Gay TV recaplet: "The Mole" (Episode 1)

Last night, reality TV whodunit series The Mole made its return with gay restaurant manager Bobby (and "obsessed" Mole fan) in the cast. And despite initial misgivings, the series was just as good as this fan remembered.

The Mole has several people competing in challenges, and the better they do in each challenge the more money there is for the winner to claim at the end. However, one player is secretly a saboteur, trying to minimize how much money is won. The real game is to figure out who is the Mole. It's a wonderful concept, one that's simple to approach but gets compellingly complex the more you think about it.

Bobby does well in the first challenge, which essentially involves grabbing a bag of money (or worthless paper) while bungee jumping over a waterfall. However, it turned out that his bag wasn't filled with money so he failed to put any money in the pot, thanks to the woman who was in charge of the challenge.

That night only some of the competitors are allowed to spend the night in a warm bed and Bobby is one of four players chosen to sleep outside, a hardship he seems to take on without complaint. However, Nicole (an OBGYN) is pretty unhappy at the thought of sleeping out in the cold, creating some drama that gets her voted as the whiniest competitor ... and an exemption from being eliminated. Bobby isn't one of the players shown calling Nicole whiny; as a fan of The Mole I wonder if he remembered that there usually are benefits to being an outcast.

In the second challenge, Bobby is one of six players who have to run around an empty beach searching for items that Robinson Crusoe character Alexander Slekirk might have had with him when he was deserted on an island. Bobby has a hard time with the task, quickly running out of breath and failing to find two of the items.

Now, one strategy in this game is to do your best to act like the Mole. That way, you hopefully trick other players into giving wrong answers on the elimination quiz (the player with the most incorrect answers about the Mole in each elimination is "executed"). Bobby certainly seemed to have that in mind as he went into the game -- in his introductory interview he names his poor physical fitness as an advantage. So was Bobby's poor performance a sign of The Mole's sabotage or strategy-based "bad" gameplay? While scavenging on the beach, Bobby puts his hands at his waist showing how rail thin he is (he could trade clothes with David Tennant), so it's plausible that he's not as fit as his youth suggests.

Next week, we again see Bobby too physically weak to compete in one of the challenges, and he ends up needing a female teammate to help him get around by giving him a wheelbarrow ride.

That prompts resident loudmouth Paul to declare it "disgusting" that a "so-called man let a woman push him around in a wheelbarrow". It should be interesting to see how the show handles that outburst and if Paul faces any trouble for it.

What do you think? Is Bobby pinging your Mole-dar? Is it just too early to tell the difference between sabotage and feigned sabotage? How much of his poor fitness for real and how much do you think is a matter of game play?