I still don’t get what the Mole’s incentive is. Does she get the money that the team didn’t earn? Does she get a bigger paycheck each week the team loses? What? I need cites, or quotes. I just caught the last 3 episodes, and nothing was mentioned. I’m dying here!
I had trouble with this, too. I think The Mole’s motivation is twofold: disrupt the challenges and go undetected. To do both is a great challenge, so she must be less than obvious (and, I assume, paid well). Kathryn stated that sometimes she wanted the team to win and she didn’t want to be detected, so she would actually try to help the team. In spite of themselves, the team still failed at times.
I would think The Mole should get all the money that wasn’t won. That would be interesting, also. Except in that case she might get too ambitious and everyone would know she’s The Mole. There’s no fun in that. As it turned out, some of the contestants already knew Kathryn was The Mole early on. The producers just edited out many of those comments (the coalition between Steve and Jim, for example) to fool the home audience. In that respect, the motivation behind The Mole (the person and the show) is to entertain us by keeping us guessing.
From ABC’s website, Rules for The Mole II:
It seems that her only incentives are to get a paycheck and to do a good job. It’s not stated, but she was probably given a fixed payoff for participating. It does say that the other participants are awarded a cash prize based on how long they stayed in the game, but doesn’t say how much that was…
Paul
Thanks, Paul!
What’s not to like? Free trip to Europe, stay in luxurious resorts and play puzzles? Unlike, say, Survivor, where you stab each other in the back for a blanket and a fishing line.
Speaking of reality show comparisons…apparently (based on news snippets–never watched the show) Temptation Island ended with all the contestant couples confessing to “intimate moments”, but all going home together. Which has got to be the worst possible outcome for all concerned. You know those couples are going to break up soon–you don’t think the subject of infidelity is never going to come up again?–but they didn’t have the common courtesy to do it on camera, and help out the producers.
I was pissed off at the collusion that was allowed between the producers and the mole during the contest. She got to fake “roll the dice” test and set up way she could help them blow it. Shave your head for a woman would be a little more extreme then if it had been for a man. The problem is she got to set it up so that she would get that task. That and the “Who will look in the producers notebook,” was probably a set-up also. Finally, the last test. Everything was dependent on the Mole being the first one out of her room. Hell, she could have sat on her ass and said she never found the “Room with a View” book. She actually wanted them to win that one (as she had been briefed on the whole puzzle beforehand)and couldn’t get the two idiots off the phone to set it up.
Maybe it’s just me, but the producers should not be helping the Mole by rigging the contests. The mole should be on their own, treated exactly like a contestant.
Leave it to a tv producer to blow an interesting concept.