Pedagogical advice of the week: ‘Adapting is everything.’ After teacher Lancelot asks his students to write down a different name for our national hockey team for the third time, they look at him confused. They may need their own Red Nose campaign to obtain.
Cultural highlight: the editor who came up with the experiment where Ruben and Toos wear bowler hats and catapult an apple at their faces deserves a raise. Magrittes’ Surrealism The son of the man was matched.
From mole: Comfort gets little trust from other players and wastes quite a bit of money. She’s back in the crosshairs as a potential mole, though it’s not a great idea to bet entire fortunes on that answer.
Belgian educational quality once enjoyed international fame, but in 2023 patriots are best limited to chocolate or chips when they brag about their home country abroad. For example, there is little chance that the students of the Pima Community College in Arizona will quickly plunder their bank accounts after the bumbling guest lecture by Mol candidate Lancelot to set up an exchange program with a Belgian university.
Admittedly, that’s not entirely his own fault. During the first trial of the sixth episode, he is sent unprepared to the classroom to teach a lesson about Belgium. If half of the students subsequently pass a test about the subject matter, 3,000 euros will go into the group pot. Lancelot has a crucial position in the game, but the main responsibility seems to lie with Thomas and Comfort. They can look up the necessary information in the university library and pass on their knowledge to Lancelot remotely. There’s quite a bit wrong there. Thomas is constantly running around and brings a cartload of books, Comfort gives wrong answers because of that chaos.
Even Toos and Ruben, who get to know two questions thanks to a fruitful collaboration, cannot save the game. The majority of students fail the test. The stress of Lancelot, whose English sometimes sounds as if he received language lessons from the Welvaert family Home-grown, does little to help matters. Although he should also direct his frustration at the duo browsing the library. A position where the mole would perfectly ground.
During the second part of the episode, the saboteur gets a chance to share his or her enthusiasm candidly. The candidates are sitting separately in a car when their American driver suddenly turns around and greets them in Dutch. The mole whispers to him through an earpiece exactly what to say, which results in a spectacle that is as witty as it is surprising. Little new information emerges from the short conversations, but a little later it appears that the adventure with the mole’s accomplice continues during the second trial.
It takes place in a restaurant where the candidates see two piles of cards on the bar: one with positive amounts of money on it and one with negative amounts on it. The candidates and the mole’s supporter may turn over a card from their pile, the sum of both amounts ends up in the group pot or can be removed. They have to be careful not to draw a ‘stop card’, because then their turn expires.
It is a test that revolves more around luck than strategy, although it is special that the mole directs his accomplice on the spot. The saboteur will only open up about what the secret signal for those instructions is in a few weeks. Perhaps there will also be an explanation for the gameplay. Because the mole does not sabotage too eagerly in the second test and is satisfied with the status quo. Lancelot and Thomas do not bring in any money, Comfort takes 200 euros from the pot and the efforts of Ruben and Toos yield 100 and 600 euros respectively.
The best is saved for last in the sixth episode. The third test is very sharply portrayed and offers space for some delicious sabotage actions. Toos, Thomas and Lancelot drive around in a bus that contains a bomb. To defuse the explosive and earn 5,000 euros, they have to call on brand new agents from the local FBI team Comfort and Ruben. The ultimate goal is to discover exactly which wire to cut, but for that they have to work well together. And let that be exactly where the mole can cause chaos. Communication between the two teams is difficult and a lot of valuable time is lost. For example, Ruben and Comfort manage to answer enough quiz questions to get a correct robot photo of the bomber, but Lancelot and Thomas fail to link that description to a photo on the bus. The lack of clarity about who bears responsibility for the error shows once again how ingenious From Mol is put together, and then the final of the test has yet to come.
Ruben and Comfort try to drive under the bus with an electric toy car. That way they can see through a camera what color the thread is that the others have to cut. That seems to work for a while, until the wheels of the bus suddenly crush the toy. Both Toos and Ruben may be responsible for this, but they still seem to trust each other. When Comfort names the right color, Toos says he doesn’t believe her. The candidates on the bus then follow Ruben’s faulty advice and cut the wrong wire. The bomb explodes and the bet of 5,000 euros goes up in smoke.
Finally, the outcome of the elimination is very unexpected. In recent weeks, also in this newspaper, there seemed to be a kind of consensus that Thomas was the mole. His talent to take key positions again and again had to be a sign that he had been briefed in advance, testified to four winners from previous seasons in Het Laatste Nieuws. Not so, just a stone’s throw from the semi-finals, Thomas has to leave the game. An exciting and unexpected ending that changes everything and encourages the undersigned to do some self-reflection. “Never believe what the newspapers say,” said Gilles De Coster earlier this season. That is a bit exaggerated, but the accuracy of the predictions in this section may still require some work.
