The Mole is back! The seventh U.S. season overall and second Netflix season is refreshed from the 2022 reboot, with a new host, new location, and more betrayal of the players by the producers, which makes for a better show.
The visuals this season are gorgeous, thanks to a shift from Australia to Malaysia, an excellent choice with its variety of cosmopolitan and remote locations. It’s also brutally hot, and everyone looks sweaty all the time.
I still miss the immersion of the lived-in, historical locations that early Mole seasons gave us, and the sense that challenges were not contained to one space.
The Mole season 7 (or season two, if you go by Netflix’s ignore-the-past counting) ramps up the game play and tension with the exemption missions. They not only fracture the group, but are frequently designed to expose players’ in-game lies. That gives open evidence of deception and truth-telling, rather than just guesses.
New host Ari Shapiro of NPR’s All Things Considered, is an immediately more charming, wry host. Ari is not in character like his good friend Alan Cumming on The Traitors, but offers more of a persona than Alex Wagner did. “Hello, Mole,” he says to the players, with a winking sneer, and I almost expected the mole to be like, Uh, hi?
We get a bit more downtime with the cast, which is more diverse in age than last season: just four of the 12 are in their 20s, three are in their 40s, and one player is 65 (go Andy!). The oldest player Netflix cast last time was 40, which is, you know, not old.
That’s especially welcome since there are slightly fewer players who appear to just be auditioning to become part of Netflix’s version of Bachelor Nation, though we still have too many of those based on maddening behavior that I can’t explain beyond a desire for screen time. (One player is already a Netflix star: Deanna from Don’t F**k with Cats, who started the online investigation into finding a person who killed two kittens on camera.)
Alas, unlike the cast of the outstanding Netflix competition The Devil’s Plan, this group is not as all as prepared for the intellectual challenge or even escape room-like conditions that made The Mole stand out over more physical competitions. For a heist mission, Ari gives them a bag of supplies, and it doesn’t occur to anyone on one team to look in it until late in the mission, while on another team someone just dismisses its contents as useless.
All of this moves The Mole in a new direction. Alas, it’s not a complete makeover, and this season doesn’t shares a lot of DNA from the first Netflix season, which was also produced by Eureka Productions.
I am a longtime fan, and it’s impossible for me to separate my love for this series from the potential its early seasons established. That keeps me watching, even though I find the editing choices to be aggressively hostile.
We are constantly removed from the action to be taken to possibly the most dreadful interview set in the history of reality television—a gray table and what appears to be a green screen backdrop replaced with an image of a fake gray brick wall.
And there, the players are incessantly prompted to talk about their suspicions: they drone on and on. Did that person’s foot slip in the mud because they’re the mole or because mud is slippery?!?! It’s a mystery!!!
This is exhausting, and actually kept me from taking the cliffhanger bait to plow straight through the first five episodes. Yes, like The Traitors, it’s unconcerned with giving us episodes that are, uh, episodes, self-contained units with a beginning, middle, and actual end.
The editing, I suspect, also gives away who the mole is. No spoilers, as I have no actual idea who the mole is, and I hope I am surprised! But there’s one person who has far less to say about their obvious sabotages that are shown but rarely explained, and that person is always, always up for taking offers, though they do so in the background as other players make more aggressive plays.
Our new host Ari is far more present than Alex was—it’s tragic how under-used she was!—and that is terrific. Yet he’s so good I wanted more of him on screen, especially since so much of what he says is ADR, not spoken to the actual contestants. (I talked with Ari about this and a lot more, and will publish that interview this weekend.)
I’m thrilled to have The Mole back, and appreciative of its incremental changes, even if they don’t drag the series all the way back to its roots. This is a game that works, and I’m
The recaps below include spoilers, but are contained to each episode, so you can watch along with me. The comments below, though, are an episode 1 to 5 free-for-all, so only dive in there once you’ve watched all five or if you don’t mind being spoiled.
Netflix Mole season 2 recaps
- Netflix Mole season 2 recaps
- Episode 1: ‘Nobody’s Safe’
- Episode 2: ‘Treasure Island’
- Episode 3: ‘Money Tower’
- Episode 4: ‘Powers of Observation’
- Episode 5: ‘Special Delivery’
Episode 1: ‘Nobody’s Safe’
The Mole opens on a cornfield visited by aliens, or at least that’s what the production has done to it: carved a shape that becomes the arena for the very first challenge.
After nine minutes of introductions, our new host Ari Shapiro appears to welcome the players and introduce the first twist: five players who emerge from the corn in full-body suits and paintball helmets.
Considering that even Tony, with his shirt not just unbuttoned by pushed open to get those Instagram numbers up, looks sweaty and hot, so I assumed that the first challenge would be to bet on which of these new players will die first in the heat.
But no: Instead, the five will race for three cars, and the first one there replaces one of the 12 core players.
Neesh steps forward to lead the team, because he is in marketing and is a leader, and then steps backwards and hides in the corn once Ari reveals the leader will be the person eliminated.
The players have five minutes to choose a leader to earn $10,000, which is literally one-tenth of season one’s final prize. If they don’t, then someone will be picked at random.
Since no one steps forward, my proposal would have been to draw corn: do it at random, since that’ll happen anyway. Instead, Melissa realizes that the first person nominated will likely get all the votes, so she throws out Neesh’s name, because he can’t keep quiet.
The new players stand and watch this, dying before our eyes.
The mission is really fun, save for all the goddamn interruptions to hear the players’ inane theories about mole-ish behavior. But I digress.
They five intruders have 30 minutes to get through three zones; the other players have to pelt them with paintballs to knock them out, first using slingshots, then a fixed paintball gun, then three paintball guns with just 10 shots each.
The players have a drone to observe and communicate with each other; the intruders get smoke bombs and shields. The best part of this, I think, is the second zone, where the paintball gun is mounted on a platform that can be swiveled by several players, not its operator, Andy. He was completely at the mercy of people moving him as the intruders climbed a tower. It’s a great way to get everyone involved and also make a task much more difficult.
Four of them make it to the final zone, so it’s 30 paintballs or Neesh is out. In dramatic slow-motion footage, we see all four get taken out, and Neesh is saved, and the players bonded against the pile of anonymous heat-exhausted bodies.
At their first luxury accommodation, the players get their first exemption test: they have to select three trustworthy people, each of whom will answer a phone call from Ari.
They nominate Deanna, Muna, and Tony. Individually, Ari offers them $5,000 if all three dial 1, or they can dial 2 and get one wrong answer on their quiz corrected.
$5,000 is so low that it’s not much of an incentive. Deanna and Tony dial 1, but Muna dials 2, and when Ari reveals that, the group is flabbergasted. Tony defends himself by saying, and I quote, “I said no to the money.” He says it again: “I said no to the money.” Then he realizes that he’s accidentally admitted doing.
“Do you know what’s so crazy to me? Is that somebody here is a really good liar. That’s what I’ve learned today,” Muna says, lying. Muna tells us, “I didn’t fly all the way to Malaysia to play nice.” Excellent!
We get to see some quiz questions (“Did the mole shoot a paintball gun in the first mission?”), and a lot of dumb speculation.
I wish some players would talk about and/or the editing would show us talking about quiz strategy. Andy mentions spreading his answers across players, but we get no mention of strategies such as speed (the tiebreaker is time) or probability (some multiple choice answers encompass far more players than others, and are the more logical choices, especially this early).
Before a phone can turn green or red, the credits roll.
Episode 2: ‘Treasure Island’
It’s Jennifer whose phone turns red, and sends her out of the game. Ari walks her to the car.
The other players wonder about her quiz answers, and that reminds me of something else I miss: players sharing information and talking about quiz answers. We don’t even see these players take notes, though they do reference it once or twice.
The players head to Tioman Island for their next mission: a treasure hunt. It’s an incredible location: not exactly new because of our familiarity with island locations, but still gorgeous.
They must build a raft and locate two treasure chests, which are buried on the beach. Clues await in two locations, including a sunken ship. And they have just two hours to do this.
Sean compares this location to The Goonies, a movie I also love. “I was just waiting for Sloth to be like, Hey you guys!” he says. But, wait, what? That was set on the coast of Oregon and in caves. Sean must be the mole because of his strained movie reference!
Honestly, I kind of of zoned out during this mission because of how exhausted I was getting by the cutaways to interviews. Someone ties a knot—are they they mole?!? Let’s speculate!!
While Ari introduces the mission on the beach, he disappears after that. I don’t know if he needed to be floating alongside them as they paddled their raft, or sitting on the buoy, but this kind of mission is where I miss the Anderson Cooper-style host presence.
The group ends up with $45,000 in the pot, and gathers at a bar, where “Buzzkill Ari” shows up to offer an exemption.
This is a truly inspired and diabolical challenge: one person gets the exemption, the last person sitting in the bar. And the second it starts, their pot starts to drain. They watch on a TV as their $45,000 starts slipping away.
Melissa, who proposed Neesh as leader in mission one, proposes they give it to him for putting himself on the line. She leaves. This time, though, no one buys it.
That’s when Tony says: “I’m willing to see it go to zero.” Then he says other deranged things like “I don’t give a damn about the money; I just want to win.” Win what, exactly? Screentime?
I imagine in this moment than many of us are Q, who is apoplectic. “You come on this show to win money, not to lose money,” he cries. “What the hell…?!”
The money continues to drain. Meesh says, “apparently some of y’all got too much money already.”
Hannah, too, refuses to move. “I’m not getting up,” and then she and Tony start full-on flirting while $45,000 is cut in half, and then heads toward zero.
Q says, “these young mother-freakers!” and later “the whole pot?!” In an interview, he says, “this new generation, something wrong with ’em.” I think that’s the casting, friend.
Around $25,000, most people have stood up and left, but notice who remains the longest: Muna and Ryan. Notice also that Muna has given us a reason, and Ryan has not.
This is where I started to suspect—and again, I am just speculating here!—that Ryan is the mole, because she’s contributing to loss without being the center of attention. “I’m going to trust my gut” and “show the rest of the people up there I’m still a team player,” she says in an interview.
Tony says he’s “chilling, no stress,” and lays down on the table. “What do you mean?” Q yells.
Muna eventually leaves at $19,000. Then Hannah decides to flirt with Tony so she can get the exemption. “Get up,” she says, and tells us: “I get everything I want when I flirt,” Hannah said. I’ve never had a guy say no to me.”
Muna asks, “if there’s no money to receive, what exactly am I fighting for?” That is the critical question, and what is coming across is that Hannah and Tony are not fighting for cash, but for clout, attention, screen time.
If I was Q or another player, I don’t know what I’d do. Walk? As a viewer, I felt like that, because the money on this show is already too low, and for all the work of two missions to be drained away, what’s the point?
Episode 3: ‘Money Tower’
“Tony, I’m having so much fun,” Hannah tells Tony, and tells us “I smile, I bat my eyelashes; boys will be boys.” Is this sexist garbage or a feasible strategy?
It turns out it works: Tony gets up, Hannah gets the exemption, and the players get screwed: $9,870 is left, so Hannah and Tony let $10K go while they flirted. The whole group lost $35,130 in what Ari says was “less than 30 minutes.” Being a magnanimous host, he rounds up the prize pot to $10,000.
“Thanks, baby,” Hannah says to Tony. Frustratingly, there’s no aftermath of this. Did they just put the players on ice (i.e. make them stop talking) until the next day’s mission? I want more of those moments and fewer interviews.
At a beach circle where the quiz results are revealed, suddenly Tony and Hannah are a full-on couple. In the car the next day, it’s even more: They’re kissing and holding hands and really doing a great job on their Love is Blind audition tapes.
Andy—oh, Andy!—gets the red screen, which is a really effective effect in the dark of the beach.
On the way to the next mission, the players are split between two cars, with half of them stuck with Hannah and Tony. They learn, via text, that they’re in two groups, and need to pick someone who’s good under pressure.
Neesh, who desperately wants to be leader, says, “you guys are going to pick me again,” and those in his car are like: nah.
The players arrive at Forest City, which is absolutely stunning, and which Ari—leaning against an SUV—describes as “$100 billion development of luxury apartments [that] covers 10 square miles.” (It’s also now “a ghost town” and also caused a lot of damage to the environment.)
It’s the location of a heist mission: Each team must break into an apartment and its safe, and exit with jewelry worth $10,000 each.
Sean and Melissa, who are selected as best under pressure, have to rappel down the outside to find a balcony with a red chair, and then let their team in. “I live in a one-story house for a reason!” Sean says.
Sean really seems to struggle, and Tony tells him, “think of your kids, dude.” Oh? Were you thinking of his kids when you f*cked the pot yesterday just to flirt a little and get some camera time?
While Melissa takes off, Sean is actually much faster, zipping down the side of the building. Once inside the apartments, the teams basically face an escape room: once they find the safe, they have to figure out its combination from numbers scattered around the room.
Ari gives each team a bag of gear, and says, “Without them, you’ll be left in the dark, so keep them close at hand,” but that’s also said in an obvious voiceover that makes me wonder what the players actually heard. Ditto with the alleged radio calls he makes to the teams, who don’t seem to hear him or the clues, like about how the game is “in the bag.”
On Sean’s team, Q finds the flashlight, and while he looks for batteries, Tony insist he should “let go of that thing, dude. That thing’s worthless.” No, Tony, that’s you and increasing the pot.
On Melissa’s team, Don’t F**k With Cats star/online sleuth Deanna says, “Can I be a successful investigator without technology?” She has the team bring all the numbers together on table, which is great.
I just don’t understand why everyone else looks so lost, and Melissa’s team doesn’t even think to look in the bag they were given to start.
Once they each figure out the blacklight, the safe reveals the four numbers but not, of course, the order. Even once they realize that some numbers get highlighted with the blacklight, both teams still make wild guesses. Deanna notices a circled 12 and thinks that’s it. Hannah suggests “we can just try both” with two chances left.
Melissa’s team spends $5,000 on a clue that tells the what they already know. They are really bad at this! Amazingly, Melissa’s team finally gets it—they guessed correctly—and the team earns just $5,000 out of a possible $20,000.
After some forced, on-camera social time (“Is this our first date, Michael?” Neesh asks) it’s time for an exemption mission.
The players and Ari sit at a circular table, and each player is given a fortune cookie: five have exemptions, five have cash. If half the players have exemptions—wow.
They have to vote people off the table, with the goal of getting rid of those holding exemptions. The players say what they have—or lie outright. Tony and Ryan, for example, both say he has $20,000.
My favorite part of this is how past behavior plays into it (“I look like a fool”; “we are going to lose money and it’s my fault,” Tony realizes). And as the next episode starts, truths and lies will also be revealed.
Episode 4: ‘Powers of Observation’
The exemption game continues. Ryan, Melissa, Muna, Sean, and Mike are revealed as lying. In the final round, Ari’s truly shocked when Mike’s lie—the only one that fooled everyone—is revealed.
“She was willing to bet $20,000 we would believe her lie, so she’s a suspect for me now,” Deanna says of Ryan, which seems to me to be the first major accusation against her in four episodes.
In the end, they got four of five exemptions, and won $45,000, so now the pot is $60,000, which is still pathetic.
The quiz takes place in the same location, though at night.
I do like the phone glowing green and lighting up players’ faces, and it’s been brighter and more obvious this season. But here, they’re sitting under red lanterns at a red table! So everyone is already glowing red. How did no one notice this? When Melissa’s phone turns red, it does light up her face, but it’s nowhere near as dramatic.
The players travel to Kuala Lumpur, and Hannah and Tony are still having public PDA. After a Hyatt ad, the players get messages from Ari on their TVs.
This is their next exemption mission: They have the choice of spending $5,000 from the pot to watch part of one player’s pre-show Zoom casting video. If they all resist, $25,000 gets added.
But only Q resists, so they lost $40,000 instead of making $25,000.
The videos show their answers to how they’d play as the mole. But to me, that’s not all that valuable since they are all openly lying and sabotaging. The only useful piece of information to me is in Sean’s video, which reveals he’s an undercover cop.
Tony and Hannah think everyone watched their videos, and then test our gag reflexes by exchanging “you’re so hot” “so are you”s and making out by the pool.
We’re at episode four, and the pot is $20,000. Netflix is getting a hell of a deal out of these dummies.
After what Ari says are “a couple days” in Kuala Lumpur, The next mission is another fantastic one: a gala at the Petronas Towers, for which all the players have been given outfits that clearly indicate they’re staff.
“Do I look like a waitress?” Hannah asks, charming everyone.
The mission: they must find three of the 60 guests, who each have gifts worth $10,000 for the pot—not even enough to make up what they lost on the video mission.
They split into two groups: four people in the back-of-house, who are basically in a control room, and five front-of-house, who are not so much servers as observers.
It’s a really smart game of elimination, with the back of the house having to cross-reference RSVPs, clues in the coatroom, photos of everyone, and choices the attendees make for wine and food.
During all this, Sean notices Michael staring at him, and tells us he’s going to openly sabotage because he notices Michael watching. Sean swaps a photo and crumples the real one up; Michael sees this and tells us “it was blatantly obvious, which then makes me question” whether the mole would be so dumb.
Ryan, meanwhile, lies by telling the back-of-house team that a pilot at her table had red wine and chicken, when he had white wine and a vegetarian dumpling. Hannah notices—but guess who we don’t hear from? Ryan. There’s just so much cutting to interviews with constant speculation and rationalization that it stands out how little we hear from her, which continues my suspicion that she is the mole.
They end up making just $10,000, one quarter of what they lost, thanks to two people sabotaging and two people refusing to identify that sabotage to the group. So now the pot is $30,000: four episodes and they’re not even to four episodes of Chopped.
Deanna asks, “is it sabotage or is it weaponized incompetence?” That is the question of this season of The Mole.
The players head to the Helipad bar, which is literally the helipad on the 36th floor of a building. The Petronas Towers sparkle in the background along with the rest of the city, and it’s another visually spectacular location. This season of The Mole really stepped it up.
Episode 5: ‘Special Delivery’
While the cliffhanger is on Michael’s phone screen, it turns out he’s safe.
After the gala mission, Hannah shares with us that she decided not to tell her boo about Ryan’s deception because “I have to do what’s best for me.”
That’s a good call—and it reverberates, because guess which big open-shirted dummy gets red screened? Yep, Tony. After he tells us that he and Hannah “see eye to eye with who it is” and “we played as a team,” his teammate betrays him and he’s out.
Whether Hannah witnessing Ryan’s sabotage actually played into the quiz results is a big stretch. It’s still likely there are ties, which means it’s about time. Also, two people who share notes could still answer differently, accidentally or otherwise.
The players are off to Port Klang, where stacks of shipping containers await them. They can earn a max of $50,000—at long last, a decent prize! This cleverly designed mission has them searching for storage containers with a US mark, inside of which are crates with various values.
They have to place the crates into one of three trucks. In dramatic fashion, Ari reveals the trucks are labeled with players’ names: Michael, Muna, and Sean. One of those is the group’s top suspect from the previous night’s quiz. What we don’t learn is about the other two. Were they selected at random? Are they the second and third?
Only the money placed in the top suspect’s truck will go into the pot. The players decide to just tell each other who they’ve been voting for—and of course, lie to each other. After Deanna admits, “I have been picking Muna from day one,” Sean lies, too, saying, “That makes it easier for me to advance in this game.” Michael also doesn’t want to admit voting for Sean.
Such lies seem dumb to me, as the answer will be revealed. So if you lie and it’s actually someone else, you’ve lost all that money and people have reason to be suspicious. Then again, maybe that’s the strategy.
They decide on Muna’s trailer, until they realize they should probably put at least some cash in the other trucks, too. They put the doubler in Muna’s truck—a crate that could have made this mission worth $100,000, had they all been honest.
“We work as a team, we win,” Neesh says.
They go to a new location to see if they’ve won. Ari plays this up: “Is that the sound of money? Is that the sound of cash?” he says as the truck they chose approaches. When he uses the control to open the lift gate to reveal the name, he says: “I love operating heavy machinery.”
The players have placed $5,000 in Sean’s truck, $19,500 in Michael’s, and $51,000 in Muna’s. The truck is Michael’s; he’s the top suspect.
So now they have $49,500. “But first, we have another game to play,” Ari says. This is the mission in which Ari is the most present, as it’s an auction. Unlike the Survivor auction, these players know how many items there are: three.
Sitting in classroom chairs in an abandoned warehouse with open walls and windows, they can bid on each one. “We’re about to lose a bunch of money, is what it looks like,” Hannah says. Oh Hannah, you have no idea!
Each player can bid exactly once, so they all wait through the first two rounds (15 minutes to look at one player’s dossier; a correction on the quiz), earning the pot $5,000 for each of those rounds, bringing the total to $59,500. The final auction item, as expected, is an exemption.
Here’s where I think the producers missed an opportunity: they should not have shown them this last item (or maybe any of the items). What if it was a zonk instead of the exemption they all believed it to be?
Before the auction starts, Sean says, “I am going for it,” and Neesh says, “I’d spend a lot of money for an exemption.” Hannah says, “This is the cycle: we work together during the mission, and then we all screw each other.”
When the exemption is revealed, Hannah says, “let’s just keep it low.” And someone takes that advice, bidding all $59,500 on that exemption.
Halfway through the season, The Mole now has a prize of $0 to offer its winner.
Cue Q: “Oh hell no, man!” he says. “That’s the mole’s job to take money out.”
Muna says, “it’s crazy, it’s crazy.” Q tells us, “I’m over these people. I’m done, I’m done, I’m ready to go home. I’m like: Why am I here?”
That’s how I’m feeling, too. Ari asked if the person would say who they were, and that’s where we end: in frustration that at least one of these remaining players cares more about being in the game than winning money at the end of the game.
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