Faithfuls Croft and Ranganathan Win 'The Celebrity Traitors' Season 2 Finale

Spoiler alert: this article contains details of the U.K. finale of "The Celebrity Traitors" Season 2, now streaming on BBC iPlayer.

Sebastian Croft and Romesh Ranganathan, both Faithfuls, won the Season 2 finale of "The Celebrity Traitors." Traitors King Kenny and Maya Jama were both banished in a tense final showdown. Almost nobody saw it coming.

The twist was unthinkable a day earlier. James Acaster admitted at the roundtable that he had been secretly recruited as a Traitor, ending what had looked like an unstoppable Traitors run. Maya Jama then "fell on her sword" — the source's phrase — shortly after the murdered Faithful Michael Sheen had worked out her identity.

Who lost out?

The ending wasn't entirely happy. James Blunt, who had been adamant about who the Traitors were, was evicted despite being a Faithful himself. His confident but not entirely accurate roundtable predictions were, the report suggests, his biggest downfall.

The verdict on the season is blunt: underwhelming. Season 1 remains a tough act to follow, remembered for Alan Carr's journey from worst Traitor imaginable to outright winner — arguably the U.K. franchise's greatest moment, in a series otherwise defined by Faithful Celia Imrie's fart. That's the benchmark.

Why did the Traitors never click?

Richard E. Grant set the tone. He admitted he was a Traitor mere moments after being picked as one. "You need to make it very clear that you're not," a confused Faithful James Blunt told him. Grant's admission and early departure triggered a chain of events this season never recovered from.

Acaster had said from the start he did not want to be a Traitor. He reluctantly accepted recruitment by Grant and Maya Jama to avoid being murdered. The show works best when Traitors go on gleeful killing sprees at night while lying to the Faithfuls by day; Acaster's hesitation meant that dynamic never got going.

Professor Hannah Fry's later recruitment couldn't gather speed either. Game rules left only her and Jerry Hall eligible for murder that night, so recruitment was not the only option — and with little room to maneuver, she ran out of road.

What still worked?

Plenty, on the evidence. "The Traitors" on a bad day still beats most reality shows on a good one, the report argues. The camp absurdity persisted, if slightly diminished. The highest moments are the ones producers can't predict: Ross Kemp can interview a cartel boss in the Amazon rainforest, but he could not handle being brushed on the arm by Leigh-Anne Pinnock of Little Mix.

The ratings tell their own story. The BBC drew an unbelievable 15 million viewers this season — a number British television usually reserves for a royal wedding or an international football final.

What does this mean for the format?

The season exposed the show's natural limitations, but they're fixable. If a recruit doesn't want to be a Traitor, the show struggles to fly. The early banishments of Grant and Fry also confirmed what dedicated fans had long pointed out: keeping an obvious Traitor in the game early makes sense, because evicting one simply produces a replacement.

For all his brief comedy in the opening episodes, keeping Richard E. Grant in the castle longer was likely the producers' preference anyway — and the format remains flexible enough that no season repeats the last.