some comments were made by Nick or Ben that were perceived by some viewers as potentially having sexist undertones, like Nick saying he could ‘control’ Katelyn or the discussion between the two of them at one of the last conclaves in which they said Kelley was “not strong enough” to “go at” them.
The Journal asked Nick and Ben for their reflections on those remarks now looking back. They said they didn’t mean them in sexist way, and Kelley added that she believes it was about “traitors being traitors” rather than “men being men”.
Finally, viewers will remember Nick’s strategy mid-way through the game of wanting to not banish Katelyn despite strongly believing that she was a traitor, suggesting they’d be better of targeting people whose status they were less sure of instead – a plan that divided opinion among the faithfuls.
It turns out that there was another layer to that strategy that he kept secret at the time:
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