We’re late and for that we apologize, but we have a really good excuse: we’re lazy and we were pretty wiped out after the Met Gala coverage. Okay, maybe that’s not a really good excuse, but it’s the one we’ve got. We’ll get these recaps back on a weekend schedule going forward. Now, let’s tear through these two episodes.
EPISODE 1: BREAK DANCIN’ 2 ELECTRIC RUGALOO
We’re just gonna throw out thoughts and observations as we go. These episodes are roughly 65% filler at this point anyway.
MORPHINE LOVE DION
Fun look, with a high concept that’s been beautifully interpreted for drag. The interesting thing about Morphine is that she plays the bitch, but only to a certain point. She backs down pretty quickly. It also sounds like she’s really been through it since we last saw her.
LUCKY STARZZZ
Love seeing Lucky’s weird-ass drag again, which Ru calls cosplay, in a tone that doesn’t sound particularly complimentary. We hope she’s here to snag cash and increase her booking fee because there just isn’t much chance of her winning, given the longstanding preferences of the show’s judges and producers.
MYSTYQUE SUMMERS
The original bitch from Chicago is unrecognizable, and we’re not just talking about her weight loss and makeover. In fact, her drag still suffers from looking a bit too off-the-rack, but she’s very clearly here to redeem herself and we hope she gets the chance. She tries to play off her history with Morgan, but it couldn’t be more obvious that those wounds have not entirely healed.
MORGAN MCMICHAELS
This look is awful. Sorry to be blunt about it, Morgan. We’re happy to see her again, to be honest. It’s nice to have not only senior queens in the mix, but ones who more or less have their PhDs in competing on Drag Race. She’s clearly strategic, but she’s also extremely camera-aware.
DAWN
Pussy has been considerably stepped up and she wants you to know it.
A’KERIA C. DAVENPORT
The most polished of the queens in this group, and considering her history, likely the season.
All-Stars is formulaic, in the sense that there’s a formula, but it changes every few seasons. The formula this time continues to be the bracket mode, which can be read charitably as a way to give each queen more time to shine or bitchily as a rather lazy way top produce a season of television, stuffing it with filler.
But we’re not total curmudgeons here. It’s fun seeing the queens reintroduce themselves or reconnect. As we said, certain hatchets are not entirely buried and it might be fun to see how that plays out, although it doesn’t seem likely that Mystique will be a finalist.
Once again, a bunch of queens born well after Ru’s pop culture obsessions had to grin their way through another goofy salute to them. Everyone was… okay. We’d rate Lucky and Mystique as the weaker ones, but we didn’t have strong thoughts as to who should be in the top.
The queens did their best with the necessary limitations imposed by a drag salute to LaToya Jackson, since she doesn’t exactly have a look book of iconic outfits to her name. A’keria’s look was fun, with a silly bent to it. Dawn came to slay, not play. Her looks are so much more elevated this time around and she’s showing an understanding that no matter how quirky and creative your drag may be, the judges on Drag Race are gonna want to see glam.
This is a lesson that Lucky hasn’t quite learned yet — or doesn’t care about. This is an okay attempt, but a drag interpretation of a stage costume should be more outrageous than the original. Morgan’s look was pretty much a flawless recreation.
Morphine’s showgirl homage was fabulous, but at this point, we’re starting to think that casting Mystique for this season is a cruelty. She’s clearly got a commitment to a kind of regular-lady drag and more power to her if that’s where her talents lie, but her drag is always going to look l0w-rent when standing next to queens in thousands of dollars of the best stagewear money can buy. Still, putting aside any question of money or drag styles, this is just a horribly unflattering look, right down to the matte black tights and chorus girl shoes.
Morgan and Dawn faced off for the lip sync as the top performers, and we have no issue with that showdown, although we would have given the win to Dawn over Morgan.
EPISODE 2: BAR QUEEN COUTURE
Everyone immediately got in their feelings over the point system, which is what it was designed to do, but in the end, everyone just handed out points to everyone else so no one went without one. Morphine seemed a little bent out of shape that her alliance attempts didn’t shake out as she might have liked, but again, she tends to back down from these things rather quickly.
Later, this happened.
We’ve always said that the mini-challenges should be in every episode and that they’re better off when the challenges are something dumb and silly. We’re eating those words now. On paper, a big-girl panties mini-challenge is a great idea, but they should’ve tested this one ahead of time. No one won and it wasn’t even all that funny watching them make the attempt.
In unrelated news, what the hell are some of you bitches wearing in the Werk Room?
The challenge was a typical DIY drag one, with the cute twist that each queen would be making a look for a specific type of bar.
There’s no longer any drama to be found in the Werk Room, so the episode was turned over to a lot of time watching the queens do their work. There’s certainly nothing wrong with depicting the creative process, but the show tends to limit how much of that you’re going to see because they don’t want to reveal too much of what the queens are working on before they hit the main stage. Raven and Ru came in briefly to pretend to be interested and we got the usual “I don’t know what I’m doing” moments, but for the most part, everything plodded along as expected. Do we sound bored? We’re trying not to.
Willow DAWN and A’keria were so obviously the top girls in this collection. If you showed us these looks without any context, we’d never have considered the idea that they were made on the fly instead of the result of weeks of work. Incredibly detailed, highly dramatic, pure drag — the both of them. It’s to A’keria’s credit that she was able to pull this together when she had such a rough time getting started.
Putting aside what Nina Garcia would refer to as the “taste issue,” Mystique’s looks are all so badly proportioned for her. That skirt is hellaciously unflattering and her love of dark matte tights is baffling. Morgan’s look was damn impressive, but A’keria and Dawn completely outdid her, so she was never really in contention for the win this week, although she might have been in a different group.
Morphine’s look was pretty bad. She didn’t have the best materials to choose from and she was obviously annoyed with the tropical bar brief she was handed, but ultimately, that’s how she decided to use the pile she was given and nothing about it is good. Luck could have been a contender for this challenge if she’d just done the one thing she most refused to do: edit herself. This look was wildly creative and fun, but she’s giving the judges way too much to look at. Simplify, girl. We know you won’t.
Dawn and A’Keria faced off for the lip sync, which A’keria handily won. While the episode-padding and relatively lazy challenge-planning hasn’t exactly kicked things off with a bang, it’s never a bad time watching a bunch of queens walk back into the competition and try to figure it out.
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: Paramount Plus]
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