'The Traitors Canada': Banished Traitor Melissa Best needs 'redemption'
The first Traitor has been removed from the game, but not before Dr. Nazila Dehghani was murdered
It didn't take long for Traitor Melissa Best, referred to as Melissa B on CTV's The Traitors Canada, to be banished from the show, with many contestants having suspicions about her from the very start.
Catch up on The Traitors Canada on Crave
"I am feeling like I need some redemption, honestly," Best, a realtor from St. John’s, told Yahoo Canada.
"It was really nice to watch everything play back so that I could see what was going on behind the scenes that I couldn't really piece together when I was in the game. Like when my name first came up, I was floored. I didn't know how people could be talking about me, I didn't know what was going on. So to be able to peek behind the camera a little bit and see that from the audience's perspective, and what other people were saying and why they were suspicious of me, helps kind of fill in a lot of the blanks."
In Episode 3 of The Traitors Canada, before we saw Best be banished from the competition, Dr. Nazila Dehghani, a dentist/doctor of dental surgery from Newmarket, Ont., was murdered by Traitors Best, Kuzie Mujakachi and Mike D’Urzo.
Dehghani revealed that right at the first roundtable, just after the Traitors were selected by host Karine Vanasse, Dehghani had suspicions about Best.
"I think I'm more of an intuitive person and I'm actually pretty good at picking out liars," Dehghani said. "Melissa just changed."
"I knew that the opportunity was right, when the Traitors were chosen, just to really scan the room because that's time to kind of get a hint on [who the Traitor might be]. ... Her eyebrows were going up a lot. She completely changed."
'I would have changed every single thing I did'
So while Best maybe wasn't the most covert Traitor in the game, she also admitted that she would have made significant changes in her strategy. That would include pushing the other Traitors to agree to murder Big Brother Canada Season 5 winner and poker player Kevin Martin.
"I would have changed every single thing I did," Best said. "If I had my time back, I would have murdered Kevin immediately, he would have been the first to go."
"We did talk about it a lot, but I didn't push it to the way that I needed to. ... I kept saying, do less talking and more listening, and then I would get in front of people and ... I just would talk and talk and talk. That's my personality, I'm just a talkative person. I would have tried to control that a little bit better."
Best explained that the first murder in the competition, Survivor winner Erika Casupanan, was done to "make an impact" with the Traitors targeting a "heavy hitter," someone who they believed would be a "problem" down the road in the game.
When it came to murdering Dehghani, the strategy there was simply confusion.
"Somebody who nobody would ever think was a Traitor," Best said.
"We knew that Nazila is not going to get banished at the roundtable, nobody was looking at her. She was very, very clearly a Faithful. So we just needed to get her out, because she wasn't going to get herself out."
But Dehghani thinks that her proximity to the Traitors, specifically Best and D’Urzo, made her a target.
"When you're watching the first two episodes, you'll notice Mike and Melissa with me all the time, in the car, they were my teammates in the [second competition]," Dehghani said. "We were together almost the entire time, so I think I was more in their face."
"My idea was to, especially for the first couple of roundtables, just kind of stay quiet and be in the background, and not be noticed. But unfortunately, I was hanging out with two of the three Traitors most of the time, so that didn't go well."
Kuzie Mujakachi is 'a great actress'
Both Best and Dehghani are in agreement that when it came to D’Urzo and Mujakachi as Traitors, they were both particularly discreet about their position in the game.
"One of my other regrets is that myself and Kuzie didn't really meet up and talk during the day times," Best said. "I think that she was playing a really, really great game, really under the radar."
"Her and Mike are doing great going undetected. ... I think that ultimately, they did what they needed to do to make sure that they're keeping their game going strong."
"I think if a Traitor had to win, I was rooting for Kuzie, because it didn't even dawn on me," Dehghani said in a separate interview. "She's a great actress."
Catch up on The Traitors Canada on Crave
Where to watch 'The Traitors Canada'
The Traitors Canada airs Mondays at 10:00 p.m. ET/PT on CTV, CTV.ca, and the CTV app.
You can also catch up on episodes on the Crave streaming platform.