Nineteen questions down, one to go. Success or failure in the second challenge comes down to this answer. The
And the answer is...
Yes.
Robert Hanssen, ex-FBI agent now serving life in prison for leaking information to the Soviets/Russians for 22 years, is
exactly the person I had in mind.
Dig that pedosmile, bro. Why Hanssen, of all people? Well listen, I won't pretend to have done a shitload of research on history's most nefarious moles. Actually, I chose Hanssen because he's the first name listed under the "Real Life" heading on
this Tropes page right here. That wouldn't have been a bad place for one of our savvier tropers to look for a lead.
Although, you should know that there's one player who didn't need to go sniffing for clues at all.
The Mole knew the identity of the target all along. I PMed that information to them when the game began. Now that you're aware of that, it's worth taking another look at some players' behavior during the challenge.
For instance, our golden boy
Biscuit, who seemingly snatched victory from the jaws of defeat in a last-minute flash of intuition. But the deck, it needs hardly be said, wasn't stacked in his favor. The team had only recently worked out that the target had ties to the government (
any government -- he wasn't even necessarily an American) and had committed some kind of crime. That's a pretty big pool of candidates right there! An eye-popping stunt, if
Biscuit's a true contestant. Quite reasonable if he's the Mole, who stands to gain much from attracting a reputation as a reliable breadwinner in the early stages. Consider two of
Biscuit's earlier questions about the target's gender and race. These seemingly fundamental inquiries would have been rendered largely trivial if the team had nailed Hanssen's (former) ties to the U.S. government quickly enough: statistically, his white maleness would have been safe to assume. Was
Biscuit the Mole trying to keep the field wide open and ensure that no one else would work out the answer in time, leaving him to stroll in at the eleventh hour with the winning name?
Of course, the whole reason this challenge ran up to the eleventh hour at all is largely thanks to our friend
Ninety, whose six-in-one questionanza might well stand as the most conspicuous move in the entire game so far. What was he
thinking? Never mind that as helpful as some of those questions were, it was ludicrous to ball them all together into one post like that (surely it would have behooved him to wait for the response on whether the target was alive before asking about the target's age, for instance!). No, the real kicker is those two questions. You know. The Murdoch and Bieber ones. Now, there was never going to be an EP bonus for finishing this challenge in
under twenty questions, and I never hinted there might be. That means, in terms purely of Twenty Questions (not of The Mole), there was no motivation whatosever to try to end the game early. So asking about Murdoch was a gamble against incredibly long odds for
no potential benefit. Bad enough move on
Ninety's part. But that goes triple in the case of Bieber, since we'd already established from
DL's question that
the target is not a musician.*
Ninety was as good as throwing the Murdoch question away, and he
abjectly wasted the Bieber question! Such an act of sabotage seems almost too good to be true... but that could be exactly what
Ninety the Mole is hoping you'll think.
And then there's
Belle, who's guilty of wasting a question of her own. Her lucid stroke in asking whether the target has been involved in a crime would've changed half the game's progression if she'd gotten that one in before
Ninety set off the firecrackers. But immediately upon receiving that critical affirmative answer, she fumbled, with a more or less unnecessary follow-up about whether the target was an alleged criminal. I don't know about you, but to me, being "involved in a crime" means you have to be either a criminal, a victim, or maybe a witness. One wouldn't say that judges, criminal prosecutors, defense attorneys, etc. are "involved in crimes": Johnnie Cochran wasn't "involved in the murders of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman", he was involved in the
trial. So, given both that she'd confirmed the target was involved in a crime
and that, thanks to one of
Ninety's more redeeming questions, she knew that the target is not "generally seen as a good person", there was really no need to expend another question at that critical juncture just to make
absolutely sure this target is a criminal. A seemingly helpful question, but in truth largely useless: unlike the others,
Belle the Mole might have been looking to bring the challenge down
without drawing too much attention to herself.
Why should the Mole have to be one of these three, though? Couldn't they be
Bulbs,
DL or
Testbug, any of whom might have been trying to sabotage the challenge by prolonging the early "Does he belong to X profession?" stage? Or maybe the Mole is one of the other six, mysteriously silent players -- perhaps the Mole received the information about Hanssen's identity and chose to do nothing with it, opting instead to sit on the sidelines and watch the contestants make their first adorable efforts at drawing suspicion. If that's true, though, then the Mole must feel a bit foolish in the face of this last-minute victory. He or she just lost a potential
20 EP, all of which pours down merrily into the team's coffers.
THE TEAM POT: 33 EP
THE MOLE'S POCKET: 7 EPThe third and final challenge of this episode will commence soon. I have some preparations I need to carry out first.
*
Yes, for the purposes of that challenge, I would have counted Bieber as a "musician". I know. Technicalities.