Love or money? It’s an old question that The Traitors winner Harry just answered very clearly indeed.

Settling into tonight’s finale, as hotly anticipated as any television event I can remember, the nation was unquestionably rooting for Harry – cute as a button, sharp as a tack, and ruthless as a Bond villain. His character arc couldn’t have been more satisfying if it had been workshopped by Shakespeare, Ovid and Chaucer themselves.

Somehow, he’d made it to the final with no one but canny Jaz any the wiser; sweet Mollie, least suspicious of all. All of this only made Harry’s final betrayal more astonishing. Following enough plot twists to fill a library, we all got what we were hoping for – in short, boy done good by doing bad.

Cast your mind back to before we saw the king crowned: the series’ final challenge. Chauffeured by helicopter to a picturesque stretch of Scottish coastline, the five finalists – Jaz, Evie, Andrew, Harry and Mollie – were tasked with tracking down canisters full of bonus cash en route to the “traitor’s ship,” where they had to raise its flags.

So far, so farfetched – but although the Go Ape-esque assault courses are normally the part of the episode where I zone out, something about the tension of this one highlighted what makes The Traitors so irresistible. No matter that later, these people will all tear each other to shreds around a fancy table – Traitors or Faithfuls, everyone’s fighting for the same prize fund, and that breeds fellow feeling; counterintuitively, that united interest in money makes for stakes higher than just financial. In order to win, a traitor has to put all of that aside.

As the contestants piled back home to end the game once and for all, Andrew’s anxieties, Harry’s masterplan, and Mollie’s agonisingly pure heart, were all jostling for room at the round table. Evie took the floor first – and although Jaz took the opportunity to begin a gentle takedown of Harry, reaching back to the show’s earliest weeks to throw suspicion at his door, votes were split between Evie and Andrew; ultimately, Evie was banished.

Throughout, Jaz has been almost preternaturally alert to the deception happening around him, in a way that puts his fellow faithfuls to shame; a kind of traitor truffle pig, if you like (I do). With an eye on Andrew, following an earlier abrupt attempt to throw Harry under the bus, Jaz was right on the money again – alas, it proved too little too late.

After Andrew’s dramatic public betrayal of Harry backfired, seeing him voted out just minutes later, the remaining three contestants voted on what to do. Mollie and Harry voted to end the game; with Jaz – Cassandra! – voting to banish again, you could have cut the air in my sitting room with a knife. “It’s not you?” mouthed Mollie over the table at Harry. “It’s not me.” It was.

With Harry and Jaz unsurprisingly voting for each other, it all came down to Mollie. “I don’t think either of you are traitors, but I’ve trusted Harry for a while,” she said as she revealed her vote, sealed her fate, and broke the nation’s heart.

When Harry betrayed Paul, it was like Julius Cesar being stabbed in the back; when he pulled the sword from the stone in last night’s challenge, it was like the story of King Arthur; when newly-recruited Ross lashed out at the traitors who off-ed his secret mum Diane, there was a distinctly Hamlet-y slant. And is there anything more camply Agatha Christie than what is essentially a parlour game in a stately home?

While of course all of these things are incidental, there’s no denying that The Traitors packs all the literary punch of a novel or a play. Its core pleasure, watching some people lie to other people who assume they’re telling the truth, is pure dramatic irony – who knew that annoying term you learn in GCSE English would come in so delightfully handy?

From English Lit to Drama, we have crowned a truly treacherous king. All hail the original traitor, who held his nerve till the end and emerged victorious – forget the Oscars furore, in Harry we’ve got a real winner on our hands. His leading lady, faithful Mollie, proved his perfect tragic foil.