Every season needs at least one lacklustre ep, and given that AS4 has been pretty damn sensational, we shouldn’t view this week’s offering too harshly. That being said, this was probably the weakest offering of the season thus far, especially following three solid weeks of RPDR splendour culminating in last week’s lip sync smackdown/the return of Latrice.

Even if this ep was a six by All Stars standard, we still got the gag of that lip sync and we said goodbye to Valentina, another queen who I thought was a shoe-in for the top four. This proves yet again that this season’s strength is keeping old bitches like me on my toes. Oh you wanted a twist, eh? *Slowly lowers my atrophying muscles to the floor. Stays there forever.*

The Challenge

I don’t have much to say about this week’s challenge apart from it was at least better than that soup can challenge from AS3. Here’s the tea: design challenges don’t always make great television. We have to watched 20+ minutes of the queens planning, freaking out, and in this instance painting the scenery when it’s much more fun watching them chew it. Then after all that BTS BS, we get 90 seconds of content.

This week, the queens had to create their own club nights including interior decorating, club acts, signature cocktails, and VIP treatment. It was a level of extra not seen for some time on RPDR so it was nice to see the queens have to excel at non-drag queen challenges like painting a wall and being nice about Rita Ora.

 

Monet and Monique keep making the most of that pact with the devil by excelling at this challenge and lasting another week, as other queens who’ve been around a lot longer get the chop.  Their club, The Blackhole, was a sci-fi inspired space. They both showed their age by not making a “C’mon Teletubby, teleport us to Mars” reference but I’m not mad. These two work well together but I suspect the next time they’re separated, one of them is going home.

Ok so first of all, what had happened was Naomi and Valentina should have called their club Studio 94. The could have still played up the 90s supermodel angle but had a stronger Studio 54 reference. Like, literally the objective of this show is to make RuPaul like you. RuPaul is a certain age. He likes pop culture references from his era. Last All Stars he said to Aja that the 1970s weren’t that long ago (at that stage 1979, the last year of the 70s, was 39 years ago). The edit of them trying to make Club 96 work was great television: Naomi quietly getting desperate as Valentina doubled down on her batshittery. Regardless, Valentina and Naomi get extra points for clearly basing Club 96 off the greatest nightclub of all time:

Here’s the golden rule of All Stars; if you fuck up in the same way that you fucked up on your season, you’re up for elimination. This week Valentina reminded me of how she handled her season nine sitcom challenge with Nina Bonina Brown and I wasn’t mad to see her in bottom two.

I’ve seen a lot of people say Monet and Monique should have won over Trinity, Manila, and Latrice’s bee-themed club hive. To those people I say, “Tamar, have you ever watched the show?” Ru likes dumb jokes that are clever and clever jokes that are dumb. Remember when Kim Chi, Naomi, and The Uber Black Dahlia won the New Wave performance in front of Blondie with an act inspired by chicken wings?

So when professional graphic designer Manila teamed up with seasoned hosts Trinity and Latrice and Manila, who is also a seasoned host, it was like…”duh”. They made so many bee puns, and they made Bruno strip, and also they made Bruno strip.

You Got Me Gallery – This Week’s Runway

This week’s runway theme was Plastique Fantastique. Like with the feather runway a few weeks back, these ruways should be good because it takes innovation and some coin to make these looks work. The queens did not disappoint. Latrice deserved her spot in the top two for breaking out of her pageant box with her look this week (I see in the promo for next week she’s back in the rhinestones).

 

 

The Lipstick And The Lip Sync

I don’t mind a bold choice, but in the words of Tatianna: that was a choice. Trinity definitely set fire to her pageant queen past with that geriatric performance (ladies and gentlemen please welcome to stage, Geri Atric), but she might have walked away a little scarred.

Ultimately I think it was a little too out there in the context of All Stars and didn’t fit the song choice. More importantly, as with Shangela’s fat suit from AS3, Trinity’s low hanging titties were low hanging fruit. Drag is crass, it translates the sacred into the profane, and we should recoil from it sometimes – but that lip sync was less a Grandmother and more a Grandmother’s Egg come to life to torment humanity.  

Top Six? Honey, I Can Barely Top One These Days

We’re only a few short weeks away from knowing who will be crowned the winner of All Stars 3 and take their place in the Drag Race Hall of Fame. That means two more queens will be eliminated to leave us with our top four. AS3 threw the top four a curveball when the eliminated queens came back to decide which of the four queens would lip sync for the crown. This was a wildly unpopular decision that left many feeling like Shangela was robbed of the crown.

My prediction is that the three queens from the Hall of Fame (Chad Michaels, Alaska, and Trixie) will have some part to play. Alaska alluded to something in this season’s first ep of Race Chaser (take it from this Drag Race scholar: if you’re not listening to Race Chaser, you’re not doing Drag Race fandom) that suggests she was somehow involved. It would make more sense to have Ru lean on a jury of former winners than fellow competitors, or at least to give the queens a challenge that involves working with the Hall of Flamers.

Next week we’ve been gifted a Judy Garland themed makeover challenge featuring the queen’s best friends. Monet bombed the makeover challenge in her season, whereas Naomi blitzed hers. Will this be the week Naomi makes the top two? Will this be the end of Monet? Will Valentina’s fans storm the World of Wonder studios and declare Valentina the new Supreme Leader of RuCo?

 

---

Nic Holas has written for The Guardian, Sydney Morning Herald, Archer Magazine, and Hello Mr. You can find him on Twitter @nicheholas, or in his role as co-founder of HIV movement The Institute of Many.