You don’t have to like how he got there, but the ultimate Traitor played the game better than everyone.
Photo: Euan Cherry/Peacock
Spoilers ahead for the season-four finale of The Traitors.
How long, exactly, was Maura Higgins mad at Rob Rausch for breaking his pinkie promise? “You’re a piece of work,” she told him in a devastating (and somewhat hilarious) scene of name-calling after he revealed he’d been a Traitor all along. In the same breath as she told him he’d never have a girlfriend after all this, Maura admitted, “You know what, fair play, though.” (Or as she put it: “Fair play, doe.”) “He’s a really bad man,” she said with a laugh in her confessional, “but good for him.” You might hate the way he lied to the Housewives and slithered his way through the castle, but Rob followed the rules and played a fair, if wicked, game.
Rob entered the game as neither a canonical gamer nor a Housewife. Despite the fact that he was there with fellow Love Islander Maura, he fell into the show’s often tricky “randos” category beside lone representatives from their respective shows (Dancing With the Stars’s Mark Ballas, Top Chef’s Kristen Kish) and non-reality-TV celebrities (musician Eric Nam, Olympians Tara Lipinski and Johnny Weir). While it can be difficult to play The Traitors as a Faithful with few allies, it’s a relatively good position for a Traitor: Rob was able to murder without guilt or context. While the fellow players tried to talk themselves into a grand theory of gamers and/or Housewives betraying one another, Rob kept things close to the chest — developing relationships in thoughtful, quiet ways but always willing to turn his back on his friends when the timing was right.
So much of what makes the American celebrity version of The Traitors both entertaining and frustrating is the poor gameplay; outside of the career gamers, most Faithfuls are basing everything on vibes. Strategies, when they exist, are inconsistent. Players change their mind on a dime, making the roundtables both deliciously dramatic and kind of annoying. The Faithfuls in this most recent season might have had a fighting chance if they didn’t repeatedly follow the whims of an odd tangent during the roundtable — the nail in the coffin for otherwise competent players like Survivor’s Natalie Anderson — but they succumbed to emotion just about every time.
Not Rob. Never Rob. There was one time, during a challenge, when Rob let his anger over losing a shield get the better of him. Otherwise, he stayed cool and quiet. Did he vote for his fellow Traitors Lisa Rinna and Candiace Dillard Bassett? Yes, of course, but the heat was on them already. There might have been a way for him to stand by them once they became targets, but The Traitors is a game about outlasting. He had to stick around, and in order to do so, he had to make the tough moves at exactly the right moment. He double-crossed just about everyone in the cast, and even if his fondness for people in the castle (like his new friend Ron Funches) was earnest, that didn’t make his half-hearted “bye, sweetie” to Tara after a ruthless execution feel any less pointed.
At the reunion, Candiace tried to make the case — as she and Lisa have been on social media — that Rob broke the rules of the game to confide in Colton Underwood that he was a Traitor. Rob looked more upset at that accusation than he did when he lost the plushy challenge, reminding Candiace that there were very specific rules to this game. It’s easier, perhaps, to imagine a world of grand conspiracy, one that paints Rob as a kind of misogynist tactician, but he turned on just as many of his male allies. He murdered his BFF Colton. After constantly reiterating that Mark trusted him, Rob signed his death warrant as well. He double-crossed fellow Traitor Eric in the finale! Maura’s heartbreak might be the image we’re left with, but Rob took no prisoners. Anyone and everyone was a target until he was the last man standing.
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