WARNING: This article contains spoilers from the sixth episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars. If you don’t wanna have it ruined for you like BOTH of us, go sip your tea else where, hunty.
WELL HOLY SHIT.
This week’s episode is a doozy. The handmaids returned, and we got right down to the nitty gritty of the whole bloody show. Not much leaves RuPaul and Michelle Visage with their jaws on the floor, and this week’s elimination left them absolutely speechless. Strap yourselves in, tighten your tuck, and fix your wig down with extra spirit gum, this is going to be a wild ride.
Courtney Fry is back to join regular rucapper Alasair Duncan again this week, after taking a slight sabbatical to escape from the city and stew over how the fuck Bebe Zahara Benet won last week. Oh and before we begin, please appreciate this masterpiece and 20/20 read on Trixie Mattel.
https://twitter.com/itgetsbedder/status/969380366636154881
Courtney Fry: Can I just say that this week’s episode was some of the BEST reality TV I’ve seen in a long, long time. I don’t know if it was my five-bottle grade wine hangover, but I wept at the end of this episode, and I wept hard. I felt like this season started to dip in quality. Last week’s episode plain sucked, I’m not sorry to say that. It felt forced and rushed, which I think helped this week’s episode stand out.
Alasdair Duncan: I agree with you that this was a great episode, probably the best of the season. This run of All Stars has been slightly lackluster so far – the challenges don’t seem as challenging as in years gone by, and the talent, much like Shangela‘s hair, has just been a little flat. (I’m sorry, Shangela Stans, donut come for me). It feels like VH1 maybe rushed this season into production to capitalise on the cultural moment that Drag Race is currently having, and I guess it worked, because ratings for the show have never been higher.
Still, quality-wise I wonder if they should have waited a bit longer to do another All Stars season, when they had a wider selection of queens. At this rate, All Stars 4 will go into production next week, featuring Ornacia, La Transbear, Kristin Chenoweth and the basketball player who barfed after Joslyn Fox made him over.
Courtney: So the whole Handmaid’s Tale arc climaxed in tonight’s episode. Alaska and Chad Michaels returned with eliminated queens in tow – the ones we expected; Aja, Morgan McMichaels and Chi Chi DeVayne. BUT then two more queens made their ru-turn for ru-venge.
Alasdair: Indeed, the first big twist this episode is that all the eliminated queens have returned to fight their way back into the competition, which was … exactly the twist in All Stars 2! Except in All Stars 2 we got the iconic visual of Alyssa Edwards staring daggers at Phi Phi O’Hara from behind a mirror, and here we just have … Thorgy Thor and Milk grumbling about their respective eliminations and squeezing all the drama they can out of their remaining screen time.
Courtney: I do love how this week’s episode was less focused on the challenge itself (even though it produced two of the best performances that runway has ever seen, I swear) and spent a lot more time going through the dynamics of the eliminated queens and the remaining All Stars.
Alasdair: That said, I think this episode’s challenge was the strongest so far this season, as the queens had to come up with their own characters and concepts and write their own song lyrics, and they pretty much uniformly nailed it. This challenge was the Drag Race we know and love. It reminded me of the hip hop challenge in Season 6, in a good way. But before we get ahead of ourselves …
Courtney: Can we just talk about how real everyone was in the workroom chat? My friend was watching with me and he leant over and said “wow this looks like a renaissance painting,” and you know what? He’s right. Look at this shit.
Alasdair: Honestly, I know the producers probably told the returning queens to go in on the remaining All Stars to stir up a bit of drama, but after listening to all of them bicker and justify their sometimes-questionable choices, this is the text I sent my group chat:
Just to recap (I mean, that’s the whole point of this exercise, but bear with me): Bebe is still acting like a giant baby and taking sole credit for the outfit that Aja helped her sew. Shangela is still beating the dead horse that is her beef with Thorgy and Trixie, and honestly, Thorgy is just lapping up the attention and egging them on like a kid yelling ‘FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!’ behind the tuckshop. Kennedy and Milk are still at each other’s throats and TBH they are both boring and both deserve to go home. Amidst all of this, Morgan is righteously – and maybe rightly – pissed that BenDeLaCreme sent her home, and DeLa seems shaken up about it, as she came here to compete in a drag competition, and didn’t want to be saddled with the responsibility of eliminating her sisters in the first place.
Courtney: Kennedy Davenport is seriously starting to get on my nerves with how negative she is about literally everything. I don’t want to spend too much time on it but she’s a real drainer for me personally.
Alasdair: Anyway, after this week’s workroom edition of The Increasingly Poor Decisions Of Thorgy Thor, we’re off to rehearse for the main challenge, where the queens will be lip syncing to lyrics they wrote themselves, in what is partially a tribute to 90s girl bands and partially a monument to RuPaul’s ego. The queens are in the studio with Adam Lambert, who I kinda feel might smell like the inside of a glove, but in a hot way? Is that a thing?
Anyway, we get to see the queens warbling off-key and tripping over their raps in the rehearsal segment, but that’s one of the oldest tricks in the Drag Race playbook, cuz that way we’ll be even more surprised when they get their shit together and give an amazing performance on the main stage. Speaking of …
Courtney: The performances this week were incredible, everyone brought 110% to the runway with their looks, everything about this episode was amazing and I’m still getting goosebumps thinking about it. I honestly think I need a rewatch because it’s genuinely an episode that embodies everything that we all love about Drag Race. Nothing about this episode sucked, and even Milk didn’t spoil it for me. If this episode was walking a NYC ball, it would get its tens in every category and leave with the grand prize.
Alasdair: This week’s main challenge, with the remaining queens facing off against the evictees as two rival girl groups, was great, and it gave the queens the chance to have some fun with their characters. It was totally weird of Trixie to base her girl group character IQ Kitty around a horny, sexually frustrated mathlete, but she looked cute as a button, and the whole performance totally worked.
As for the other highlights of the performance – Morgan’s Bimbo Kitty is pretty if a little uninspired, Aja’s Lil’ Banjee Kitty is high-energy and classic Aja, Thorgy’s Cardio Kitty has some fun physical comedy involving her … shall we say, puss? The standout tonight is once again BenDeLaCreme – her goth girl character is a completely new look for her, but she pulls it off flawlessy, and I can’t take my eyes off her the whole time she’s on stage, and as we later found out, she repurposed her Julie Andrews dress for this Goth Kitty number. Goddammit. There is nothing DeLa can’t do and she is so far ahead of the competition at this point that it’s basically embarrassing.
Courtney: The biggest shock here is BenDeLaCreme destroying yet another maxi-challenge and lip-sync, and then sending herself home. I just. I can’t. I cried at the point because she’s just dominated All Stars, a show that she was hotly rumoured to not even want to do in the first place.
Alasdair: I’d been hearing rumours about tonight’s big twist for a while – that BenDeLaCreme, faced with the prospect of sending yet another of her sisters home, would instead choose to let Morgan McMichaels back into the race, then gracefully exit the competition at the top of her game. There are some lingering questions following her elimination: Where did she get the White-Out that she used to write her own name on the lipstick? Was RuPaul’s expression of shock really genuine, given that Ru knows all that happens on Drag Race and probably knew about this decision well in advance?
https://twitter.com/kevinpokeeffe/status/969675215071461377
Courtney: DeLa goes out on top here – she’s won the challenge five out of six weeks, and three of those she’s gone on to win the lip-sync. She’s at least $25k up financially, and she recognised that she was ready to go, but there was no way that she’d get sent home by another queen (nor did she want to tank a challenge, because that’s just not how she works).
Alasdair: As Drag Race hierstorian Kevin O’Keeffe pointed out on Twitter, DeLa has now won the most challenges, across the board, of any queen who has competed in an All Stars season. She has seven total wins under her belt, compared with Alaska’s six.
https://twitter.com/kevinpokeeffe/status/969735096667332610
Courtney: It’s such a big play to change the format of the game like this, and I think Aja damn nearly shit herself at the shock.
Alasdair: By leaving the competition at this point, DeLa is definitely doing herself out of $100,000 in prize money, and a place in the Drag Race hall of fame, but as she points out herself, she never really wanted the title to begin with. She came, she saw, she conquered, then she left on her own terms. At this point, her exit also paves the way for Shangela (or maybe Trixie, but probably not) to forge ahead and win the competition.
Courtney: All hail BenDeLaCreme, the Patron Saint of RuPaul’s Best Friend Race. The winner of this season is going to pale in comparison to DeLa’s consistency and honesty to herself and to the drag community as a whole.
Alasdair: Whoever ends up wearing the crown at the end of this season, they’ll be in DeLa’s shadow. Her exit now means that the eventual winner of All Stars 3 will know that they’re a second-place getter. That’s gotta sting.
Courtney: Also Bebe’s still safe, the theory rings true for yet another week.
Don’t forget you can keep up to date with Drag Race every week over on Stan.
