Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Mole’ Season 2 On Netflix, Where A New Group Of Contestants Try To Figure Out Which One Is Sabotaging Them

In the second season of Netflix’s reboot of The Mole, 12 contestants land in Malaysia, hoping to be the one that wins a pot of money that is built mostly through teamwork challenges. However, there is someone amongst the twelve that was put there by the producers to sabotage the others’ efforts to win. That person is “The Mole.”

THE MOLE – SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Various contestants sit at a table and are asked if they are The Mole. They all deny it.

The Gist: After the twelve contestants wander out of a field of hugely tall grass into a mowed clearing, new host Ari Shapiro comes out of the sky-high grass to welcome the contestants to the new season. They are actually already in the middle of their first task: The clearing is part of an obstacle course that the team will have to defend with paintball weapons. The people they have to defend against? Five people who barely missed the cut to be on the show. If one of them gets through the course without being hit by a paintball gets to move in the house, at the expense of whichever current contestant is chosen as the leader.

The group is given five minutes to pick a leader to earn $5000. If they can’t decide, someone will be picked by the producers. Of course, no one wants to be on the hot seat so quickly, but people end up nominating Neesh because he was the one trying to organize the group.

He picks the groups to man each phase — the first using slingshots, the second using a rifle on a wobble board, and then the third where three guns with 10 paintballs in each have to cover a large area.

After that challenge, the group is driven to a mountaintop villa and are asked to pick the three most trustworthy people. Those three people — Muna, Tony and Deanna — are told to wait for Shapiro to call them at a phone booth. Each are given a choice: Earn $5000 for the team or have one of their wrong answers on the elimination quiz corrected. The money only gets paid if all three select that option.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? As most people know, this version of The Mole is a revival of the franchise that started on ABC in 2001, hosted by an up-and-coming young journalist named Anderson Cooper. (Wonder whatever happened to him?)

Our Take: The entire idea that, from day one of this game, there is someone there trying to sabotage the group has always been a delicious one to contemplate. It’s the reason why The Traitors, hosted by Shapiro’s buddy Alan Cumming, is so appealing. But The Mole did it first, and this revival still makes for a compelling reality competition because of it.

As with most reality competitions, the early episodes suffer from too many contestants whose personalities tend to blend together. Though at least here, we have the calm, collected Andy Mintzer, the oldest contestant in the group, and the bubbly but determined Deanna Thompson, whom you might remember as one of the web sleuths from the Netflix docuseries Don’t F**k WIth Cats. Their distinctive personalities separate them from the usual twentysomething people who are posturing and saying things like “I didn’t fly all the way to Malaysia to be liked,” as Muna Abdulahi says.

The jury is still out about Shapiro as host. Season One’s host, Alex Wagner, was serious when needed and playful when it called for it. Shapiro seems to swap playful for cheeky, taking cues from how Cumming hosted The Traitors. But a) Cumming’s cheekiness is something that comes naturally and we expect to see, and b) The Traitors is a much less serious show than The Mole. Maybe this is how Shapiro is on All Things Considered, but our guess is that, in the early going, he’s just having problems trying to figure out the right tone to use.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: The elimination is down to the final three, and as Shapiro types a name on his tablet, the phones in front of each contestant turn green if they stay and red if they’re eliminated. The first contestant is eliminated at the beginning of episode 2, and the rest are off to a remote island for the next task.

Sleeper Star: Muna seems to be the most trustworthy right at the start, but she proves that she might be the most devious one there. But is she The Mole?

Most Pilot-y Line: Because no one really knows each other, every little slip up makes the other contestants think someone is The Mole. It’s one of the irritating things about the early episodes, but it’s not something we really think the producers can fix.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Mole is a sturdy formula for a reality competition. We’re not quite sold on the new host yet, but the rest of it is as solid as the first season was in 2022.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.