Warning! The following contains spoilers for The Traitors Season 4 finale. Stream the episode with a Peacock subscription and read at your own risk!
The Traitors is over, and against all odds, Rob Rausch successfully duped the cast and won the game as a Traitor from the very start. While the fandom and his co-stars celebrate Rob and try to get him on other shows, it feels the pendulum is swinging the other way on Maura Higgins, with everyone dragging the Irish Love Island star.
As if being betrayed by Rob wasn't enough, Maura continues to catch strays from other castmembers, as Eric Nam talked about her gameplay with US Weekly. and went on about how she did "nothing" all season:
[Maura] literally did nothing. Maura Higgins is that bitch, because she can literally do whatever she wants, and she’s fine — she was always protected. She literally would just be carried everywhere. We would just look at each other like, 'We’re so f---ing good at this game.' And I was like, 'Maura, you might be the best player, because you haven’t done a single thing, you haven’t lifted a finger, and somehow you’re in the final.'
I think we can all admit Eric's harsh words may be rooted in how his exit played out on The Traitors. Had Maura not suspected Eric, Rob likely would've kept his fellow Traitor safe rather than go along with her theory to protect himself. It's also worth noting that it seemed like Maura wasn't really following her instinct as much as she was parroting what Johnny Weir and Tara Lipinski tried to tell her before they were eliminated.
So, why didn't Maura try to be more active in the game and compare notes with people like Colton Underwood? Monét X Change had the answer on the Las Culturistas podcast, in which he exposed the reason why the Love Island star seemingly had no idea what was going on at any given moment:
The tea about Maura. I'm not kidding, this is a fact. She said it in the castle. Maura had not watched a single episode of the show before going into the castle. Maura had no idea there were banishments. Maura had no idea people were getting murdered. After Porsha got banished I'm not kidding, everyone was really upset. And we're all in the kitchen and she goes 'Is this going to happen every night?'
I've talked about this issue before, but unfortunately, there's little way to fix The Traitors consistently rewarding people for being bad at the game. Traitors are incentivized to take the most clueless players to the end, and unless they're faking it the entire time, we'll continue to see players like Maura at the end.
Would Maura have done better if she'd known the rules of The Traitors going in? It's impossible to speculate, though I think if she were given another chance to play on the NBC spinoff coming to the 2026 TV schedule, she'd do much better. That season is reserved for the common non-reality television folk, however, so don't count on her being a part of the cast.
Viewers could learn from Maura, however, and maybe appearing to be an ignorant Faithful is the easiest path to make it to the end and win it all. Personally, I suspected Gabby Windey figured this out in her season, because her gameplay became increasingly better in the final stages of the game. Could we get a Faithful who's as good at playing the Traitors as Rob was the Faithful? I'd love to see it.
Every season of The Traitors thus far is available to stream right now on Peacock. After the wild way this season ended, I'm already looking ahead and psyched to see who they manage to get next. Hopefully, everyone this next time around will have watched the show.
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