‘The Celebrity Traitors’: [SPOILER] and [SPOILER] Win in Nail-Biting Season 2 Finale

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SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for the finale episode of the U.K. version of “The Celebrity Traitors” Season 2, now streaming on BBC iPlayer.

It was the feel-good ending hardly anyone expected: “The Traitors”

season finale resulted in an unexpected win by Faithfuls Sebastian Croft and Romesh Ranganathan, as both Traitors King Kenny and Maya Jama were banished from the game during a tense showdown.

It was also an outcome unthinkable only a day prior. James Acaster’s admission at the roundtable that he had been a secretly recruited Traitor put an end to a seemingly unstoppable Traitors run. Traitor Maya Jama then fell on her sword not long after murdered Faithful Michael Sheen had worked it out.

Yet, the ending wasn’t entirely a happy one. James Blunt, who had been adamant about who was a Traitor, was evicted, even though he had been Faithful. His confident, yet not entirely accurate predictions at the roundtable, were perhaps his biggest downfall.

Despite the unlikely twist of the Faithfuls winning here, though, the first season of “The Celebrity Traitors” was the definition of a tough act to follow. Alan Carr’s journey from the worst Traitor imaginable to somehow fooling everyone and claiming victory is arguably the greatest moment the U.K. franchise has ever had, in a season that will otherwise forever be remembered for Faithful Celia Imrie’s fart.

This season, Richard E. Grant admitting he was a Traitor mere moments after being picked as a Traitor was on par with Alan’s time in the turret (“You need to make it very clear that you’re not,” responded confused Faithful James Blunt), but his admission and eventual departure set off a chain of events that this season found harder to recover from.

Acaster, who had said from the start that he did not want to be a Traitor, had to reluctantly accept the offer by Grant and Maya Jama to become one to avoid being murdered. The show is always in its element when the Traitors go on a gleeful killing spree at night while lying to the Faithfuls during the day, but Acaster’s understandable reluctance and difficulty in getting stuck in meant the dynamic that the show thrives on never got going.

It was made worse by the fact that another chain of events meant that Professor Hannah Fry’s later recruitment as a Traitor couldn’t get into gear either. As game rules meant it was only her and Jerry Hall up for murder the same night, recruitment was not the only option. Viewers would have been disappointed if she had been chosen to leave, but with little room for maneuver she ran out of road.

Thankfully, “The Traitors” on a bad day is still better than most reality shows on a good one. There’s still a camp absurdity, albeit a little less than a usual series, which makes the more tense moments easier to stomach if reality television is not your bag. The parts when “The Traitors” flies highest are moments that the producers can’t even predict. For example, Ross Kemp might be able to interview a cartel boss in the Amazon rainforest, but he could not handle being brushed on the arm by Leigh-Anne Pinnock from Little Mix.

An underwhelming season, and this rather underwhelming conclusion, will not unravel “The Traitors” either. The format of the show is flexible enough in that no season feels like a repeat of the last one. Even older reality shows when they were firmly in their prime, like “Big Brother” on Channel 4, had the odd season where the ingredients were there but stars never truly aligned. The BBC couldn’t be prouder of the ratings this season received — an unbelievable 15 million viewers, a number British television usually only gets for a royal wedding or an international football finals.

Yet perhaps this season of “The Celebrity Traitors” exposed the show’s natural limitations. But it’s something that can be fixed. It seems that if you don’t want to be a Traitor and you are picked to be a Traitor, it is harder for the show to fly. The early banishments of Grant and Fry also made more obvious a flaw dedicated fans had been pointing out for a while: you might as well keep an obvious Traitor in the game early in the show, because if you kick them out they will be replaced by another Traitor anyway.

And for all of the comedy that Richard E. Grant provided for such a short time in the opening episodes, keeping him in the castle for longer was likely what the producers wanted anyway.