There’s places to be, Emmys to win.
A second premier and a second talent show with the show inching ever closer to just outlawing lipsyncs like they outlawed impersonations of other Drag Queens on Snatch Game.
Well, we might as well jump in at the deep end and get straight to the point by addressing the heterosexual elephant in the room as Maddy Morphosis makes history as the very cishet man to make it onto the show, and rather appropriately entered in a Guy Fieri outfit through the lens of Blue Banana in 2012
I am kind of obsessed with this look, even as is it’s delightfully silly but then she lifted up those polarized sunglasses on an opera stick and I kind of fell in love
Apparently she wasn’t allowed to say “Welcome to Flavour Town” because the show is still hiring the same extremely incompetent copyright lawyers.
Obviously Drag Race Twitter has been discoursing about Maddy’s inclusion on the show ever since the casting was announced. Do I wish that the show had a better established relationship with the the trans community and queer women before Ru spent several minutes eulogising the bravery of a cishet man doing drag as though there isn’t a pretty rich history of it being done in the theatre world and British comedy scene? Yes, I really, really do. But I’m also not going to say Maddy shouldn’t be on the show because at the end of the day, I’ll champion that all drag is valid, even if it is Sexy Guy Fieri. And I think we should all be grateful that Maddy’s drag at least progressed beyond the entire joke being “hurr durr, I’m a man in a dress.” Also Maddy has shown in interviews that she’s fully aware of her place in queer spaces and seems like a very good and respectful ally and it’s worth having her around for the reactions of the other queens when it was revealed that she was straight
and I’m so glad we get to do this twice because of the double premier.
Maddy wasn’t the only campy queen on the scene, with DeJa Skye entering in an outfit that I am still trying to decipher
it’s a bit of a June Jambalaya situation in which I don’t quite know if the mesh on the top half of the dress was an attempt at a nude illusion or not – and then there’s the fact the bodice is just a swirl of fabric seemingly stapled onto her torso with no regard to how fabric or the human body works. I also cannot say that I’m a particularly big fan of this honeydew melon colour when it comes to wigs (or a fruit salad for that matter)
her eye makeup however is STUNNING, oh to have even half of that lid space, but alas, I am forever cursed by a hooded eye. But I think we’ll be seeing a lot of these sorts of colours from DeJa given that she likes pastels and people call her “The Pastel Princess” which I am 90% sure nobody actually does.
DeJa hails from Fresno, California – and in the long history of Drag Race there haven’t been many queens from California (the show very much treating Los Angeles as a completely annexed state of its own). This season however, we get two! And none of them are wearing a patented Honey Mahogany Caftan, as Lady Camden enters dressed in a bra made from candy necklaces as a sort of harbinger of imminent candy peril
she and DeJa are also both the oldest queens on the season at *checks notes* 31 years old, which isn’t wildly unusual for Drag Race but we usually at least have someone born outside of the 90s – who will make all of those 60s references that Ru so adamantly uses to gatekeep your worth as a drag queen now!? Well, the answer to that question is Jasmine Kennedie
who is only 22, so Ru will fall over in sheer amazement that Jasmine has somehow watched that very obscure film… Beyond The Valley of the Dolls. This entrance look however is giving me a little bit too much Elliott With 2 Ts And No Self-awareness Flamingo Vibes
Which I do not care to be reminded of.
Despite what the show might have you think, Jasmine isn’t the drag daughter of Alyssa Edwards, they’ve seemingly learnt their lesson from the clusterfuck of legacy queens’ daughters being cast in Season 11 and we’re limiting it to one, with Daya Betty being the We-Don’t-Say-Drag-Daughter of Crystal Methyd, and once you get passed the TERF bangs, you can really see it
it’s all in the lip shape, and the delightfully obnoxious Wooooo!-ing. Her name however isn’t a drug reference that the show doesn’t have to awkwardly tiptoe around and instead comes from the fact she is a Type 1 diabetic, and the Drag Race Wiki proudly informs me that “Daya Betty is the first openly Type 1 Diabetic Queen to appear on Drag Race” and it just tickles me that someone is keeping track of that. This does mean there’s a risk that she’d pass out on set, a prospect that Ru was all too keen to know more about as he smelled the potential to recreate the infamous ANTM fainting scene
She has another Emmy to win Daya, chop chop.
As for Daya’s entrance look, I quite liked it
It feels a touch unbalanced with there being so much volume around her shoulders but I do enjoy the sort of catch all Electric Type Pokemon Gijinka-ness of it all – I’ll always like a look that reminds me of the non-smutty side of DeviantArt in the late 2000s.
On completely the other end of the style spectrum we have the pageant excellence of one Angeria Paris VanMichaels, who entered dressed like every woman that goes to Disneyland for their honeymoon but at an 11
It’s always pretty impressive when someone wears an entrance look that could quite easily be worn even on a finale runway – which seems to be a bit of a trend with her as the episode progresses. And then there’s the accent, I can’t wait for her to narrate the entire season. Although, with it being the American series they’ll probably hand that job over to Lady Camden and her small village librarian confessional look
they do love themselves a British affectation.
And lastly there’s Jorgeous, who I genuinely thought would have pronounced her name as “Whore-geous” but apparently we’re just going with “Georgeous”
she’s ridiculously pretty, both in and out of drag
but she very much leads first with the fact she’s a dancing queen, and promptly dubs herself “The Dancing Queen of Texas”
but I think my favourite thing about Jorgeous is just how absolutely minute she is, and it being even more pronounced when she stands amongst the other queens in their standard, ridiculous drag heels while she wears a dainty size 5
5 foot 2 bouncy baby bio girl vibes.
An Entrance Look Ranking
- Angeria’s Minnie Mouse Drag
- Daya Betty’s Raichu Cosplay
- Not Gay Fieri
- Jorgeous’s Little, Tiny, Red Number
- Jasmine Losing a Fight To A Flamingo
- DeJa Skye, The Alleged Pastel Princess
- Lady Camden’s Sticky Torso
Tic Tacky
Much like last week the first Mini Challenge this group of queens must face is a photoshoot, except this time the spinning wheel has been replaced by a giant bowl of a tictacs that Ru reveals to a very confused DeJa Skye in an equally confused mix of references to Mommie Dearest and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition
and thus begins a series of photoshoots in which very few of the queens manage to deliver a particularly flattering photo, least of all Lady Camden who was too busy choking on the buckets of tictacs that the Pit Crew insisted on throwing at her
the decision to keep this photo as one of her best is divinely evil, but not quite as evil as the lingering shot of her clambering out of the giant bowl with a shower of tictacs falling from her arse
but apparently the bowl of tictacs wasn’t absurd enough as for some unknown reason the show has decided that now, amidst his constant antivaxx ravings on Twitter, was the best time to acknowledge the existence of Santino Rice as Maddy finds his hat in the Drag Race version of the Tumblr Ball Pit and is justifiably confused
although, I won’t lie, the hat did cap her look off quite nicely
the queens obviously faced the dilemma of whether to try and play the photoshoot as a sexy pin-up style shoot, which Angeria leaned into with it fitting nicely with her vintage style costume
or just lean into the absurdity of this giant bowl that may well have come from the disparately sized set of CATS (2019), which DeJa did quite well as she went from rolling around it like a rotisserie chicken to just T-posing
I was a little surprised that Jasmine didn’t manage a few better photos, granted her face always looked great but she just kind of forgot to work her flamingo capelet which ended up swallowing her whole
in the end Angeria very deservedly wins the challenge and the £2500 from JJ Malibu, although I do think Daya’s photo was my personal favourite
the Pit Crew however weren’t quite so impressed with Daya’s efforts to be sexy
Rude.
America’s Got… A Whole Lot of Lipsyncing
Much like last week, the queens are taking part in a talent show, and if we thought last week’s lacked a diversity of acts, this week’s was even more one note. Although Jasmine was doing everything in her power to convince us that she was not going to be dancing, she was going to be doing cheerleading. It turns out her cheerleading is indistinguishable from a particularly good Lipsync For Your Life – but to be fair it is kind of hard to pull of a full cheerleading routine as a lone cheerleader, but she’s got stunts for days
I will never not applaud from my bed when a queen whips out a flying spinning splits, it is always impressive and feels very much a part of the Janette Manrara’s Anti-gravitational School of Choreographic Thought. She wasn’t the only one doing cheerleading though as DeJa wanted to showcase that she is a cheer and dance choreographer. She was putting a twist on it though, that twist being that she, like Orion last week, was going to be doing some unprompted character comedy which at this point is just self-flagellation. The whole joke of her routine being that she couldn’t actually do the moves and while I will happily watch a 15 minutes compilation of badly done cartwheels on YouTube and cackle at every single one, when you’re doing a Monique Heart cartwheel on purpose, it kind of loses the funniness
I don’t think a talent show was the right space for this character, I think it would absolutely work in one of the Drag Race advert challenges when you can build more of a narrative around it – but here every joke fell flat, and she nearly did too
I still can’t tell if that stumble was on purpose or not, so maybe well done DeJa, actually.
Jorgeous had by far the most bog-standard lipsync/dance performance of the bunch, but you know when you enter the show trying to pull the Dancing Queen of Texas title out from under Kennedy Davenport’s feet, you’ve kinda gotta justify it and while she’s a very talented performer
I do think she got a little lost in amongst the other, slightly more memorable-even-if-for-the-wrong-reasons routines.
Daya was also giving off a pretty standard lipsync, except she wasn’t doing it sexily so it was inevitably judged much harsher. I didn’t think this was half as bad as the judges made it out to be, especially with their angle being that “it didn’t show enough of Daya’s personality” when I got infinitely more from Daya taking off her hat to reveal the same hat but tiny than I did from anything Jorgeous did in her performance
granted I cannot excuse the fact her choreography amounted to the sort of school talent show literal charades dancing she pulled out when the lyrics hit the “looking flashy in my Mercedes Benz” lyric
but you know, there was a fisting joke in there that usually has RuPaul cackling in her seat and Daya was deigned with a mere stock photo smile
it might have also helped Daya to have had a better outfit because the magician outfit that she wore just felt a little featureless and didn’t really give you anything to focus on
it has the flatness of a Morphsuit.
I did however very much enjoy Alicia Keys trying her best to groove to this performance while Daya was in the midst of waving a balloon around like a massive dick
God bless Alicia Keys’s makeup free face, after the powerhouse of a judging performance from Lizzo last week, this was very much “Go girl, give us nothing!” but you know, Alicia is just a very chill person and so it’s understandable why she probably vibed best with Maddy Morphosis playing the blues on an electric guitar, as did the other queens who definitely weren’t being told to sway to the music at gunpoint
When Maddy first mentioned that she was going to be playing the guitar, I did think she was going to whip out Wonderwall by Oasis – thankfully she had the sense not to do that. I don’t quite know why you would choose to do this as a number on a Drag Race talent show when you know everyone else is going to go the full razzle dazzle, and even more weirdly do it dressed like you’re about to defend someone in court
Lady Lawyer Plays the Blues does sound delightfully like something from 30 Rock though.
While the performance wasn’t particularly exciting and did kind of bring everything to an absolute standstill, she played the guitar well and has to lauded for playing it with her tongue, even if nobody could actually see her doing so.
And now we must return to our regularly scheduled dance programming with Lady Camden’s… ballet number? Kind of? I really don’t know what to make of this routine because, much like anything British, it’s hard to tell how much of it was sincere and how much of it was self-deprecating – because the judges raved about how well she danced, and while I can fully admire anyone being this nimble in a pair of stilettos
she did also do things like this
and it confused me tremendously – not helping was the fact she was dressed in everyone’s go-to first ballet recital outfit and giving off some severe Veronica Green energy
you can decide if that’s a compliment or not.
I didn’t however have any trouble with Angeria’s performance as she followed Kornbread in the trend of absolutely storming to victory with one hell of an original track – Angeria’s being slightly more in the vein of a usual RuGirl song and featuring a very catchy hook. Who amongst us hasn’t been saying “Check!” since saturday morning? And of course she pageanted up the number as much as she could by first emerging in the staple textured coat of unending tulle
only to then remove it and dance down an absolute storm – and the judges certainly couldn’t tell her that they didn’t end up getting to know her by the end of the performance because the entire final chorus is just “Call me Angie” being sung through a vocoder and I loved every second of it.
Signature Style
With the theme of the episode mostly being “show us who you are”, we follow in the footsteps of the first episode with a Sickening Signature Style prompt – so of course Angeria showed up looking her absolute most pageant in a gown that most queens would dream of wearing for their crowning
that burgundy colour on her is absolutely divine and there’s really not much more to say beyond the fact she just looks incredible.
Also going for some high octane glamour was Jasmine in her *BEYOND* The Valley of the Dolls look
she does look absolutely incredible and I feel really bad because just the way Michelle and RuPaul have already started talking about her like she’s some sort of pop culture savant has instantly alienated her to me – I’m really over the whole “You’re under 25 and you know who Cynthia Myers is, you’ve done your hooooooooomework!” thing and then both of them being completely blindsided and clueless as to who Moira Rose is.
Much like her talent show performance, Jorgeous got a little lost in the mix, not least of all because she literally came dressed as the backdrop
it’s very pretty and stoned to the nines, but it isn’t particularly memorable in the grand scheme of things, especially when you’re competing for attention against Maddy Morphosis as a beheaded Marie Antoinette
do I wish the dress was maybe a little less milkmaid and a little more baroque? Yeah, sure – although Maddy could have been making the niche historical reference that Marie Antoinette had an entire fake dairy built for her where she would go and pretend to be a milkmaid for a couple of hours – truly the original Dairy Queen. The funniest thing about this look is that there’s already internet drama over it as some queen is claiming Maddy stole the idea from her as though Marie Antoinette holding her own head isn’t a pretty popular children’s Halloween costume, or that we didn’t just have a very similar look from Adriana on Canada’s Drag Race
Like girl… sit down, you do not own Marie Antoinette, the guillotine owned Marie Antoinette.
Lady Camden was leaning into her British roots and channeling the rave scene of London with her neon pastel peacock
I do really like this, I don’t know if she really needed to have the peacock headpiece being quite so literal but I also won’t begrudge a bedazzled peacock head – I did love that Alicia said that it looked like her favourite Pokemon character, a compliment that neither Lady Camden or her peacock passenger looked overly enthused by
but it is nice to know that Alicia Keys is a Ho-Oh stan.
Daya was going with her sort of vaguely punk-ish aesthetic with a sort of Burberry meets Westwood ribboned hobble dress
It is a dress that mostly relies on you to be impressed by its construction, with the whole thing being held together by the ribbons, unfortunately it had quite badly popped at the back
even besides the split, I don’t quite know why she would choose to wear this for this runway – she must have known she was going to be in the bottom 2 and therefore lipsyncing, an activity that a hobble dress does everything in its power to not allow you to do – she must have had *something* she could have swapped in.
And lastly we have DeJa Skye in her silk and lace
I’m never going to be a fan of a lacey fabric used like this – also the black is too disparate from the blue, even with the black details, it feels too much like two dresses being Frankenstein’d together. And a necklace wouldn’t have gone amiss.
A Sickening Signature Drag Runway Ranking
- Angeria’s Fine Wine
- Jasmine’s Knowledge of the 70s
- Lady Camden’s Peacock Raver
- Maddy Antoinette
- Jorgeous’s Perfect Camouflage
- DeJa’s Frankenstein’d Glamour
- Daya’s Misguided Hobble Dress
It was pretty obvious that Angeria was going to win the moment the judges started singing along to her song after only hearing it once and true to form, the Angeria Domination continues. As for the bottom, DeJa was obviously going to be punished for doing bad character comedy outside of a bad character comedy challenge and then it was either Maddy or Daya joining her but with Daya’s runway look pretty much falling to pieces and Alicia Keys ready to fight for Maddy’s blues performance the bottom 2 came down to a fight between DeJa and Daya – which does make trying to remember names a lot easier.
Fallin’ Off
The lipsync song for the week was of course Alicia Keys’s Fallin’, which certainly didn’t give us the fun of last week’s lipsync but both queens brought the drama that I think the song deserves – or at least as much of it as they could because Daya was very much hampered by the fact she was in a hobble dress – they could have thrown her a bone and let her change rather than have her trying to walk around the stage with it slowly being pulled further and further down her torso like someone frustratedly trying to get a refresher out of its wrapper in a heatwave
but she did what she could, what with her rather meagre use of fake blood
which I’m not sure the judges could even see given the distance and the washing out that the lighting was doing, but I liked it – if there’s one thing I wish for more of on Drag Race it’s fake blood.
But it was hard to compete against DeJa who just managed to find that soulful sweet spot, even if the whole thing did start a little rocky – I wasn’t quite sure where she was going with it when she dramatically lifted and dropped her demi-coat to the floor
I too am constantly surprised by the concept of gravity.
It was very much a win for DeJa as Daya very quickly ran out of things to do on stage and understandbly couldn’t bring herself to masturbate a balloon on stage in front of Alicia Keys for a second time, and so she becomes the second queen to sashay away and looked like she’d just fought a bear
I’m really sad, I think she could have been a very interesting competitor to have at least had around for another couple of weeks.
And so, 13 queens remain as we enter a ball challenge with 42 looks OH GOD HELP ME
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