Now that is an episode of reality TV. This episode of Drag Race is produced within an inch of its life, with both the producers and editors working overtime to make sure all the pieces align perfectly for the most dramatic ending possible. And also … the queens made it possible for them by playing into the story line so vigorously that, by the end of it, I’d gasped multiple times.
The claws come out on all sides this week, most notably with Jewels and Arrietty, but really just about everyone gets in on it at some point. Notably, the two who don’t get in there are the two win-less queens, Lydia and Lana, who clearly feel an impetus to simply get down to work, and their eventual success just adds to the intensity. Between the topsy-turvy placements and the demonic energy coming from just about everyone else, the episode manages to enliven a season that was trending stale. And it will have repercussions moving forward: Suddenly, Butthole has a path to the final four if she can take it, which would mean one of the five main contenders could go home earlier than expected. And if one of them can go home earlier than anticipated, then who’s to say it won’t happen next week, given that Lana did well for the first time? I still think the most likely scenario is that Lana goes home next week (sue me), but now it’s not preordained in the way it once was. She can fight back. Season 17 still has some life in her yet.
Let’s run through the fights, starting with the big one: Jewels versus Arrietty. It’s amazing how much had to happen for this plot to get off the ground: First, it had to be the roast; second, Arrietty had to have made it this far despite being sent home early and being terrible in every comedy challenge; third, Jewels had to have won last challenge; and then, finally, the mini-challenge had to have been bullshit so they had to have the previous challenge winner decide the order. And none of that could have been planned for this story line. But then Jewels decides to get shady with the order, and we’re off to the races.
And here’s the thing: I do think Jewels is shady with the ordering. If things had played out as they typically do, with the usual players doing well/poorly, it would really only benefit her. But also: It’s true that the ordering never really matters that much to the judges. Yes, Jewels screwed Arrietty over a bit by putting her after Onya, and, yes, her own positioning would imply that Arrietty will do badly. But also … of course Arrietty is gonna do a bad job! She is maybe the worst comedy performer to make it this far in the competition ever. From my perspective, it seems like the challenge is so far over Arrietty’s head that the queen is grasping at straws to feel anything except overwhelming anxiety and anger.
And that’s also how she commits the most dastardly move I’ve seen in a long time: Stealing some of Jewels’s jokes to throw her off. Look, it’s a competition, but Jewels making a shady running order is not the same as this. The running-order gag is well within the bounds of previously established competition (Ellie Diamond, this is your legacy), but joke stealing is new. Ultimately (and I’m jumping ahead to the performance here), from the show’s edit, it seems like Jewels gets thrown off early in the set by one of her jokes that Arrietty stole, bombing and floundering the rest of her set. Again: That could just be an edit. But it’s also the story that the show presented to me, and as such I will respond, in turn, to the story I received: What an epic! Arrietty being so bad at comedy that she doesn’t even try to do well but instead manages to drag Jewels down to the bottom with her through bad sportsmanship is gripping TV. And, later, when they have to lip sync, it’s the kind of even the lip sync for your life was created to give. Who knew that an episode with Arrietty, a queen who has literally already been told to sashay away, going home could be such good TV?
The intensity of the episode is supported on all sides. For starters, there’s the fact that Arrietty is joined in Jewels hatred by Lexi, a queen who cannot stop sabotaging herself. She gets exactly the placement she wants (last), but gets completely thrown off by Suzie going right before her. Suzie, it turns out, is not just somebody who rubs Lexi the wrong way, but someone whose presence (specifically, her schooling, it seems) gets at all of Lexi’s insecurities. She goes ballistic in the Werk Room on Jewels for putting Suzie before her and, later in the performance, gets completely thrown off by a pretty par-for-the-course joke from Suzie about her having no friends. It’s sad to watch Lexi beat herself up week after week in the Werk Room. She reminds me a bit of season-seven Katya or Nina Bo’nina Brown: A queen with high levels of talent and personality that the other queens might just blow past because their heads can stay in the game.
Until Untucked, Onya and Suzie are mostly not involved in the main drama this week. Still, I did want to highlight the moment during the training session with Michelle and Whitney Cummings, when Onya calls out Suzie for playing the game and trying to set expectations low. That’s a pretty typical move on Drag Race — Ben DeLaCreme’s Snatch Game being perhaps the best example — and it’s smart of Onya to not let Suzie get her desired plot in. Early in the season, I yelled at the girls for letting Suzie nab a “Jinkx Monsoon” edit. Is anyone surprised that Onya knew how to put a kibosh on it? Onya and Suzie are clearly the queens this season with the best ideas of how to play for the camera (with Sam being the best at playing to the judges), and it’s fun to watch them go head-to-head, not just in the performing arena but in shaping the edit.
Finally, we should talk Butthole. Proud to say that last week I called out that Butthole was the standout performer among the girls everyone perceived as cannon fodder, but even I wasn’t expecting this. Her story this week centers around her place in the competition post-Kori. It’s a dangerous game to be a single without the duo that you’ve been playing into all season (Spice never managed to figure it out), but Butthole does exactly as she should this week: Mourn Kori, say that she’s glad she’s still there, put her head down, and deliver. And it pays off. On that note, let’s dig into the performances.
Onya goes first. In terms of presentation, she does the best of the entire week. Seriously, Onya is a flabbergastingly good public speaker, holding the audience in the palm of her hand without seeming to try. But we knew that from RDR Live!, and this week, we learn that it doesn’t mean she’s a great joke writer. She delivers every joke with panache, but none of them really hit. It’s impressive, but it’s not a good roast. She is, quite correctly, safe.
She’s followed by Arrietty, who shows the value of “good presentation” if you even have terrible jokes by bombing in such an embarrassing way that it’s not even fun to watch. She can’t even muster up a “Let’s get this roast a’cookin’” because she falls apart the minute she stands up. It’s not even ironically funny or ironically fun — this is what happens when a girl who should have gone home on a comedy challenge with high guardrails (RDR Live!) manages to squeak through by sheer power of her looks. She gives a performance like this.
Next is Jewels, who, as I said before, bombs one joke and then nearly falls apart. She’s just a young, giggly mess. And it’s worth noting how high a percentage of her jokes are fat jokes — outside of basic performance issues, it shows a more limited perspective than I thought Jewels had previously. It’s not a great look to be the twinkiest of 22-year-olds and not have a mean thing to say outside of “fat.” I do think she is significantly better than Arrietty, but that means virtually nothing.
Jewels is followed by the first big surprise of the episode, Lana Ja’Rae. Lana does a really solid job, shockingly. Who knew she had this in her? It’s not the best of the week, and I still don’t think she really has much of a persona as a presenter, but she has personality and delivers all her jokes proficiently. A solid week on a hard challenge for a queen who has not given a standout performance yet. Deeply happy for her. Her best joke is when she refers to Sam as someone with family who probably owned her ancestors. Given that joke and her choice to do Rosa Parks, it seems like her personality might be a bit edgier than we’ve gotten to really see, but this is the first time it’s worked.
She’s followed by Sam, who is the best presenter outside of Onya. Unlike Onya, she has some solid jokes. She quickly responds to Lana’s jab at her whiteness by calling her a “family friend,” which is funny, and then lands everything after it, too. Sam has yet to be fully thrown off in this competition, and I’m really starting to warm up to her as a personality. She’s fun and sassy and clearly very talented. Go, Sam!
Then it’s Lydia, whose performance this week so overshadows Lana’s big success that I kind of feel bad for Ms. Ja’Rae. It turns out that Lydia is a really solid joke writer, and even if she’s not as present onstage as Sam or Onya, she has a kind of wry speaking style when talking as herself that works. The oscillating fan joke really is funny. Of anybody, her roasting style reminded me the most of Willow Pill (who should have won the roast on her season, sorry, Bosco): Her delivery of some drier, more inappropriate jokes comes off even better because her stage presence is comparatively low-key.
Then it’s Suzie, who does fine for herself. The jokes are all good, not great, but the thing that really stood out to me was her stage presence. There was something about her this week that I just found a little … dour? Sad? She just couldn’t give the kind of bright, excited presence that a roast needs to fully work. Rightly safe.
Finally, Lexi is a big disappointment. She starts the episode thinking she could win the challenge and ends it by giving a frantic, messy, unfunny performance. Of all the girls this season, I think Lexi could be the best natural performer, and she’s got comedic references out the wazoo — I mean, she did Gilbert Gottfried for Snatch Game; clearly, she’s watched roasts. Unfortunately, she refuses to let that part out because she gets so bogged down in the interpersonal. It’s difficult to see, but also … Lydia Butthole Kollins is on a path up in this competition, and it would be a goddamn shame to see Lexi eliminated at the top six.
The runway category is shorts, which is kind of eh. Onya’s denim look is okay but it doesn’t read as shorts to me, even if it is made of jean shorts. Love the color of her wig. Arrietty, per usual, has the best look of the night. Jewels get half-yelled at by Michelle for doing Marie Antoinette, but I think it could be equally argued that this is a saloon fit. Either way, she looks great. Lana does a Naomi Campbell “Dsquared” fashion look that I knew immediately and loved as a reference, but I get why the judges wanted more “drag” from it. Sam does a lovely, predictably polished football look. I think the shoulder pads could have gone out a little further, but that’s a nitpick. She looks great. Lydia’s lumpy, weird drag is, it turns out, a lot easier to take when she gives a killer challenge performance. The shorts are bad, but the Balaklava is great. Suzie’s look is good, looks expensive. Lexi does a shredded jeans short look that destroys Onya’s look. I don’t get why TS Madison would have a problem with all her trains. She’s a drag queen!
Judging bears out as expected. Lydia gets her first win, while Jewels and Arrietty end up in the bottom two, both because their performances stank and because the story line was right there. How could they not? For the second week in a row, the lip sync is good on its own, but better because of the story. It’s to “YA YA,” the best track off of Cowboy Carter (fight me), which is a 10/10 lip-sync song. I’d say the girls get to about an eight. Jewels is definitely better, although it seems to me that she’s a bit worried about the wig coming off at the end. Still, a deserved win. Arrietty goes home, mercifully.
• Untucked is fucking fierce. Onya and Suzie have fun at the beginning, but then once the other girls come backstage, it’s a free-for-all. I appreciated Onya standing up for Jewels a lot, and loved learning for the first time about how close Lexi and Onya have gotten. It’s very sweet. I was glad to see Lexi honestly apologize. If I were Jewels, I would have screamed at Arrietty about the joke stealing, but I think Jewels was just too over it to do so.
• Best read from each of the villains: MIB’s “Learn the music,” Plane’s “You clocked it sister,” and Kandy’s “You’re going home next.” Oh wait, those are all toward Arrietty.
• Ru’s description of Suzie’s look as “Merchant of Penis” is really, really stupid.
Gay thoughts from straight co-workers: I’ve avoided talking about Whitney Cummings’s presence until now, because I asked my co-worker Jesse David Fox, who literally wrote the book on comedy (called Comedy Book, on sale now), to chat with me about her. For those who missed this, Cummings recently went on CNN’s NYE show and fired off a bunch of edge lord-y jokes like “It was amazing that the pro-choice party didn’t give their voters one when it came to the presidential candidate. Kamala was forced on us so hard, you’d think she was patented by Pfizer.” She has also recently has made transphobic jokes like “Shania Twain’s on the show tonight. Reminds me of this year’s Paris Olympic theme: ‘Man! I feel like a Woman.’” All of this happened after filming Drag Race.
Anyway, I asked Jesse about the fact that she went on Drag Race, and he said, “In the past, drag queens seemingly were known for having an irreverent sense of humor and not being particularly PC,” and noted that “I think there is a segment of the Drag Race fanbase that is more sensitive than drag queens probably are.”
• Predicted top four: Sam, Onya, Suzie, and … Jewels? She had a bad week, but Lexi seems to be trending even worse.
