‘RuPaul’s Drag Race UK’ S2E7 Recap: Flower Power Can’t Compete In This Fracking World
When RuPaul tells you to not to do your planned look, listen.
We all anticipate Snatch Game each season, but the unconventional material design challenges that are the truest test of the queens: the great equaliser.
Ellie might just be a touch too green to be a contender for the crown, but there’s no doubting her talent — that 21-year-old can conceptualise and create a complete look. As can the whole top six, save for Tayce, who by attaching some scourers to a corset made the exact same mistake, with the exact same material, as Baga Chipz back in S1. It did look much bettah than Baga’s — maybe next season, we’ll see the final evolution.
Luckily for Tayce, the judges didn’t love Sister Sister’s Annihilation homage — sure, it was a little messy, but do you expect the morphing of human DNA with mother nature to be an easy process?
Unafraid to reference, or to not reference…
It didn’t turn out so pretty in the film, either, and I will say I was disappointed the lip-sync didn’t involve the two queens mirroring each other in a battle to the death — or, rather, to life-anew.
Since the episode’s beginning, the show signalled that one of the badgeless queens, Sister or Ellie, would probably sashay away, and it’s probably for the best that Sister sashayed away. Last week, she wrote an op-ed for The Guardian about the hatred, death threats and trolling she’s received for being on the show, stressing how much it affected her to know that thousands of strangers hated her.
Unfortunately, Drag Race isn’t always going to make audiences fall in love with every queen — as she wrote, “One hour a week to squeeze in the original cast of 12 people’s stories is not enough time to learn about someone. You could watch a show 100 times over and it would still be impossible to truly know the people on screen”.
And while the show’s made a real effort to curb trolling while still providing plot-lines (though the trolling of Kandy Muse after an episode where she talked about the effect of trolling shows the audience isn’t quite getting it), Drag Race is ultimately a reality show — one that boxes contestants into roles or erases parts of them completely. That’s fine! If only the wider audience understood that just because Sister Sister didn’t shine on the show, that’s no indication of her artistry or worth.
With that in mind, it’s for her best interest she went home this week — and on a high note, too, after winning the reading mini-challenge and presenting, after weeks of cries of plagirism, an original (if not completely pulled off) look.
Sister is currently lagging behind her fellow UK queens in Instagram followers, a metric that matters a lot for how these queens make money and get gigs in the COVID-era. Chuck her a follow, send her some love. She deserves it.
Reading Is What? A Nice Hobby To Have!
After some chitchat about how Sister and Ellie are without wins, Ru arrives for the reading challenge. Sister’s the sharpest: she’s got a very dry wit, and it works well for this context.
No-one flounders — Ellie, intentionally or not, presents a jumble of well-worn reads with a line about executing Bimini by electric chair. Given we’re 9,521 seasons into Drag Race, it’s hard to fault her too much: there are only so many ways to tell someone they’re ugly. The best read of the session is Lawrence’s of Ellie: ‘she’s so stupid she studied for her COVID test’. Topical!
With the mini-challenge win under her belt, Sister gets a 15-second head start on picking materials for this week’s design challenge, a homage to lockdown superheroes. She grabs everything that looks moderately easy to work with, and anything pretty: it’s a strategy to leave the girls without, but the end result means she probably overdoes her own outfit.
A’Whora is thirsty for a win, having come Glenn Close but no cigar on the last design challenge, and tries to butter up Sister to steal away some materials. Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t work, but it doesn’t seem like A’Whora is too concerned: they show a lot of footage of her messing around in the werkroom.
Plunger? I Hardly Even Know Her!
Compared to S13, where Denali and Rosé have been so determined to win they rarely seem to say anything else, it’s nice to see A’Whora have fun even while gunning for a badge.
We also get an appearance from Raven, who does Ru’s drag makeup. She looks perfect, tells Lawrence to fix her brows, teaches Sister how to cover up her stubble, and looks on with major suspicion at Bimini’s dress-in-progress.
So pretty.
?????
But where Bimini gets the memo and starts from scratch, Tayce doubles down on her scourer look, even as it scratches her skin off and causes enough cuts that the first-aid man is called on-set. Tayce originally plans to have no corset underneath, but I have a feeling the show might’ve forced her hand, lest she cut up her entire body during the hours of filming.
Ru, Is Everything Okay? You’ve Barely Used This Runway To Spruik Your Song ‘Super Queen’
This week’s guest judge is Maya Jama, a very pretty and charming British TV personality/BBC1 Radio host, who I have learned, as some trivia, dated Stormzy for five years. Good for her!
A’Whora is the hands-down winner this week: her dark-blue dress looks as polished as anything else she’s worn on the runway. It’s just on another level from the other looks — Ellie is the closest to the win, and, to her credit, she embraces the unconventional materials much more with her marshmallow jewellery.
Is the blue mask some subtle shade/a reference to Sister Sister’s entrance look?
Comparing them, A’Whora’s is the ‘fashion’ take on the challenge, while Ellie embraced the whimsy. But A’Whora’s was just so well-designed — the way those frills puffed out on the runway was so thought out.
It’s a little perplexing that Lawrence winds up in the bottom three instead of Bimini, given the judges thought the latter’s was a little lazy, but whatever. It doesn’t matter (save for the point-systems us super fans have in our heads at all times, where it matters greatly).
This is cute, and has more of a ‘storyline’ than the other looks, which is seemingly part of the challenge despite not really coming up outside of the cringe runway narrations I am going to otherwise ignore.
Derrick Barry is so angry that Michelle complimented Bimini’s brows.
That leaves Tayce and Sister in the bottom, with the latter receiving a frustrating criticism from Tina Burner’s ex, who questions whether the look is ‘drag’. The line between costume and drag seems so arbitrary, especially when one of Ru’s favourite expressions is ‘you’re born naked and the rest is drag’.
I don’t disagree that Sister deserved to be in the bottom, but I really liked the look. Yes, the base is a bit shapeless, but it’s ambitious, fun and filled with lots of wonderful details. If this wasn’t the pointy end of the competition, she would’ve been safe
No matter what she wears, Tayce still scrubs up alright.
The two duke it out to a perfectly serviceable song by Jess Glynne. And just like Glynne when she tried to enter Sexy Fish in flip-flops and a hoddie, Sister was asked to sashay away.
Next week, the queens try their hand at standup, themed around love. Sure!
RuPaul’s Drag Race UK is available on Stan, with episodes dropping each Friday 8AM AEDT.
Jared Richards is Junkee’s Drag Race recapper, and a freelance writer who has written for The Guardian, The Big Issue and more. He’s on Twitter.