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Normally, I wouldn't invest any time into trying to find an objective means of identifying our Mole. After all, there are no hard-and-fast rules the saboteur has to play by (if there were, it'd be much easier to track him or her down). But now that Kristen is gone, I'm at a loss as to who the Mole really is, so I'm desperate enough to try just about anything.

Over the Falls
(For this task, we know Marcie didn't put any money in the bags belonging to Nicole, Kristen, Bobby, and Liz. I'm assuming Craig was her fifth, meaning the other six players all had money in their bags and the opportunity to add cash to the pot.)
Alex - $0 out of $10,000
Clay - $10,000 out of $10,000
Mark - $10,000 out of $10,000
Paul - $0 out of $10,000

Crusoe
(For this task, it's worth noting that we are shown Marcie bringing back both the Bible and the goat for the appraisers. It's not clear who brought the musket and obviously the mission was a team task, but Marcie really brought more money to the table than Alex/Clay/Craig.)
Alex - $15,000 out of $25,000 (team)
Clay - $15,000 out of $25,000 (team)
Craig - $15,000 out of $25,000 (team)
Mark - $15,000 out of $15,000 (team)

Race to the Summit
Alex - $0 out of $35,000 (team)
Clay - $0 out of $35,000 (team)
Craig - $0 out of $35,000 (team)
Mark - $0 out of $35,000 (team)
Nicole - $0 out of $35,000 (team)
Paul - $0 out of $35,000 (team)

When Pigs Fly
(For this task, I'm dividing up earnings into two parts. The first portion of the task involved finding the pigs, up to $50,000 worth. The first numbers indicate how many pigs each player helped bring back to the arena, if they were involved in it. The second portion of the task involved actually getting those pigs safely into the arena. The second set of numbers indicates what each player contributed to that part of the mission, if they were involved in it.
When deducing totals, I averaged together the player's performance on the first part of the mission and the second part of the mission to obtain an earnings amount.)
Alex - $26,000 out of $50,000 (team)
Clay - $18,000 out of $50,000 (team)
Craig - $0 out of $50,000 (team)
Mark - $18,000 out of $50,000 (team)
Nicole - $26,000 out of $50,000 (team)

Alex - $28,000 out of $44,000 (team)
Craig - $28,000 out of $44,000 (team)
Nicole - $28,000 out of $44,000 (team)
Paul - $28,000 out of $45,000 (team)

Fruit of the Luge
Alex - $2,000 out of $14,000 (team)
Clay - $0 out of $14,000 (team)
Craig - $0 out of $14,000 (team)
Mark - $14,000 out of $14,000 (team)
Nicole - $2,000 out of $14,000 (team)
Paul - $10,000 out of $14,000 (team)

Dress Code
Alex - $5,000 out of $5,000
Clay - $0 out of $5,000
Craig - $5,000 out of $5,000
Mark - $0 out of $5,000
Nicole - $5,000 out of $5,000
Paul - $5,000 out of $5,000

Midas Rush
Alex - $9,000 out of $25,000 (team)
Clay - $6,000 out of $25,000 (team)
Craig - $9,000 out of $25,000 (team)
Mark - $9,000 out of $25,000 (team)
Nicole - $6,000 out of $25,000 (team)
Paul - $9,000 out of $25,000 (team)

Who Said That
Alex - $0 out of $2,000
Clay - $2,000 out of $2,000
Mark - $2,000 out of $2,000
Nicole - $0 out of $2,000
Paul - $0 out of $2,000

All for One
Alex - $5,000 out of $5,000
Clay - $5,000 out of $5,000
Craig - $5,000 out of $5,000
Mark - $5,000 out of $5,000
Nicole - $5,000 out of $5,000
Paul - $5,000 out of $5,000

Travelers
Alex - $0 out of $10,000 (team)
Clay - $0 out of $10,000 (team)
Mark - $0 out of $10,000 (team)
Nicole - $0 out of $10,000 (team)
Paul - $0 out of $10,000 (team)

Total
Alex - $63,000 out of $178,000
Clay - $56,000 out of $181,000
Craig - $48,000 out of $156,000
Mark - $73,000 out of $171,000
Nicole - $45,000 out of $143,000
Paul - $57,000 out of $151,000

Clearly Nicole has made the least money of anyone in the group, but she's also had the fewest opportunities to make money. It might be more accurate to analyze it in terms of what opportunities these players have really had to contribute to the pot, in which case you need to look at the percentages each player has contributed, based on the money it's been possible for them to rack in:

Alex - 35.39%
Clay - 30.94%
Craig - 30.77%
Mark - 42.69%
Nicole - 31.47%
Paul - 37.75%

Here's what this says to me. Mark is definitely not our Mole. He's made by far the most money of anyone in the game, and he hasn't had as many opportunities to make that money as half of these chumps have. Alex has actually made less of his opportunities than two other players in the game, but the fact of the matter is that he's made the most money besides Mark, and he's just looking like a very strong contribution to the pot at this point. Paul is looking strong too, but he's added less money to the pot than the other contributors (I'm not counting either Nicole or Craig as "contributors"), so he's still in contention to be the Mole, in my opinion.
Clay and Craig are clearly strong Mole contenders. Neither has added the lowest amount of money to the pot, but they've been the most useless in the overall scheme of things.
Nicole likes playing her part and she has indeed contributed less money than anyone else, but she's actually not the biggest saboteur in the game at this point, with both Clay and Craig having done more real damage than she has.

I'm glad I did this, because now I can be pretty damn positive Mark is not the Mole (not that I thought he could be anyway), and I can keep a closer watch on Clay, who I hadn't noticed sabotaging the pot as much as he actually has.

hotchiemothcie wrote:

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I think it's nearly impossible to create an objective ledger of the players' contributions to the pot, since people always incorporate their own biases into what actions made or lost money.. What an objective list can't manage to do is take into account the subjective arguments for what constitutes an honest effort to add money and what is sabotage.

I agree. Like I said, under normal circumstances, I wouldn't bother, but now that my leading Mole candidates are all gone, I'm willing to turn to anything to try to figure this out.

This brings up a good question. What if Mark is the Mole? What does that say for him and even more importantly, for the game?

I think Mark has made a lot of proactive moves to earn money where he needn't have. If he's the Mole, I think someone involved in production needs to let him know that he's been far too productive thus far, and needs to start tanking these tasks quickly. Because in my opinion, there may be no real guidelines for the Mole to follow, but they should not be the most beneficial player on the team when everything's said and done. That just goes against the spirit of the game. If this show wraps up and Mark is our Mole having done what he's done, I think the set-up will have been a bit of a failure and completely unfair for the players involved.

The way I see it, Mark got 15k out of 25k on the first challenge. It doesn't matter if he wasn't given the items. The fact is, he didn't need to sabotage too much because Paul/Ali sucked at the timer and the scavengers weren't finding the items.

Mark earned 15K out of 15K because there was no possible way for him to make more than 15K for the group. I did not factor in parts of tasks where money was available if the players did not participate in it. In my humble opinion, it's the Mole's job to sabotage the tasks he's involved in, not to simply sit back and let the other players sink their own ship. Sure, if a lot of failure is occurring, maybe the Mole can take a day off and let things transpire without his direct interference. But in general, that's not the game he's supposed to be playing.

In "When Pigs Fly," Mark may not have lost money in the launching, but he caused his group to arrive late, and then he tried to get the group to just fling pigs, not caring if they survived or not, just so they wouldn't have leftover pigs.

Mark's group arrived after the other two, but it was early enough to shoot off all the pigs his group brought back. And honestly, I agreed with him on how stupid it would have been to have any pigs left over when the shooting was done.

He's a competitive person by nature, but he's lost some money.

Absolutely. They all have. It's rare when you get a player in this game who goes far without having screwed things up several times over the course of the season (Erik von Detten and maybe Bribs are the only ones I can think of off the top of my head).

42%? That's not a lot.

No, but that 42% figure is attributing an awful lot of possible money-earning to him. I mean, I'm saying he could have made a possible $25,000 on the Midas Rush task, but really, it would have been close to impossible to carry that many bricks. And besides, our past pots have generally been a little over 50% of the total possible pot value, right? And that's with the late-game tasks factored in, where there are a lot of easy opportunities to earn large sums of money. So Mark isn't really that far off from what's normally expected of a Mole player. What he's far off from is what's expected of the Mole himself.