It’s remarkable that, for the last almost two weeks, I have sat and watched the gut-wrenching (for the Americans, anyway) Olympic figure skating and had chipper, smart, enthusiastic Tara Lipinski in my ears having no idea that, just a few months previous, she was caught in a Lovecraftian hell inside a Scottish castle. Her calm and earnest analysis of toe loops and lutzes and death spirals has given little indication that Tara spent a good deal of last summer descending into anguished madness, that she was brought to the threshold of the abyss and was shown its howling nothingness and the nothingness looked back at her with a smirk. She seems to have recovered from that horror pretty well, so my congratulations to the numerous Austrian psychiatrists she was attended to at the Innsbruck sanitarium that all Traitors contestants are sent to after this show wraps.

I feel for Tara’s pain, but it also annoys me. Here was an episode in which something sudden and true dawned on Tara: wait, isn’t one of the traitors obviously Rob? How could they all have been so blind to this reality, staring them gorgeously in the face for lo these many restless days? It was exciting to watch, Tara with newfound confidence charging at a triple axel and nailing it. But that was just a practice skate; she’d have to actually execute this daring maneuver at competition later that night. And that, well . . . That she biffed mightily. She boofed it hard, fell down on that ice with an awful crunch. Why did she lose her confidence? What happened between her post-breakfast epiphany and that roundtable disaster?