I just think she’s neat.

welcome to the The Judas Lipsync Wasn’t As Good As I Always Wanted It To Be Support Group, we meet every monday, snacks are provided.

Soulful

We got a “proper” mini challenge this week! It didn’t count for anything, I was potentially expecting them to ruin Shea Coulee’s life by announcing that it was worth several Legendary Legend Stars which they would subsequently be giving to Jaida and Yvie, but really this was all about putting Bryce and Bruno in yet more questionable outfits

I do not like that Bryce looks like someone in a porno playing a Donald Trump parody. BURN THE WIG.
They weren’t the only ones looking insane though as the queens had 15 minutes to get into Disco drag with the results being suitably deranged, highlights include Trinity looking like Donatella Versace and Hilda Ogden had had a baby

and then Monet desperately trying not to trip over her wide footed Priscella-esque disco bellbottoms because she clearly wasn’t wearing the heels that they were meant to be worn with

but really, this dance break was about testing the waters as to how much they were going to have to pay the editors to swing the lipsyncs Raja’s and Jinkx’s ways

SOMEONE CALL THELMA SCHOONMAKER, STAT!

The Runway Winners

The final runway was the standard call for something big and glamorous, which basically meant it was the exact same prompt as the first episode and in most cases I think their Week 1 runway outfits would have been better suited to the finale, but everyone still looked pretty damn phenomenal, as did Ru whose outfit this week might have been my favourite of the season

I shan’t acknowledge the nightmare circus of a lipsync that it was subjected to, I simply did not see it, STRIKE IT FROM THE RECORD.

Kicking off the procession of queens was Jaida who was doing a nod to the black Hollywood actresses of the 40s

she looks gorgeous and I’m glad the beaded almost kimono sleeves are there to make the silhouette a little more interesting than just being a beautiful beaded dress, and I really love Jaida in a fingerwave, she looks immaculate, I have no notes, except maybe a glossier lip?

And then the runway was pretty demolished, eaten and ended when Raja stepped out in what I’m going to say is the best outfit of the season

it’s like 1 part McQueen, 1 part Dilophosaurus, 1 part sea slug and a dash of Avatar 2: Wet, Wet, Wet for good measure but what truly sold it for me was her makeup

I really like that it’s kind of subtle against the outfit, I think a lot of queens would have been tempted to try to make the makeup as dramatic as the outfit which I think would have detracted from the look as a whole, but with this she looks like an Elder God that’s about to crush humanity, and if she could hurry up with that, that’d be great.

The Vivienne had the tough job of following Raja’s high fashion dart frog of an outfit and… I liked her face

and you know, considering she just about surgically staples it back every week, I’m glad it’s worth it. The dress is kind of just a bit nothingish for me. Given that she’s name dropped Vivienne Westwood at every opportunity she got, I was expecting something a little more in that glam faux-punk aesthetic that a few of her other runway fell into and I found myself longing for the wild, big swing that was her Occult Aylesbury Duck

go big or go home.

I was curious to see what Yvie would do for the finale runway considering the last time she did this rodeo she walked out as a three titted alien

a little part of me was hoping she’d up it to a 4 titted alien, but that does also border on a bovine fursuit and not enough time as passed since Symone wore the custom made Marco Marco fursuit, so I’ll gladly take Yvie dressed as a cake that looked like it was made out of the bedspread of a 5 year old girl

I’m mostly just really impressed by the engineering of this and I hope there’s a cut of her walking the runway with the trolley wheels very loudly squeaking along the runway the entire time. And as campy and silly as the outfit is, Yvie looked so beautiful, which is weird to say considering her lips were a trypophobic nightmare and she was wearing a slimed Gruzzle as a hat

I have to periodically remind myself that Maths Rescue was a game I played obsessively as a kid.

Jinkx was next and while I think the whole suit of armour gown is a little played out at this point, there was some really beautiful and intricate details on her armour which at least told me more of a story, even if that story was “I payed a lot of money for this Game of Thrones cosplay for Comic-Con before the show lost all of its good will, please appreciate it.”

I do wish the skirt had had a little more stiffness to it and was maybe less blue and more grey, there’s just something about it that doesn’t feel like it goes with the rest of the outfit, but I loved her hair, it had a real 1940s Sword-and-Sandal feel to it

I was surprised there weren’t more queens passive aggressively wearing crowns for this runway – only she and Raja did, and look what happened.

After Jinkx was Monet who just ATE this runway – in a world of terrible nude illusions, this was absolutely flawless and it really needed to be – where does one even find steel-capped nude illusion boots?

she very much said she had taken inspiration from Ruth E. Carter’s work on Black Panther and the piercings and the patterns are very obviously referencing the scarification that many West African tribes use. I really just can’t describe how impressed I am this look and all the details – I wish I could get a better screenshot, but I really loved the corset detail

and her makeup was really cool – much like Raja she did a great job of not going too far where a lot of other queens might have.

The biggest shock of the night was that Shea Coulee wasn’t wearing a Joshuan Aponte creation, but you know a 450 pattern piece gown by Christopher John Rogers is the next best thing

I really love the colours of this and something about it was giving me tropical butterfly fish

I do maybe wish she had forgone the mid-tier and just had that very structured peplum down into the mermaid skirt, I think it might have made the whole thing look a little more dynamic, I’m also shocked she didn’t wear the big gold bangles that by this point everyone has worn at least once.

And lastly we have Trinity in a very romantic, wafty gown that somehow didn’t come with a 20 foot train

I really love the top, the fallen sleeves and split bodice look like an outfit worn by someone alongside Fabio on the cover of an erotic novel. I do wish she had maybe had a full skirt though, or at least just closed it a little more. But I REALLY loved the Renaissance girl hair she was wearing and honestly, as rude as this sounds, I might have preferred the whole look from behind

I think it has a better sense of drama about it.

She Done Already Done Had Herses

We’ll start with the Non-top 4 as they compete for £50,000 and in the usual Lipsync Smackdown fashion, the pairings were being decided by Lord of the Wheel, Calix and his silver speedos

and the first matchup was The Vivienne and Yvie Oddly, with The Vivienne being chosen first and therefore getting to randomly pick the song choice from 1 of two boxes: The Platinum Box or The Brass Box, and with the Platinum Plunger being a very different colour to The Platinum Box AND The Brass Box being gold, we can safely deduce that RuPaul is precious metal colour blind

and from that supposedly brass box came Salt’n’Pepa’s Push It.

Pushing It

In their last lipsync, Yvie very much got shafted with the Dolly Parton lipsync, so a really fun bit of 80s hip-hop felt like a much more even footing, although truly I think Yvie won the moment she dressed up as art teacher Clair Huxtable

it’s just hard to get as excited by Natalie Portman’s least interesting costume in Black Swan

and you know, it was kind of A Choice to replicate the dance stylings of one Baga Chipz

yeah, me too Jaida.

But it was maybe an even bigger choice when she looked like Ed Balls doing his Gangnam Style Salsa

I did get the feeling that The Vivienne was wanting to do that thing Ginger Minj always does in that she waits for her lipsync opponent to do an impressive dance move and then does it very badly for comedic effect (it’s not a great tactic for finale lipsyncs), except Yvie was biding her time so The Vivienne just had to execute bad dance moves anyway, which made the fact Yvie whipped out an impressive flip right after The Vivienne did one with all the grace of me in the annual year 8 gymnastics PE lesson which resulted in her having a severe chiropractic emergency in the corner of the screen

and the only time The Vivienne got to do The Ginger Schtick was after Yvie did The Robot

which you know, isn’t as great because it’s The Robot.

It was a pretty decisive win for Yvie, as I’ve said I don’t think really leaning into comedic “ineptitude” does a queen many favours in a finalé lipsync, so Yvie advances to the final lipsync against either Raja or Jaida and The Vivienne got a very nice scepter which might be worth a small fortune if Drag Race France is to be believed?

unless they pulled a Liz Truss and got it from Clair’s.

Raja vs Jaida

Raja and Jaida were lipsyncing to Deniece Williams’s “Let’s Hear It For The Boy” which according to the subtitlers was a very dramatic family showdown

for clarification, she VERY obviously said “infant baby” but when has WoW ever thought about hiring a competent captioning team? [exasperated sigh in French]

Not a lot really happened in this lipsync, it was much more of just the two of them really vibing, which honestly made for a great time and I think this might have genuinely been my favourite lipsync of the night, even if Raja maybe moved about 2 feet the entire time and Jaida was dressed in an outfit that looks a bit like she had to make it during that duct tape challenge in season 3

while Raja was wearing that distinctly Raja silhouette

she’s the paper doll of Drag Race.

I had thought that Jaida would win this because narratively the show has felt like it was pulling towards either giving Yvie or Jaida a big final win but I wasn’t unsurprised that Raja won it, meaning Jaida got the complimentary scepter

and so it’s a showdown between Raja and Yvie.

The Queen of She Done Already Done Had Herses

For the compensatory $50,000 prize Yvie and Raja had to lipsync to Sisters are Doing It For Themselves by The Eurythmics and Aretha Franklin which is a top tier lipsync song, but much like Let’s Hear It For The Boy, it’s much more of a ~vibe~ which definitely favoured Raja a little more, but it wasn’t like Yvie pulling out a few tricks was the cursed performance that heavily pregnant Kenya Michaels flying about the stage like a banshee while Latrice, also heavily pregnant, sang Natural Woman to her fake unborn baby was.

I really liked the outfits they both wore for this lipsync, Raja in her sort of Chanel Tusken Raider dress just looked really pretty

and I enjoyed Yvie’s polar opposite campy, bra-bearing powersuit, it certainly kept your eyes on her

and I was a little surprised that Yvie didn’t win this because we do know how much RuPaul loves a wig reveal

although it was probably a mistake to use the wig that Michelle gave the one negative critique in the entire show to

the queens are all on record as saying that negative critiques were given and they’re all a little frustrated that they got edited out which was *APPARENTLY* done because Raja cussed out Michelle on the mainstage for daring to critique her when her “only accomplishment is being the best friend of the show’s host”, which, if (however unlikely) is actually true, makes the fact Raja won this and was given $50,000 for it even funnier

although I do think Yvie actually won the lipsync, but judging by the stories she’s posted on Instagram since the finale, she seems kind of relieved that she didn’t because she hasn’t really enjoyed that the show focused so much on her EDS, when she felt her bigger struggle was how she and her style of drag fits into the pantheon of Drag Race winners and I can see how she would feel patronised and a little used, but I hope that the relationships she built with the other queens during this season gave her what she needed

because I very much enjoy her as a winner and face of Drag Race.

The Queen of Queens

Exactly the same format as before, Calix spins the wheel – Jinkx and Shea are paired up, Shea promptly dies inside because she knows exactly where this is going

and they select a box containing Judas by Lady Gaga and for a little bit everyone is excited because ABSOLUTE BOP OF A TUNE.

Jinkx vs Shea

I was very excited about the Judas lipsync, it’s one of my favourite Gaga songs, however I’m not sure it’s one that lends itself very well to a spontaneous lipsync, which is why I do wish they’d change the finale format and allow the queens to pick a song (or assign them songs) and really build a performance around them like they did the Season 12 finale (given how much everyone loved it, it’s BONKERS to me that they haven’t made it the norm) instead of making them cobble together whatever performance outfits they had left by the end of this marathon run, so we had Jinkx dressed as a vampire that runs a very successful bordello in the 1800s

and Shea dressed as… Uma Thurman working as a chef gradually turning into a werewolf?

I’m kind of obsessed with this outfit, I don’t understand it even slightly but I appreciate the big swing, it was a little distracting and I do remember the fact she looked like she was starring in a broadway production of Childs Play more than anything about her performance, except for when she was clearly trying to remember the Judas choreography off the top of her head without having access to YouTube

a valiant attempt.

Jinkx on the other hand brought out a number of Drag Race lipsync staples, dramatically revealing to her very unsexy shapewear within seconds of the song starting

which I’m sure Australian-Michelle would not have been happy about

and then of course she dramatically twirled herself across the stage which did look pretty great with the dress

but the highlight for me was the moment she went a bit Gottmik with the whole thing and turned away from the judges only to then just jump around to face them again, almost immediately, like she was playing peek-a-boo

which had Carson going through some sort of religious experience

I, and I don’t think anyone, was at all surprised Jinkx won, moving on to the final lipsync while Shea collected her commemorative Drag Race scepter

her run was a little weird on the season but her run throughout Drag Race has been a little weird so I feel like we got the full Shea Coulee experience in the end.

Monet vs Trinity

Considering they spent so much time showing us how Monet and Trinity playing their own game of Survivor in the Werk Room, I’m glad the producers at least managed to get them a lipsync showdown, with the deciding song between the two of them being Pink’s “So What” which I’m guessing was the song Trinity was gunning for because she was dressed like Space Opera Villain Pink

and Monet was just dressed in pink

honestly though, if I looked half as good as Monet does in a bodysuit, I would simply never wear anything else.

Lipsync-wise, a strange one, mostly because of the bit in the middle where Monet started riding Trinity which they had to crop around really awkwardly

Trinity eating Jaida’s ass though? That’s fine.

Monet was the clear winner for me which is hard to admit because she did do the air guitar in the middle and I do believe doing any sort of air instrument during a lipsync should be an instant trapdooring

Silky Nutmeg Ganache did not make a guitar out of pizza boxes in her hotel room the night before a lipsync so that you could do windmill arms – but at least it was during an actual guitar solo, and of course she had her splits which were a little crunchy

and I only say “crunchy” because they seemed to really mic up the slapping noise when she made contact with the floor, it honestly made my eyes water a little bit. And so Monet advanced to the futile Lipsync Smackdown against Jinkx while Trinity got the novelty scepter and pranced out to some [warm music]

I think we’re all just relieved that RuPaul made a decision.

The Big Swish (Swish)

And so it all came down to Jinkx Monsoon or Monet X Change and the most baffling song choice for a finale since Trixie and Kennedy struggled their way through Wrecking Ball for some reason, as they were dealt Swish Swish by Katy Perry. Did it have more cultural impact in the US? Because I think I only ever heard it being played in Pure Gym here in the UK. But the two of them put in a valiant effort nonetheless, even if the sceptered peanut gallery looked thoroughly underwhelmed the entire time

with Monet recreating scenes from the already incredibly dated music video by doing the most lackadaisical flossing and pretending to play basketball

if you had asked me to place a bet on who would floss during this routine, I would have said JInkx and I would have meant she would whip out a string and go at her teeth instead of attempting Nicki’s verse. Instead Jinkx tested the limits of the editors abilities by not actually doing much except relying on the fact the lyrics mention tigers and she was wearing leopard print for comedic effect

and of course acting as a natural barrier to extensive periods of Monet’s vogueing session

I think it’s pretty fair to say that Monet gave the better lipsync performance – she worked that stage like it was worth every bit of that $200,000 and looked utterly gorgeous while doing it

I did love that she kicked off the whole thing by applying her lipstick while singing purely because it reminded me of Milan doing the same thing except 100% more desperately and with all the energy of a woman in a made for TV movie having a mental breakdown

so yeah, Monet won this lipsync but ultimately they were taking the season as a whole into account which did stack more in favour of Jinkx (depending on which fan-made grading system you use of course) – I would have been happy with either of them winning, I find them to both be very charismatic and watchable queens but I was thrilled to see Jinkx getting the crown

the season very much felt like a love letter to the early years of the show and with Raja and Jinkx being the earliest two we’ll probably get because Tyra has retired, Bebe did All Stars 3 (she can come back, I guess) and Sharon Needles not getting welcomed back anytime soon, I think it was a pretty fitting end.

The whole season was great, I’ll be curious to see if they extend the format to regular All Stars seasons or if the non-elimination process will be reserved for All Winners only. I’ve loved writing about the season, I will be writing recaps for Down Under – I was sad to miss out on doing Canada’s Drag Race but it started during a bad time for me and I’m not playing catch up now, but rest assured I’m Team Vivian, Gisele and Irma (also slightly relieved I’m not having to write about it because oh my God the drag names… it’s like the season was made by a Drag Name Generator.)
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