Previously on RuPaul’s Drag Race: Condragulations to Juicy for winning the Lalaparuza Smackdown, an episode that seems increasingly designed to resist recapping. This week on RuPaul’s Drag Race: A finale that also doesn’t really lend itself to much in the way of recapping! But perhaps we’re being unfair here. It’s been known to happen a time or two before. After all, we’ve been recapping this show since episode one and then wrote a whole-ass book about it, so it’s entirely possible that we’ve simply run out of things to say about RuPaul’s Drag Race after all this time.
PSYCH. Of course we haven’t! First, let’s shoutout this lovely sequence paying tribute to iconic drag legends of the past. William Dorsey Swann is quite literally the mother of all drag queens. When we we do readings or Q&As for our book, we are asked every time about whether drag is inherently misogynistic. We’ve always said that it’s not for us to tell anyone whether or not they should be offended by how drag artists perform femininity, but we try to remind people that drag was created by trans women who had no other way to express their true selves. They didn’t even have a word for what they were. Theatrical traditions allowed trans women to be women, up on stage, for as long as the audience would let them.
We used to cry whenever we did readings about José Sarria during our book events; not because we’re so impressed with our writing, but because we were so inspired by the outrageous, self-loving defiance of her drag at a time when it was literally illegal to be queer and people were routinely arrested for it. She used to round up patrons of the Black Cat Bar where she performed and parade them down to the roundhouse where she led them all in a rousing round of “God Save Us Nelly Queens,” sung to the queer men and women locked up inside for the night.
We were especially pleased to see the legendary Mother Flawless Sabrina, aka Jack Doroshow, highlighted, since she was a Philly girl and major figure in the life of Harlow, whose biography we’re currently writing. The stories we could tell about her. She used to throw underground parties for queer Philly kids in the early sixties that routinely got raided by the cops. One octogenarian queen quipped to us “It cost five dollars to get into a Jackie party and fifty dollars to get out of one.” A queer hustler and entrepreneur like no other, who essentially created modern drag pageants, she probably did more to get the cross-dressing laws overturned than any single person. This concludes the overwhelmingly positive portion of this recap. Seriously, this was a lovely bit in the middle of a wildly over-produced episode and we really appreciated it. More of this, please, Drag Race.
The returning queens came out to serve some of their most sickening looks yet to a rapturous canned crowd. From the left: DD’s eleganza was a pleasant surprise and she looked very pretty. Vita served up pure flawlessness (and the best look of the season). Mia never looked so elegant. That midnight blue was gorgeous. Mandy Mango’s look was a little low-key and conventional. Loved Briar’s steampunk drag and mask. Discord kept it weird and we love that for her. Who else would come out on the main stage in a coat? Ciara finally managed the perfect balance of fierceness and grotesquerie, but her bird drag got shown up by Juicy’s big queer cockatoo. We’ll be honest: we thought Jane’s look was a bit of a letdown. Kenya’s Amazon warrior goddess drag was spectacular. Athena served up the Greek goddess fierceness we’ve come to expect from her.
We have the same issues with this finale as we’ve had for probably the last ten or so. All of the tension and creativity exits the show all at once and we’re thrust into this very canned, phony take on Drag Race, with obnoxious crowd noises that don’t actually match the small, rag-tag crowd of artificially excited people the camera pans to, and pre-packaged production numbers we never saw the queens rehearse or prepare for. The results are always very flat. If you’re not going to mount the finale in an actual theater, with a crowd that doesn’t look like they were paid to be there, come up with another format.
Even the baby picture moment has been stripped of any emotion. Instead of something intimate between Ru and the queens, the pictures are now slapped up on the screen in front of a crowd tasked with making as much noise as possible. Everything about Drag Race feels so perfunctory now.
Darlene did a wonderful job with her number, but we could’ve told you right there that she wasn’t going to make it to the final lip sync. This was cute and well-suited to her, but a comedy number was never likely to win the crown.
With Jane out of the competition, it seemed like everything was geared toward a Myki-Nini showdown. We don’t want to be mean here, because they’re both talented queens, but having a season come down to these two queens isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of the season itself. They’re fine. She’s fine. The number was cute and she did a good job with it. But we can’t claim to be excited by the prospect of who gets to win this time. Like we said, it all feels so perfunctory at this point. No stakes. Canned applause.
To our surprise, Nini ate that. We don’t necessarily think she’s quite a world class performer, but the material was well suited to her and she got probably the best song out of the three finalists.
Jane got her consolation prize and we can see her counting down the days until the next All-Star season. Also, they gave Miley Cyrus an award for some reason. LOTS of padding in this episode.
As expected, Darlene was quickly sent to off to live out her days on a farm, romping with other trash queens, while Myki and Nini prepared to face off in their bizarrely poorly chosen lip sync costumes. Like so much else about this episode/season, it was a perfectly serviceable attempt by both queens and we don’t think either of them was the clear and obvious winner.
So condragulations to Myki. She’s cute, charming and talented and she absolutely earned this. We don’t want to take a thing away from her win, but this season, while mildly entertaining, limped its way to a finale that nobody seems to care about.
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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