Better late than never, areweright? RuPaul’s Drag Race came screaming back for its 18th season and there was no way the OG Drag Race recappers were going to let it pass without comment, so let’s get down to it. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.
ATHENA DION
The look – as well as the entire persona – is extremely polished. She clearly has the goods and she clearly feels she should remain at the top of every challenge. We’ll see if she can manage it.
KENYA PLEASER
This is cute and she comes off pretty funny, in a surprisingly nerdy sort of way. From the few shots of it we saw, her Lizzo drag is pretty amazing.
NINI COCO
Some of the queens were a little bitchy about Nini’s homemade entrance look, but they inadvertently revealed their misunderstanding of the kind of drag this show rewards. We’ve made this point more and more in the latter seasons as girls walked through that doorway in some incredibly overwrought drag: the judges want to see clarity of concept in drag, not piles of ideas that are hard to parse. Nini gets it. This is simple, maybe a bit cliched, but super high impact. Her training as an engineer seems to inform how she approaches her drag.
JANE DON’T
We like to think that Michelle Visage would have read her for filth for sporting those white tights, which look kind of awful on her. She’s a self-described funny lady with a Bette Midler tattoo and she comes off like a hoot so far.
DISCORD ADDAMS
This is what we mean by overwrought drag. There’s way too much going on here. You can have the massive spiked ball on a chain OR you can sport six different plaids OR you can go for leopard fur, but if you try and make all three work in the same look, you’re just a pile of ideas. Killer beat, though. Not to be all Michael Kors “Who is this woman and where is she going,” but really, what is this character? It’s sort of punk, sort of high fashion, but it just feels very confused and muddled to us
MIA STARR
She’s one of Athena’s sisters and the Florida resemblance jumped out. This is a fun, well executed character look. You know exactly who and what she’s parodying at a single glance.
DD FUEGO
And now for one of those critiques that’s a bit Drag Race-specific, in the sense that it may not matter in the larger world of drag but tends to matter within the sweatbox of this competition: she looks exactly the same in drag as she does out of drag. Like we said, this doesn’t necessarily apply to all drag, but Drag Race definitely prioritizes the transformational quality of drag and we’re afraid if she doesn’t mix up her beat a bit more, she’s going to get called out for it.
JUICY LOVE LONDON
She’s Athena’s granddaughter, which means everybody’s gotta be watching out for those Florida bitches. She’s utterly adorable, she knows it, and she’s not above using it.
VITA VONTESSE STARR
We have to say, this wasn’t the best sort of entrance look for her because it tended to obscure just how fabulous her drag can be. It’s a great look overall, but we wouldn’t have recommended it for her introduction. It’s a bit much. We guess we’re coming down hard on the idea that entrance looks should be introductory and thus, relatively simple.
BRIAR BLUSH
On the one hand, we’ve been doing this recapping gig so long that we just can’t bother getting worked up over someone declaring themselves the bitch of the season. After seventeen seasons of recaps, we can’t even remember some of the people we once claimed were the greatest villains in Drag Race herstory. In other words, go ahead and do your Mistress rerun, but it’ll get little more than a shrug out of us. Being cunty in drag is about as interesting as being pretty in drag. Anyway, this look is cute.
MANDY MANGO
We want to support a Philly queen, since so few of them have made it to the show, but we’re afraid we cringed at the sight of her. The nurse schtick is very cute, but the drag comes off haphazard and sloppy.
CIARA MYST
This is what we mean by “pile of ideas” drag. It’s just too much. And yes, we realize that technically, there’s really no such thing as “too much” when it comes to drag, but there is definitely such a thing on Drag Race.
DARLENE MITCHELL
Cute, but no one should be walking through that door looking like this in a post-Trixie world. There’s nothing wrong with being a countrified queen, but this is very stale.
MYKI MEEKS
Sweet, funny and cute. The entrance look is meh.
For some reason, screaming seemed to be the theme of the episode, as the queens were tasked with turning the lights on by screaming and then by having a screaming photo session. We don’t expect Drag Race to make a ton of sense and we do expect it to be aggressively stupid when it wants to be, but this whole thing left us wondering if they’re running out of ideas. Kenya “won” as the best screamer, whatever that meant. For the main challenge, the queens were given a bunch of runway leftovers and tasked with making a new look.
Category Is: Reclaim, Renew, Rejoice! ✂️✨ Which lewk is your fave? #DragRace pic.twitter.com/RTbEkGyDWX
— RuPaul’s Drag Race (@RuPaulsDragRace) January 3, 2026
Ciara’s look is impressive in the sense that it’s a lot and we wouldn’t call any of it terribly executed, but the design is all over the place and it’s kind of ugly.
Honestly, we expected more from Athena. This is cute, but it feels pretty stale. Granted, it’s all made out of leftovers, but still. We thought she’d be pulling off something more grandiose. Then again, she needed help in the Werk room.
It was bad, and to her credit, Kenya absolutely knew it. We think she did a bad job of selling it, however. She should have gone for a much more polished sort of look from the neck up.
Between the seventeen seasons of Drag Race we’ve recapped and the 15 we did for Project Runway, we’ve seen more paper dresses than a gynecologist and we’re here to declare that this is easily the very best iteration we’ve ever seen. Nini’s a threat.
We were a bit puzzled by the judges’ collective love for this look. While the construction and use of materials is to commendable, we can’t say it’s a particularly pretty or fabulous look. That yellow and pink color combo doesn’t look great on Jane and the style comes off a bit frumpy. Impressive sewing skills, but we’d have thought the judges would find this dowdy. Instead, she was top three.
It’s funny. Discord entered the Werk room in a look that had way too much going on and here, she’s serving a look that has way too little. It’s a fuzzy bathing suit. The only thing that distinguished her efforts was her comically bad walk, which you just know the judges are going to call out soon.
Mia’s look was impressively rendered, but the proportions were odd. She wasn’t joking when she said she was here for some big back drag.
Come the hell on. This should have had DD tearfully begging for her life as one of the bottom three. Granted, there were three that were worse than this, but we miss the days when Ru used to lose her shit over a parade of bad work. DD described it as a combination of Moschino and Galliano and we can’t tell if she’s delusional or just an impressive bullshitter.
That cute-as-hell mug saved Juicy’s ass this time. Granted, it helped that she sold the hell out of this look, but at the end of the day, there just wasn’t all that much to sell. The judges put her in the bottom.
This look is the entire reason why we thought Vita’s entrance look was a mistake. The maximalist drag is great, but she really shines when she’s giving you pure pageant queen. The glamour is off the charts and the execution here is insanely good. She was a top girl.
The corset is impressively rendered and the design is pretty cute, but it looks like half a costume. Briar, you’ve got to back that bitchery up with something impressive.
Bitch, you’re a mess. We say that with Philly love. She rightly wound up in the bottom.
Darlene’s look was fairly well executed, but the concept was pretty stale. That seems to be an issue with more than a few of these looks.
Credit where it’s due: We’re never going to top Ru’s “Arya Stark for Ethan Allen Home Furnishings.” Granted, Ru has a writing staff.
Vita and Nini faced off for a surprisingly aggressive winning lip sync while the bottom girls were told they could stay another week. Can’t say we disagreed with the top choices. We can understand why the show wants to spare any of its queens the humiliation of being Pork Chopped, and it wouldn’t be a T Lo Drag Race recap if we didn’t point out for the thousandth time that Drag Race is more of a variety show than a legitimate competition, but some of those entries were bad-bad and someone needed to go home.
Nini took the win this week, and we think it had more to do with her design than her lip sync, although she held her own impressively against Vita. Like we said, she’s a threat. All in all, a perfectly okay premiere episode, which is probably the best we can expect in the show’s 18th season.
Girl, if you ever thought we were going to stop plugging our book, you weren’t paying attention: Legendary Children: The First Decade of RuPaul’s Drag Race and the Last Century of Queer Life, a New York Times “New and Notable” pick, praised by The Washington Post “because the world needs authenticity in its stories,” and chosen as one of the Best Books of The Year by NPR is on sale wherever fine books are sold (like at this link)! It’s also available in Italian and Spanish language editions, darlings! Because we’re fabulous on an INTERNATIONAL level.
[Still Credit: MTV]
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