I've loved The Mole since I was a teenager. I love trying to out-smart entertainment and figure out what a show (or game, or movie, or whatever) is trying to hide from me, and since the 2001 debut of the original Mole on ABC, that's all it's been about. In this show, a group of contestants competes in challenges to earn money for a communal pot, all while one player, the titular mole, is tasked with sabotaging these challenges to remove as much money from the pot as they can. At the end of each episode, more or less, the players all take a quiz on who the mole is, and whoever scores the least—meaning, whoever knows the least about the mole's identity—is eliminated.
That is a simple yet effective premise, allowing the audience to try to spot what should be subtle sabotages and make judgements on character and honesty. The Mole was a staple of the early-2000s reality TV scene and got revived by Netflix in 2022. I wrote about the first Netflix season for The Cipher (shameless plug: If you subscribe at a Pal level to Defector, you get a daily newsletter with some of my colleagues' funniest ramblings), and I was pumped for season two, which premiered on June 28 and ended on Friday. Unfortunately, though, season two highlighted one big problem with the show: The contestants, dumb and selfish though they might be in certain ways, have cracked the code for how to win at the expense of making a good reality competition.
Spoilers from here on out for both Netflix seasons of The Mole
Here's the conundrum that The Mole now has to fix for any future seasons. If the game is about not just figuring out the mole is, but scoring better on the quiz than your fellow contestants, the best strategy for an "innocent" player is ... to pretend to be the mole. It makes sense: If you can strongly mislead players into answering the quiz as if you are the mole, then you have an advantage right away. If you can figure out who the mole actually is early on, all the better, as you can focus on learning everything you can about them. (While some questions on the quiz are about the events of the game, such as what the mole did on the last mission, other questions can be about the mole's personal life, such as the name of their first pet, or where they are from.) It's hard for me to fault any player who deploys this strategy. While the non-moles are, in theory, supposed to play to the best of their abilities to add money to the pot, they would not win anything if they go home early, so it's better to stay alive even at the cost of the communal pot.
Season two's winner played this fake-saboteur role almost too well. Michael O'Brien, a 30-year-old parking manager, locked in on the actual mole early on, then deployed his strategy of open sabotage to throw off his cast-mates. He was successful: Not only did he survive all the way to the end, but he ended up removing the most money of anyone from the pot, even more than the mole (Sean Patrick Bryan, a 42-year-old stay-at-home dad and former undercover cop). Michael was directly responsible for losing $89,143 from the pot (thank you to Reddit user malkie0609 for compiling the data on this) in a variety of missions, and his sabotages were at times so brazen that I don't fault anyone for thinking he was the mole.
Why is this a problem, and not just smart gameplay? It's both, really. Michael won, so props to him, but if contestants are openly sabotaging, that makes the mole's job easier, and boring. While Sean did sabotage plenty—he took the second-most money out of the pot—it becomes almost impossible to think that he's the mole just based on that, because almost everyone is sabotaging as well. This ranged from purposefully misidentifying clues in a Guess Who-type challenge, to stalling in various missions, and perhaps most egregiously, to lying about who they were voting for as the mole in a mission where success was completely reliant on the innocent players telling the truth. In that mission, pretty much every contestant lied, leading to a prize of only $19,500 out of a possible $100,000.
This type of financially ruinous gameplay allows the mole to do his sabotages out in the open, if he chooses to do so, or even to just sit back and let the players do his dirty work for him. For the audience, this sucks. In early seasons of The Mole, it was possible to figure out the mole's identity if the viewer caught them doing a subtle bit of sabotage, and that was also true for the players. But if everyone is trying to convince each other that they are the mole, what is the point?
The way the Netflix seasons are set up on a production level also contribute to this problem. There are multiple exemptions—immunity from the next quiz, essentially—that can be "bought" with money from the pot, so that removes more cash than the mole possibly could. Neesh Riaz, one of the contestants on season two, ended up removing the most money in one go from the pot this season because he bid $59,500 on an exemption, the entirety of the pot at that time. How can the mole compete with that?
The other issue is that Netflix appears to have a rough estimation of what it would like the pot to be, and so it will rig the later challenges to add enough money to not make the finale disappointing from a monetary standpoint. Michael ended up winning about $150,000, despite his best attempts to minimize that number in favor of survival. If contestants have figured out that the pot will be roughly the same amount no matter what happens in the game, then sabotaging the early pot for an advantage on the quizzes has very little downside.
How does The Mole fix these issues? Honestly, I'm not sure. When the show first aired, social media wasn't really a thing, and though there were forums and discussions about the best strategies, they weren't as mainstream as Reddit is in 2024. A prospective contestant on The Mole has a massive advantage compared to earlier players, and Michael proved that coming in with this specific strategy is the best way to play the game, entertainment be damned. Perhaps Netflix could punish the players who take the most money out of the pot, or who get falsely accused the most; it might be harsh to eliminate someone who more than 50 percent of people accuse wrongly of being the mole, but introducing that would at least lessen the blatant sabotages. (This would also turn the game into something more like The Traitors, a social game masquerading as a competition, so it's not a perfect solution.)
Really, the best fix might just be to make the finances more punishing. If every mission has a set value that doesn't change based on how the game is going, then at least players would know how much the pot could grow during the game, and therefore might feel worse about burning a tenth of the eventual winnings in order to gain an advantage. Surely, some players would still rather win at all costs, but it would tweak the incentives somewhat. Exemptions also probably need to go, or at least come from the challenges themselves rather than at the cost of the pot. It becomes too easy for the mole to sit back and let the selfish players do his job for him; there were two big exemption challenges during season two, in which players could trade money for immunity. In both of these challenges, Sean just let everyone else take the lead, and the players lost almost $90,000 across both exemption games.
Whatever has to change, it has to change quickly if The Mole is to keep its particular niche in an ever-crowded reality TV field. The Traitors has been a huge success for NBC in part because it's fresh and new and has not been figured out all that well. It might eventually become like The Mole with more seasons, and there are certainly moments across all editions of The Traitors that made me cringe because of how much they ruined the game. (The ending of the U.K.'s first season comes to mind here.) But The Mole has an underlying issue that Michael exploited to win, and it needs to be fixed or at least mitigated. Otherwise, any subsequent seasons will have the same problem: When everyone is trying to be the mole, why does the mole even exist?
