You know the drill: 10 players, one of them the mole. As Coop puts it, "The mole is working for us."

Coop is using the word "us" loosely.

Time was that TV hosts were like Alex Trebek. They knew everything. Guys like Walter Cronkite actually ran news operations. Things are different now. Dan Rather can call an election wrong twice in the same night and plead ignorance. He was just saying what he was told to say.

Coop is the latest of a new breed of TV hosts. Like Regis Philbin and Julie Chen, the lovable ditz from "Big Brother," the show's producers keep him in the dark as much as possible.

He's just this guy who wanders around mumbling and tries to look as if he knows what's happening, when he really doesn't.

But it makes us feel good that he's there. Coop used to be an ABC News guy, just as Chen used to be a CBS News gal. (For all we know she still is; we don't really keep up with what CBS's "The Early Show" is doing these days.)

He gives the show a little bit of that ABC News gravitas.

But even Chen enunciated.

Coop is still mumbling and we're still in Spain as the penultimate episode of "The Mole" opens. The promos for the show said the contestants would be in four countries. They've been in France and Spain so far; we've been waiting for the next big trip, but now we think the producers are including both the States, where the show started seven weeks ago, and Monaco, which the contestants briefly visited, in their country count.

Is Monaco technically a country? It's the size of an average U.S. shopping mall, doesn't have its own police force and has become such a haven for money laundering that France is about to take away what country privileges it has.

Anyway, where were we?

Oh, yeah: And then there were four! There are three 30-ish kids -- Steve, the undercover cop; Kathryn, the legal lecturer; and Jim, the lawyer turned helicopter pilot -- and one old guy, Charlie, who's a retired cop and kind of a flaming asshole.

Charlie has girl trouble, big time -- he got into regular screaming matches with some of his since-departed distaff fellow contestants. Last week, he called Kate, the cheerful mom, a "fat bitch."

Tonight we see that he's got boy trouble as well. He makes a reference to Jim, who's gay and has unbearably long sideburns, as being "fruity."

Coop says he needs two people who can count up to 751. He ends up with Charlie and Steve, who have to herd a big flock of sheep into a pen. The pair are shown three dogs -- a German shepherd, a sheepdog and a mutt -- and told that one of them is a trained sheepdog. They're allowed to choose one to help.

Steve says sheepdogs don't really herd sheep, and chooses the mutt.

Wrong! Turns out they should have picked the German shepherd.

So the two of them spend a lot of time wandering around shouting at sheep. It seems as if Charlie's being deliberately unhelpful. But "The Mole" is edited so poorly that you don't ever really get a sense of what the pair were doing or how, eventually, they get the sheep into the pen. For all we can tell, it could have been magic.

Or Coop and a crook.

Or vicious crocodiles lurking around the sun-kissed outback.

Sorry, wrong reality show.

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