Colton Underwood is not—as one might suspect, given his name—a B-tier country singer who rose to fame on a long forgotten season of American Idol. Nor is he a guy who died in an ATV accident that you read about in the local newspaper when you were home visiting your family over the holidays, though that would certainly track. Colton Underwood is, instead, the somewhat unlikely star player of this season of The Traitors so far, a gay former Bachelor who grabbed the game by the horns in episodes four and five and made quite a splash. 

I gotta be honest, I didn’t see that coming. I expected Colton to be meeker, shier, more guileless. I thought he was going to be mostly an unassuming dope, one of those newly out jocks who just wants to be accepted by everyone and quietly have a little boyfriend. But no! Colton is a creature of the stage, it turns out, He’s not quite messy, he’s not really a bitch, but he does seem to love drama. I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that a former professional athlete has a real competitive streak in him, but I was nonetheless a bit taken aback by Colton’s aggressive gameplay in these two episodes (“I’m not going out like a bitch,” ugh). I guess he really meant it when he called himself a Traitor Hunter last week. He seems to have taken that self-ascribed title quite to heart.

Only, he hunted one of the most obvious traitors of the game, and he wasn’t the only one doing it. Now he’s swinging wildly and, until the end of episode five, incorrectly. He first went after Tiffany, the Big Brother contestant who thought she had it all figured out but was, of course, also totally wrong. Tiffany didn’t do a great job of defending herself during her final roundtable, but I think that scene made Colton look just as bad. But he was undeterred, spending most of the next episode charging just as hard. He ran right into Michael, in what turned into an ugly clash that kinda had Michael insinuating that a guy who was in the closet for a long time would be pretty good at being a liar. That did not sit well with a lot of the group (Johnny seemed particularly peeved), and Michael was bounced out, at long last. And thus, a star was born in Colton.