Dom
Casey
Avori
Will
Joi
Jacob
Kesi
Pranav
Osei
Sandy
Samara
Greg
These bitches were just so so messy. Joi literally threw away every opportunity she had to make money just to make it to the end. But like she emptied out the poot on the fourth episode almost halfway through the game. Was it entertaining? Of course but why would she do that lmfao like ok everyone thought she was the mole and suspicious all game but there was 100K prize at the end. And even when she got to the end she did not figure it out.
Kesi as a mole was pretty good. She did a bit throughout the game just to keep in people's heads but there was so much noise with all sorts of decisions being made by everyone that she could constantly sabotage without getting caught. I caught on to her being dissuasive when people were right about things IE she was trying to gaslight Joi into thinking she had the wrong pigeon in The Bird Cage challenge. But oftentimes she would just be stalling around which felt kind of obvious. In that same bird cage challenge while she is stalling she literally looks away to the camera as if to say "Have I dragged this out enough? I dont want to win too early" and they edited that in I felt like it was a LITTLE BIT obvious to the audience.
Will as a winner was so excellent, but they did kind of give away his winner-hero edit a bit early, but it did make me cheer for the winner all the way through so I suppose thats good editing.
People I was thinking were the mole:
Jacob
Joi
Casey
Avori
After Final 5 when nobody voted for Kesi I started to really commit to her as the Mole though. I was hard between Joi and Jacob for a while but no I was completely led astray.
Would love to know what you guys thought of the show. It was messy fun I liked how they just sort of figured out out when they went but I can see how that might've been cringe
Edit; I forgot to mention Avori!! I thought her and Pranav were the only strategic allies and they had an arc I did not expect. Pranav encouraged Avori to be more suspicious to bait people into thinking she was the mole, and then eventually fell for that himself. She got a few people early in the game to vote her for mole and got them out! But in the end game she started just annoying me and I started rooting against her
I have never seen the original series of the Mole but I'm familiar with the format. I really enjoyed binging this over the last few days. The challenges they had to do were pretty campy but pretty charming. A lot of the people on the cast were pretty annoying I'm not gonna lie, it kinda made me root against them.
Production:
I really enjoyed the production value of the show. I think the kinds of narrative arcs prod pulled off was well edited. The challenges created a lot of The Circle type moments but without them being directly able to vote each other out it was interesting to see how the players approached the situations. Scenically speaking there were tons of drone shots of the regions in Australia that they went to which I liked for transitions. I just felt like the challenges they were doing wasn't for enough of a cash reward. Some of the objectives they had to complete during missions only got them 1000$ which felt pretty cheap. Prod makes it pretty plausible that anybody can be the Mole and presents all the information they give in a way that you can perceive it as confirming somebody as the mole or as a player depending on however you want to perceive it. IE somebody throws a challenge? thats what the mole would do. Or thats what a player would do to make people think they are the mole. Would the mole want you to think they are the mole or would the mole be blending in? You can tie yourself in knots and the players absolutely did which brings me to the next point.
Gameplay:
Atrocious. Just so so so bad. Some of them would apply strategy and it would be effective on deceiving others in the cast. But they fell in love so quickly with being assholes to each other and went so lone wolf. I think almost nobody communicated about their quiz answers based on what was shown. I felt so disappointed in the way the players would approach accusations they felt like they were being so fake. So many times they would show a player in confessionals bragging about how good they thought they were doing, and then multiple confessionals of others explaining that they were onto their strategy and ruling them out as the mole. It was a messy shit show I was laughing throughout as they just burned money over and over. They would look those few thousand dollars in the eyes and say fuck yall.
Conclusions:
It was so fun to watch. I hope they do a second season and bigger prizes, it would make the marketing so easy just "The stakes are higher! and the mind games are STRONGER!" just be cliche netflix that's literally your thing.
If you haven't seen it give it a watch. Or read the spoiler filled version of the review I'm going to do after this and just flame the cast. I had to restrain so hard for this one.
