Why Joe Marler is the best Faithful The Traitors has ever had

Who has been the star of The Celebrity Traitors? National treasure Stephen Fry and his considered pondering? Celia Imrie and her dainty on-screen fart? Alan Carr and his fits of the giggles? No – none of them can compare to the former England rugby prop Joe Marler, with his brute strength, outrageous lid and enormous plates of lasagne.

From his exasperated diary-room entries to hard stares at the roundtable, his wiggly walk across the bridge in yesterday’s challenge to the infamous Big Dog Theory, Marler has come through as the series’ champ, regardless of whether he wins. Loveable giant he certainly is – but more importantly he has proved himself to be the best Faithful the show has ever had.

This is precisely because Marler does not fit the mould of the usual Traitors participants. Over the past three series, we’ve seen that there’s a certain kind of person who ends up on the show: contestants who like to see themselves as clever, perceptive, and better able than most to “read people”.

From magicians to secret actors, almost all of them have eventually fallen by the wayside. Because unless you’ve got a particularly useless Traitor on your hands, these skills don’t actually get you very far in a game that plays with your emotions and where the opposing team has an inherent advantage. Last year, our TV Editor, Emily Baker, wrote about how this is the major flaw in the show: the way to get to the end of the game as a Faithful is to sit tight, follow the crowd and be sufficiently unthreatening that you don’t get murdered. Only bad Faithfuls can win.

But rather than claiming some unique ability to pick up on deception, Marler has barrelled into the game with gruff competitiveness, enthusiasm and teamwork. Other Faithfuls in the series have confirmed what we already knew: Imrie’s “snooping” has fallen short; certifiable genius Fry remained stumped until he was banished in episode six; Faithfuls deemed too perceptive and outspoken – namely Tom Daley, Ruth Codd and Joe Wilkinson – were duly eliminated. So now, as we near the final, it’s Marler’s 120 kilos of no nonsense that’s propelling the show, as he leads the Faithfuls ever closer to victory with the dutiful determination of someone born for the job.

There is, as you might expect from a man used to scrummaging in a muddy field and who can supposedly squat more than double his own weight, an element of force involved. Marler showed right from the beginning that he would be invaluable in the challenges, many of which are physical (in episode one he did a lot of the heavy lifting, literally, of pushing a giant wooden horse up a hill). But all that practice in the scrum seems to be coming in handy in the psychological elements of the game, too: Marler knows that, in a team, it’s essential for everyone to muck in. Save for the odd drop-goal, there are no main characters in rugby – you stick to your position and work together.

Marler seems to be treating The Traitors very much like a team-building weekend away. He’s deployed tough-love pep talks to contestants he considers not to have pulled their weight: “Cat, mate, I need more from you,” he said at the roundtable last week (unknowingly, perhaps, identifying Cat Burns as a member of the opposite team). When anyone – I’m looking at you, Kate Garraway – sits on the fence or deflects, he demands concrete “theories” and “names”. In the chessboard challenge of episode six, he suggested, unafraid to ruffle feathers, that the teams were randomised a second time to preclude a Traitor plot. And when Nick Mohammed came under heat last night for colluding on that plan, Marler owned up to his part at the roundtable, knowing it would attract attention to himself, but also knowing he owed it to the team.

What’s more, his own theories have often proved to be right. Marler originally allied with the comedian Joe Wilkinson, with whom he developed the Big Dog Theory: Marler wondered whether the two most famous men in the show, Fry and Jonathan Ross, were the respective leaders of the Faithfuls and the Traitors. The BDT became the best working hypothesis the Faithfuls had and – eventually – led to Ross’s demise in last night’s episode. (Marler’s pure elation after the roundtable, when Ross was banished, is worth watching it for alone.)

Though he wasn’t the only person to suspect Ross, the shape of the theory is significant: the BDT isn’t rooted in hunches or personal gripes, but in the structure and hierarchy of groups and teams. While other Faithfuls flail from suspect to suspect, Marler, pack animal that he is, views The Traitors for what it has always been: a team game. How do you defeat a team? Find its weak spots. What’s the first step to finding the weak spots? Its leader.

Now that Fry has gone, having been banished last week in the first attempt to prove the Big Dog Theory, it’s clear Marler is the Faithfuls’ true captain. Since his buddy Wilkinson has left, he has rallied them into action and never looked up from his tireless mission to catch a Traitor, loyal to nobody but the team he is working so hard to identify. Joe Marler, biggest dog of them all, might be about to prove that good Faithfuls can win. Woof.