The Traitors: Harriet shows what happens when women stop playing small

This article contains spoilers for The Traitors.

“I’d had enough of playing ‘the nice lady in a scarf’.”

And just like that, I understood Harriet Tyce’s seeming personality switch in The Traitors last night.

The most-recently banished contestant was explaining her narrative arc on The Traitors Uncloaked. An arc that changed from a strategy of keeping her enemies close and applying laser focus to dodgy behaviour (as Hugo found out, quickly) to marching into breakfast, ignoring her teammates’ plea to regroup and subsequently blowing everything up by accusing Rachel of being a traitor. She detonated herself out of the game. And it felt like watching every middle‑aged woman finally snap in the most delicious, defiant way possible. 

She was done with being the quiet, sensible one, and while it was a shock move and will leave a big hole in the game, there’s a truth and honesty in her behaviour (even if I didn’t love how she spoke to Roxy).

We saw a woman embracing chaos, not because she’d lost control, but because she finally recognised that playing small wasn’t benefiting her. That instead of being a background character – the supportive motherly type, the wise mentor, the pleasant footnote – she wanted her own dramatic climax. And she got it. 

Unlike many of the other contestants, the show didn’t seem to be about the money for Harriet. As a bestselling crime writer (The Bookseller reports a 96% increase in sales of her novels, while Witch Trial is out next month) and former criminal barrister, I’m going to assume that she’s not necessarily on the show for the potential financial gain. Rather, it was a chance for autonomy and to use her skillset to solve the riddle. And to satiate her competitive edge.

In her interview with the BBC before entering the show, she said: “My husband and I don’t play Monopoly anymore because it would have led to divorce after a particularly bad game! I very much like winning. I want to win if I’m doing something, I want to be the best.” So when she was clearly not going to win, she went nuclear instead.  

Harriet herself called her gameplay a “kamikaze move”, explaining to Ed Gamble that she “left on [her] own terms”.  That phrasing alone feels like a thesis for midlife. Women in their 50s have often spent decades smoothing edges, managing egos and lowering their voices so the room doesn’t accuse them of being “too much”. “If my voice is shaking, it is not through nerves,” she told the traitors at their secret meeting. “It is through anger that you have taken me for such a fool.” And the rage was palpable.

It’s a shame that her teammates also took her for a fool. While Harriet asked her fellow faithfuls to vote her out to prove her theory against Rachel, and her ‘evidence’ wasn’t quite as compelling as she’d made out, I was disappointed that so few of them backed her up when it came to it. She was the best faithful in there, and the group that had benefited so extensively from her expertise just let her go; the instant she stopped playing nice, her value was forgotten. 

So while I’m disappointed she’s gone, and was convinced she’d go all the way, I also loved seeing her rip up the rule book and take back power. It was a great, if also uncomfortable, TV moment – she stepped into her rage, and it made for compelling and thought-provoking viewing.

Images: BBC