Drag Race 13, Episode 11: One Hell of a Fudging

Everyone’s coming for Sister Sister’s look these days!

This week on Drag Race the show truly confirms that “What is Brand may never die”. Unless it’s orange, yellow and red.

Skate Off

Having sent Denali home while wearing her drag and obviously worrying about the postage costs of sending an entire dress and wig from New York to Chicago, Olivia is feeling a little down and gives one of the most truly terrible efforts at cleaning the mirror we’ve ever seen

Someone’s not getting a Mr. Muscle branding deal.

The fact that Olivia was even in the bottom two with 2 wins under her belt has all the queens a little shaken – and the queens who have yet to win a single thing except a mini challenge are a little overly confident that they could turn this all around and pull a full Bimini Bon Boulash and dominate the last third of the season – because yes, there is still *quite* a lot to go.

Quizzing Queens

The mini challenge this week is a quiz, which Olivia is especially excited about because she gets to showcase her extensive general knowledge that I’m sure she has because she does look like one of the kids from The Magic School Bus

Unfortunately for her the quiz is centred around the history of Drag Race and I don’t think The Magic School Bus ever did an episode in which they entered the brain of Alyssa Edwards but I could be wrong.

I’m genuinely shocked that they even acknowledged the old Untucked with a question about The Interior Illusions Lounge because I fully thought they were pretending that it never existed, much like they do with Willam, after the whole fall out with the sponsor and the fans general irritation about what Untucked has morphed into – A SOFA IN THE MIDDLE OF A BADLY LIT STUDIO IS NOT A SHOW.
It wasn’t quite as shocking as the fact the Pit Crew were allowed to talk this episode – after years of them being nothing but meat it felt so wrong, like the moment you realise you should probably be a vegetarian. I did love the fact they were playing Bryce up as being really stupid and in real life he is actually a fully qualified aerospace engineer.

The winner of the quiz is Kandy because she can do basic maths when it involves sausages and a number below 15 and Utica forgets that Alexis Mateo has a monopoly on the word “BAM!”.
Her prize is a cash tip of £2,500 – THAT’S TWO THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED Kandy – the fact she thought they were dishing out £25,000 for mini challenge wins because Tina Burner got her arse out is exactly why I love Kandy so much, what an absolute gem of a TV character.

Pop Goes The Drag Queen

For this week’s Main Challenge the queens have to design and brand their own soft drink including a label, advert and writing their own jingle. It does, to me, feel like a bit of a mistake to have 1 brand centric challenge after another – the conversations are just a bit repetitive and rather annoyingly narcissistic because they discuss “my brand” without any hint of irony or awareness that these sodas are not real.

Truly the only queens to pull off the challenge were Symone and Rosé – the former because anything she says will automatically be amazing and hilarious because she delivers it like a slightly fritzing robot from Futurama

all the while looking just plain gorgeous. She also had the best jingle of the entire lot and the only one that I can remember and have been singing all morning 🎵Everybody’s got a Sweet Toof🎵.
As for Rosé, she has the self-awareness that Comedy Impresario of New Yawk, Tina Burner, sorely lacks. Her commercial is a perfectly executed pillorying of herself. When Bryce came out wearing the ruffled, loofa dress and looking like the offspring of a Spongebob and Patrick fanfic and she told him it wasn not at all flattering – it was genius

Just an overall well executed gently self-deprecating parody of an advert which is what these adverts should have been BECAUSE THESE’S SODAS AREN’T REAL. And we all know how much RuPaul loves a Drag Race reference being thrown about

I did love that a key part of Tina Burner’s 45 second kitchen sink drama was the part where she “pulls a funny face” and then this was the funny face

meanwhile Rosé, whomst Tina Burner does not believe is a comedy queen or even remotely funny is out there doing this

She clearly graduated from the Asia O’Hara School of Winning Main Challenges.
It was obviously another comedy challenge which means Tina was back on her ill-advised high horse and talking a big game while making her advert about a sexually repressed 1950s couple that discover new levels of horniness with her drink named “Burnin’ Up”

She got very caught up in her head about the narrative of the advert that the jokes and humour somewhat went out of the window – but at least it made sense which is more than can be said for a fair few of the others! And she lowkey looked the best she has ever looked on the show

she also did the best of job of differentiating between 2 characters, being her housewife self and her devilishly sexual self which looked alarmingly like Ellie Diamond’s Dirty Diamond and was doing the same satanic voice as Tina decided “HELL YEAH!” was now her catchphrase

The demonic voice at least made sense on this occasion.
I’m just very glad that the scene of her getting railed by the priest was written out of the advert – I want to see that conversation between her and the producers. And whoever decided to not tell Utica to delete the scene of her suckling the cow did her a disservice

I can’t even understand anything about Utica’s advert – like why was she so sad and crying over her cow? and then suckling from it in the next scene

Had she asked for two cow props and that one of them was meant to be dead? Because I genuinely feel like she might have done just that. Also her advert would have just made much more sense if they completely erased the scene where Bryce feeds the cow the soda and then Utica drinks its soda laced milk directly from the udders. She did have the best list of ingredients though “Sunshine, anti-depressants and The Blood of Christ!”

At least Utica had fun making the whole advert, even if it did drive Carson and Ross to the point of insanity where you begin tasting colours. Actually maybe BECAUSE it drove them insane. Good for her and the chaos she caused

Although I’m not sure if Utica and her abundance of mouth noises and limbs was quite as frantic as Kandy who seemed to film 100 scenes that never made it into the final cut

The judges loved Kandy’s advert but I found it to be really dull and thought her joke deliveries were kind of inept – there’s no rise and fall in her voice so the punchline never really punches and it all seemed a little flat to me, much like Olivia’s advert which had a very clear narrative and concept that she just hadn’t thought through the finer details of.
She really should have had a costume change and started off looking a little frumpy while she wonders what it means to live and then the change into her regular smiling self once she took a sip would have read much better

but I still thought her advert was one of the stronger one and easily in the top 3 – I realise I’m slightly bias but I could watch her doing the little steppy steps all day – she looks like one of those windup toys

She’s just ridiculously cute.

Gottmik probably had the biggest struggle during the entire episode and it started right from the conceptualisation and as someone who had to make a whole 90 shot storyboard for a short film in under a day – I fully feel how insane he was going during the planning of the advert. I HATE storyboarding, it’s a nightmare but nothing brings me greater joy than storyboards drawn by people who cannot draw, from Symone’s accidental school desk pornography

to Tina Burner drawing what looked like the art project of a disturbed child

Hang them in The Louvre.

The idea behind Gottmik’s advert was good – playing on the infomercials with people being deliberately inept was great, she did however make the same mistake as Olivia in that she needed to have more of a differentiation between the complete and utter failure shots

Which should have been in black and white, and the shots of her failing but looking sexy

Which should have then been in colour.
It also didn’t help that the Pit Crew’s reactions to both instances of failure were the same

I don’t expect much acting range from the Pit Crew, this was them trying to pretend to be failing through space while on an acid trip

They simply do not have the range but at least they’re pretty!
It was a rare misstep for Gottmik but a misstep nonetheless.

Beauties and the BEASTS

Beastly Couture is such a fun runway prompt – there’s so many cool places you could take it or draw inspiration from, I hope they repeat it sometime, it’s my favourite kind of runway.

I had high hopes for Utica in this runway and she was perfectly fine, kind of like Connie The Hormone Monstress in formal attire

I wonder if she’ll ever live up to the strange majesty of the sleeping bag dress? She could also have done without the muff, it became a little cumbersome. I do love the way she shades her face though

and her colours choices are always so unusual and creative.

Kandy was next and we all know that because of the amount of looks the queens have to curate in a very short space of time, they inevitably have to fudge a few of them, and this was one hell of a fudging

It’s like Dipsy the Teletubby and Mr. Burns after his longevity treatment had a pair of twins and one of them was Yzma from The Emperor’s New Groove. It is utterly bonkers and terrible and would be the worst thing worn on the runway this season had it not been for LaLa Ri stapling bags to a corset and Tina Burner’s beaded tit reveal.

Following that delightful mess was Tina Burner in some Five Nights at Freddy’s realness

I love this look and I think it’s unarguably Tina’s best, the makeup was terrible but I think it was on purpose?

The point was to look like one of those dolls that comes onto Antiques Roadshow and their blinking eyes don’t work anymore so they’ve depleted in value by £500, right?

From one fursuit to another and can you believe it has taken 13 seasons before a full on Furry character suit made it onto the runway? And it’s a full on Marco Marco commission piece

Can you also imagine what Symone’s DMs look like right now? Nothing but vore and knotting.
I do think she could have done more with her face – it’s kind of just sitting there like she’s taking a picture through one of those photo stand-in boards.

It would be hard for most people to follow a full on furry cosplay but Gottmik managed it

It really reminds me of Oblina from AAAAH! Real Monsters

but also a Gruzzle from iconic DOS game Maths Rescue

It’s a very good costume and the makeup was super interesting too

Olivia Lux was next and really looked like the little sister to Crystal Methyd’s purple patchwork monster cow from last series’ Purple Runway

Bless her for trying to play it as frightening and looking very much like the main character of a Dreamworks film that is designed purely to sell merchandise to children.

Lastly we have Rosé as the halfway meeting point of Him from The Powerpuff Girls and Mr. Tumnus

It’s incredible and somewhat of a miracle that she didn’t take her own eyes out with the long, whip-like nails that she was wildly flicking around.

A BEAST Couture Runway Ranking

Rosé The Rosy Devil
AAAH! Gottmik!
Olivia Lux, The Little Beast That Could
The Furries Have Landed
5 Nights at Tina’s
Utica’s Beastly Formal Wear
The Oh No UFO

Given The Hump

With everything judged and just about everyone getting a stern talking to about the clarity of concepts it’s another double win, this time it’s Rosé and Symone because apparently VH1 has money to burn this season with another 2 queens getting $5000 each. *stares at the RuPeter badges*

The bottom 3 are pretty obviously Utica, Tina and Gottmik with the latter getting a reprieve meaning it’s a lipsync between Tina and Utica. I think it’s mostly fair – Utica reached almost divine levels of absurd while making no sense and Tina really has used up all 9 of her Comedy Queen lives at this point, even if her final advert was easier to parse than Gottmik’s and Utica’s.

The lipsync song is My Humps by the Black Eyed Peas which was absolutely made for Tina Burner in this massive oversized teddy bear nightmare outfit and the way it moved when she danced

It’s brilliant and would have gone down an absolute storm in a club.
While Tina completely dominated the first half, Utica really came out in the second and had a few fun moments, the bickering between the two of them was a nice interaction – I always love it when the queens work together on the stage during a lipsync