If you’re at my apartment on a Friday or Saturday night, and we’re wondering, what should we do, how should we spend the evening?, I can pretty much guarantee you one thing: I will suggest, with feigned casualness, trying to seem like I really don’t care that much, that we play One Night Ultimate Werewolf. I won’t bore you with the details, because who on god’s green earth wants to read board game instructions. All you need to know is someone is secretly deemed The Werewolf, and they don’t want to be discovered by the rest of the group as such. The group has five minutes to discuss, with the goal of identifying who really is The Werewolf. If the group successfully identifies The Werewolf, the group wins; if The Werewolf goes undetected, The Werewolf wins.

Reality competition series The Traitors is basically One Night Ultimate Werewolf, except all the people playing are from various other reality TV shows, and the villains are The Traitors, not The Werewolf. And instead of having five minutes to discuss, you have hours, or days, or weeks, broken up by episodic challenges. And the American version  all inexplicably takes place in a huge, ancient mansion in Scotland, hosted by Alan Cumming, who is dressed to the nines, narrating each turn of events in the thickest Scottish accent you’ve ever heard. So yeah, it’s amazing.

The Traitors Season Two opens with a bunch of reality TV stars from totally disparate worlds — from Rupaul’s Drag Race’s Peppermint, to Survivor’s Parvati Shallow and Sandra Diaz-Twine, to Bling Empire’s Kevin Kreider, to a professional boxer, to a random retired British politician — arriving at Alan Cumming’s mansion in rural Scotland. That would’ve been enough of an opening, but no, The Traitors goes hard where it simply could’ve not gone at all. The stars are greeted by Alan Cumming’s bearded, silent footman, then his dog Lala, and finally, a bunch of people dressed all in black vigorously playing these huge drums, for some reason. Everyone’s screaming, and so am I! This is theater, people!!! And I love theater!!

As with most competition reality TV shows, the pace feels slower in the first few episodes — but honestly, the completely unnecessary drama of literally every choice made by the producers of The Traitors makes it feel fast-paced and delicious from the very start. For anyone who watches a good amount of reality TV, it’s really dang fun to see folks from very different shows all socializing here. The bizarreness of someone from Big Brother teaching Kevin from Bling Empire about Johnny Bananas from The Challenge (now is when I confess… I also love The Challenge) is just — well, it’s just something I never thought I’d see borne out.

Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t admit that arguably the biggest reality TV pairing of this season (at least for me) is two people from the same world — Parvati and Sandra from Survivor. Survivor fans out there know about the long-standing rivalry between these two absolute icons, and let me just say, The Traitors Season Two, at least in the first three episodes, does not disappoint when it comes to exploring their dynamic.

And this is where I’ll level with you — as soon as I saw Parvati and Sandra were gonna be in the second season of The Traitors, I was deeply hoping that one or both of them would be a traitor. Parvati in particular, because the role of Traitor is one Parvati Shallow was meant to play. The Traitor must have high emotional intelligence and be able to form connections with, if not everybody, then at least the right socially influential people. The Traitor must be calm under pressure, or else their identity will be discovered by the group. The Traitor must be agile and adjust their plans as social dynamics shift and evolve. Parvati Shallow — #1 flirter; master meditator; evolving, growing human being — would make a great Traitor, wouldn’t she?

But if there’s anything I’ve learned from Parvati, it’s that the best way to keep someone invested isn’t to give them what they want — it’s to withhold. So I’m not going to tell you if she got selected as a traitor or not. I’m not going to tell you if it happens in a conventional way or not, or if it happens at all. You’ll just have to watch to find out. If you want.

What I will tell you is that every single thing about The Traitors — from the setting, to the emotionality of the contestants, to the language Alan Cumming uses, to the very timbre of my recaps! — is over the top. Only Johnny Bananas (a fascinating human being to me; how on earth can you win a show with the physical and mental absurdity of The Challenge not once, not twice, but seven times?!) seems to realize how silly and extravagant this show’s whole deal is. Everyone else — including me, as a viewer — gets sucked into the lush, high-octane world of The Traitors and swallowed whole.

You might think, then, that The Traitors is escapism at its finest. Sure, on a surface level, it is. I could (and will) watch it for hours, completely dissociated from the world around me. But I don’t think it’s that simple. In fact, early in the show, The Challenge’s Trishelle Cannatella’s treatment of Peppermint shows us that the power dynamics at play in the game are anything but divorced from reality. Without really anything significant to go on — the game has truly just started — Trishelle decides, based on how Peppermint reacted to a joke, that she thinks Peppermint is a Traitor. It’s hard not to see racism, transphobia, and homophobia, as factors in how Trishelle effectively turns nearly the whole group against Peppermint, rather swiftly, which is especially easy for her to do since Peppermint didn’t come on with sibling cast members the way most other players did, which Peppermint spoke about in her exit interview with Out. Trishelle’s treatment of Peppermint and her subsequent elimination is hard to watch and stomach. Peppermint ends up, heartbreakingly, being the very first person sent home, despite, of course, not being a Traitor. I think the outcomes of the Trishelle’s and the group’s treatment of Peppermint will heavily impact the rest of the season, given how strongly some folks reacted when Peppermint was revealed to not be a Traitor, just after being the very first person the group sent home.

The Traitors is a show, much like One Night Ultimate Werewolf, about social manipulation. How groups of people define otherhood, rightly or wrongly, based in reality, assumption, fantasy, or some mix of all three. How someone slides into or resists a role thrust upon them by a group. How someone seizes, maintains, and loses power. How the collective subsumes the individual every time, except for when the individual subsumes the collective. How groupthink pulls focus from those deserving scrutiny to those completely innocent.

I’ll be watching The Traitors Season Two and recapping it every Friday. Join me?