‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ Recap: Get Out Of My Oats, Girl

A sigh of relief: this season of RuPaul’s Drag Race is going to be good. Last week’s premiere was more stuffed than Alaska’s notorious monster-mash of a tuck, but this week had a little bit more breathing space — and, thankfully, a Ganache that let other flavours flourish.

This week, these 14 queens established their personalities, fleshing them out from the 2000 other figures we’ve seen before. It was a great episode: there was fair amount of workroom time, a dumb-as acting challenge and an astrology-themed runway that made every Co-Star-using queer lose their shit. And just as the stars predicted, we said goodbye to Kahanna ‘please spit on me’ Montrese.

‘When You Feel Your Own Oats, You Forget That There Are Other Oats There’

After their Cyster Soju popped off back home, the queens return to the workroom to set up this week’s storyline. Scarlet Envy is, as Vanjie says, ‘pressed like a panini’: she’s feeling underestimated, and starts a mild beef with last week’s winner Brook Lynn.

She also clearly watched Pretty Woman the night before the competition, because she says ‘Big Mistake!’ twice this episode. Scarlet hadn’t impressed me much, and I was thinking she might even head home this episode — but this week’s acting challenge and gimmicky-but-fun bubbly runway proved she has more to offer than butchering Paris Is Burning quotes and Gia Gunn catchphrases.

This week’s mini challenge is a photo-bombing challenge, and I have absolutely nothing to say about it. RuPaul gives the win to the two queens who strip for the camera, Silky and Brook Lynn.

They pick their teams for the main challenge, spoofs of Black Panther and Get Out. It’s always interesting to see who’s picked first/last, as the queens often have a pretty different view on their competition from us.  Nina West, A’Keria, Ra’Jah and Vanjie are the first four chosen, while Scarlet and Ariel are left till last.

This makes sense: Ariel’s known from Instagram (and Girl, she stumbles to perform, Girl, in the challenge, Girl), while Scarlet hasn’t left too much of an impression so far. She soon shows us by nabbing a win alongside Yvie, thanks to her pitch-perfect impression of Get Out‘s Allison Williams, which is to say ‘privileged and pretty’.

During the workroom, there’s a little bit of drama as Ariel and her team call Silky ‘obnoxious’ to RuPaul, though he essentially tells them to shape up to her level.

Silky was redeemed almost immediately this episode: RuPaul laughed at every darn thing she said, and then she proved she was smart because she’s planning to do a PhD, which is literally what I say on 2nd dates. Ru even calls her a Doctor, prompting every postgrad I know to explode.

The real drama comes later, when Yvie, oddly, ends up fighting with Ra’Jah over Ariel calling Silky obnoxious. The feud continues in Untucked, and given how Ra’Jah refuses to accept Yvie’s apology, it feels like there’s more to the story here: the edit might have cut out the build-up.

Something‘s missing here, and no, we’re not talking about the lack of Taurus’ on this week’s runway (though, as a Taurus, you know I’m irrationally upset about this).

Why It Gotta Be Racial Stereotypes?

There is nothing funnier in the world to RuPaul than a heavily-accented joke, as Drag Race continually rewards queens who play and embody stereotypes, from Bianca Del Rio’s housekeeping bits to Manila Luzon’s rouge reporter in S3.

It’s pretty rare that the show completely mis-fires — Gia Gunn’s abysmal Jenny Bui impersonation springs to mind — but it often leaves the audience a little unsure whether they’re laughing at the deconstruction or the original joke.

There’s no easy answer here, and drag, as we know, is a mess of conventions designed to provoke and challenge. Drag Race‘s relationship to stereotypes operates similarly, but to a much wider audience than a nightclub — maybe it doesn’t translate to a generic audience.

It’s also notable that Brook Lynn told Plastique to play Nails with a Vietnamese accent. It’s important to note that Plastique (who is Vietnamese-American) is super into the idea, and runs with it to great success in the challenge. Still, the moment sticks out, especially since Brook Lynn apologised last week for once Instagramming a picture with another queen in blackface.

Similarly, Drag Race alum Shea Couleé tweeted about this week’s challenge to say it felt “completely tone deaf” to get queens to parody Get Out and Black Panther. Under the show’s guidelines, it was set up as ‘another step forward for representation’ in having two drag-queen narratives lead the box office, but the conflation of drag culture’s appropriation with Get Out‘s sunken place felt weird — especially since drag culture, for the most part, was and is cultivated by people of colour.

I in no way thought the show had any ill will or malice behind the maxi challenge. I’m just confused behind the decision to make performative blackness the punchline? I respect the contributions of Production, but they had to know it would be provocative right?

— Shea Couleé (@SheaCoulee) March 8, 2019

A reply helps nails why it lands a little oddly, with comedian Ayana Atiba Sahar saying that it feels like it’s punching down.

“Black Panther and Get Out were such huge movies with cultural impact that a parody seems welcome,” she writes. “But they are also so important to us [that] when a parody comes along it feels like an attack on this sacred drop of water we have been thirsting for for so long.”

As the show expands, it’s worth questioning its rocky relationship to race and gender — Drag Race remains revolutionary, but it can still be mired in the same shit we see elsewhere. Thankfully, we have queens like Shea and The Vixen who are willing to push the conversation further without cancelling it, though it’d be nice if some whiter queens pitched in too on the regular (Silky in whiteface doesn’t count).

Star Signed, Sealed, Delivered

The only thing gayer than drag queens is astrology, so this week’s star-sign themed runway was well and truly overdue. It’s a bit of a shame that so many of the girls are Aries and Leos, but they mostly all serve up different looks. On the plus side, it made for a very horny runway.

There were a few misses on the runway too, like constellations we couldn’t quite put together.

Yvie and Scarlet nab a shared win, while Mercedes, Kahanna and Ariel land in the bottom. The lip-sync is a lot, but Mercedes shows a little bit more restraint than Kahanna and sticks around for another week.

Both Scarlet and Plastique came out from the middle of the pack this week, and we’ll see who breaks free next. Mercedes, unfortunately, probably doesn’t have too long left — especially since we got a bit of time with her this episode. Even if the conversation about ‘travelling for pageants’ was obviously prompted by producers/Alexis Michelle, Yvie Oddly’s concern for Mercedes’ health and experiences with racism felt very genuine in a way the show’s Serious Conversations sometimes don’t.

Occasionally, the show cuts through to create these genuine moments that manage to be informative without voyeurism, which is perhaps why it stings when it fell flat in the challenge.

Next week’s challenge is an evangelical talk show and features drag expert Troye Sivan. Until then, I leave you with this.

Imagine being a straight person trying to figure out what’s happening in this video pic.twitter.com/KORXslC733

— horace (@trashygaytweets) March 10, 2019

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RuPaul’s Drag Race streams on Stan, with new episodes dropping Friday 3pm.

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Jared Richards is a staff writer at Junkee, and co-host of Sleepless In Sydney on FBi Radio. Follow him on Twitter.