The Mole is: coming up after this commercial break

The Mole ended its Batman Begins season tonight, and I enjoyed the finale as much as I have the rest of this middling season. If that sounds like damning with faint praise, get out of my head. But it's not my fault The Mole airs on the same night as the summer's most glorious show The Middleman. Find out who the mole is after the jump and about three commercial breaks with ambiguous reaction shot teasers.

The mole is Craig! (I think my tactic of propping up the lead beneath neon lights could teach reality television producers a thing or two about satisfying their viewers.)

My personal choice for the mole has been Mark for some time. How did I come to such a ridiculous conclusion? One day about two months ago (give or take), I realized that Mark was the only one I was positive was not the mole, given his adamant desire to win, his obsessive note-taking, and his general competence. Seconds later came the realization that Mark, then, had to be the mole.

When we got down to Mark, Craig, and Nicole, my suspect was still in the running. I knew I was right. Nicole was screaming for attention from Day 1, which isn't necessarily a bad strategy since that's the same reason everyone wrote her off. But I had a hunch the producers wouldn't go with someone so obvious.

That reasoning also discounted Craig, who I assumed was too obvious from the very first mission. On top of being conveniently absent when the rest of the contestants' notebooks were burned, the final exemption was at his favorite site in the city! And it wasn't just obvious to me: the final two episodes before the reunion were riddled with contestants observing how much money Craig has lost them and how he was their prime suspect. As we learned in the finale, that's because everyone from Paul on up to Mark, who won, knew Craig was the mole!

So yeah, I 'm a little deflated by the anticlimax. I got my hopes up that the producers were aiming for a surprise reveal. And at this point, I would have considered Nicole a surprising mole, simply because of how obnoxious she was.

Nicole went through a tremendous change somewhere along the way. She started the game so annoyingly that I wanted her gone, but about halfway through, her humor started to show. She could still be a bit of a shrew, especially around Paul, but she was also a smart, hilarious competitor. I appreciated how proud and sad she was to be the final girl. She was playing a character in the beginning (and occasionally thereafter), but toward the end we got to see more of the real Nicole, as her game face dropped, and I enjoyed having her around.

I'm excited for Mark to enjoy his $420,000 though. His motivations were a little Lisa Frank, but it's nice to see hard work and determination pay off every so often. Of course, we learned how much luck played into his win, tying with the executed player three times over the course of the game! Mark's win this summer is a microcosm of the American dream. Yeah, I went there. The Hills is Aristophanes for the 21st century. What are you gonna do about it?

While I wasn't piddling in my panties (to steal a phrase from Daniel Vosovic) about the Craig reveal, I can't help but admire his game-playing. Even though I'm just an audience member, I'm a little honored to have a mole that was so surreptitious while such a likable guy. Mark was right: Craig cloaked himself in affability.

I'm not sure I want to see any more of this show. I liked The Mole in the past because the games were more interactive or at least so foreign to my mundane life that I got to play vicariously (remember when they had a team navigating other players through an abandoned town via walkie talkie while other players shot at them from rooftops for an exemption?). This year, whenever they had riddles or number games that could feasibly be played by viewers at home, the producers gave us no time or didn't show us (as when they revealed the answer to the doublet before even the players got it, which is as ridiculous as if Jeopardy subtitled the answers instead of letting us shout at our television sets).

You could argue The Mole is more a reality show than a game show, and the game shouldn't steal focus from dissecting personalities and behaviors. In which case I definitely don't want to see future seasons of The Mole. If I can't stroke my ego by correctly predicting the winner, then I want to do so by out-solving the players. "I could so win this show!" needs to be my nightly refrain. Think on it, ABC.

I'm not sure what the consensus is on Jon Kelley's work as host, but I found him generally awful. He just doesn't have the charming ease of Anderson Cooper, and frankly, I don't see what's so important that Andy can't come back to his roots for a month of filming.

But barring the return of the youngest silver fox this side of the asteroid belt, I'm content to be done with The Mole. I have no idea about its ratings, but my guess is ABC will bring it back next summer to fill time between Wipeout promos (there, I've now referenced one metric assload of reality shows in this post). And for all my gripes, I'll be there. And for the fourth time (no joke, and I didn't watch the second celebrity season), I will predict the eventual winner is actually the mole.