This week’s RuPaul’s Drag Race mini-challenge is called “Spill the T,” and hoo boy, is this an episode about spilling tea. From the fallout of the Who Should Go Home Tonight and Why? session last week to Loosey LaDuca’s dramatic final speech on the show, this is a group full of queens who are fully out of their congenial eras.
Speaking of which, let’s start with that mini-challenge! Hosted by Ru and Anastasia Beverly Hills’s Norvina—who strangely becomes a Drag Race reference-reciting Cylon this week; “Sickening, no?”—the challenge is akin to a Majority Rules challenge on Big Brother or Touchy Subjects on Survivor. The queens are asked to identify who among them exemplifies certain superlatives best: shadiest, most likely to steal your man, most likely to have a sugar daddy and so on. It’s meant to throw gasoline on the fire that is these queens’ existing conflicts, and while the queens mostly take it in stride, there are some hilarious moments.
Mistress Isabelle Brooks is voted funniest, shadiest, hairiest and also most likely to steal your cosmetics. “Shady, hairy and a thief,” Ru summarizes. Loosey is voted the queen who thinks she’s the smartest—including Loosey voting herself as such. And in the dramatic final question, everyone is asked who will go home next, and they all say Loosey. Including Loosey herself! Give the queen credit: she plays this game well, and she wins a supply of Anastasia cosmetics for her trouble.
But more than that, she earns the power to pick partners for the queens this week. That’s right, it’s the makeover challenge, and it’s teachers in the spotlight this season! Five educators get the chance to be made over into drag queens. And while partner assignment has mostly been random in recent seasons’ makeover tasks, Loosey gets the chance to assign everyone this week. How will she play the pairings—and will revenge be on her mind?
For the most part, Loosey does play fairly, giving herself, Mistress and Anetra exactly who you’d expect for them. When it comes to Sasha Colby and Luxx Noir London, though, Loosey assigns Luxx’s desired partner, the one Black teacher (Mrs. March-Banks, an absolute icon), to Sasha. Luxx instead gets the delightful Mrs. Reyes, but she sees this as an attempt at sabotage on Loosey’s part.
You can see the warning signs flashing for Luxx as soon as they all break off into their pairs. Everyone else is seen bonding with their partner—Mistress and Ms. Tang are a particular highlight—while Luxx basically immediately gets to work on her garment. While, yes, the judges will only see the results on the runway at the end of the task, there is something to be said for making sure your partner is comfortable in these challenges. You need them to trust you to guide them well on the runway, and as we’ll see later, Mrs. Reyes (a.k.a. Asia Azul) seems uncomfortable during hers and Luxx’s walk.
Moreover, I’m surprised that Luxx, who has been acutely aware of Drag Race as a TV show all season long, doesn’t understand the importance of these werk-room connection moments in terms of the narrative. They do come together a bit later, as Luxx is putting Mrs. Reyes’s makeup on, but it’s hardly the type of chemistry we see between the other queens and their partners. Luxx has said on Twitter that she could explain what was happening here that we didn’t see, but that she’s choosing not to. With my usual disclaimer that any edit on this show is the product of multiple authors, I’m looking askance at this. I think it’s very fair to say that this was not Luxx’s challenge, and that’s okay. She’s done well all season long, and one stumble near the finale has hardly ruined other queens. In fact, if you look at some of the all-time great winners—Jinkx Monsoon, Bob the Drag Queen—their only stumble came near the finale.
That said … it’s a pretty bad stumble on Luxx’s part. We’ll talk about the other makeovers in a second, but suffice to say that Luxx is a distant fifth of five this week. Her makeover of Mrs. Reyes, yes, does transform her into a Jennifer Coolidge look-alike. But the details are all wrong, especially the limp wig and a dress that has no real relation to Luxx’s own. There’s no arguing with Luxx’s bottom two placement this week, and she knows it.
Credit: Courtesy MTV
Joining her in the bottom two is Loosey, which is both entirely expected in terms of the season, and also kind of a shock when looking at the makeovers. To be fair, everyone else does very well, so it’s hard to say who should’ve been there over Loosey. But she pulls off one hell of a makeover on her partner—the newly christened Lala LaDuca—making them look basically exactly the same. If I have a knock (and it’s not about the shoes, Ross Mathews), it’s that the dresses are a bit too simple when you look at the other queens’ outfits.
Mistress puts herself and her partner in Mae West-esque gowns, complete with matching feather boas. They have the best runway presentation, complete with a flourish while exiting—they really feel like sister grande dames. Are the dresses the most complex ever? Maybe not! But Mistress aces the makeover, with Madam Thang’s mug beat within an inch of its life. Once again, Mistress is in contention for the win—but once again, she misses out.
Shockingly, however, Sasha does not beat Mistress. Despite by far the best makeover in my eyes, complete with an amazing padding job for both herself and her partner (now Ferocity Colby, a fierce-ass name), she does not take the win this week. I have many a thought about what this means for Sasha and the show, which I’ll get into in the power ranking, but I can’t remember a time I was this shocked by a win. (I was befuddled by Aura Mayari winning the girl groups challenge, but not this floored.) Even in the silly-but-meaningless Lip Sync for Your Life that the teachers do to “Champion,” Ferocity turns it out! She’d have beaten several of the girls in lip syncs this season!
Instead, the win goes to Anetra, as she snatches her second victory in a row and her third overall. Even as a Stanetra, this win is bizarre to me. While, yes, Anetra does wonders on her partner Alektra’s mug, and she whips up some impressive looks on the fly, the transformation and presentation aren’t nearly as strong as Sasha’s. I’d maybe even put them below Mistress’s, to be honest. The fact that Anetra takes this win makes me wonder if she’s indeed our frontrunner going into the finale—but her relatively low-key edit in this episode also has me doubting. Much to consider about how this win both happens and is presented, but at the end of the day, congrats to Anetra—and Alektra, who wins $5,000 for her efforts!
Credit: Courtesy MTV
The lip sync this week is to guest judge and Secret Celebrity Drag Race winner Hayley Kiyoko’s “For the Girls.” I’ve never heard the song before, and it’s kind of a bop! The queens also may not have heard the song before, though, as neither Loosey nor Luxx has the best grasp on the lyrics. (It was released in May of last year, which means depending on filming dates, it may not even have been out when this episode taped.) However, there’s not really a contest here. Luxx practically teleports across the stage, overshadowing Loosey at every turn. Luxx shantays, and Loosey sashays away.
But hold on, folks! This episode is not done yet. Loosey’s final words to the camera are a barnburner of a monologue, as she once again expresses her shock that she was in the bottom, much less that she’s going home. I feel for her when she says she wishes she could go on the rest of this journey and be in the finale, but just as quickly I cackle when she says, “Mistress put her girl in a stretch dress.” Loosey! C’mon! You know that presentation is better than just “a stretch dress.” Ah well. Wouldn’t be Loosey’s departure without some final bits of delusion. And in finally getting angry and letting it show, Loosey did exactly what Luxx and Mistress have been wanting from her all season long.
Now we’re on to the final four, and presumably this will be our crew for the finale—but wait! In the preview for next week, Ru says we’re going back to Seasons 1-8 (and, accidentally, Season 12) rules with a top three. I’m skeptical of this, for reasons I’ll explain in the final thoughts, but let’s pretend it is for a second. Who could possibly go out of this top four? Certainly not Sasha or Mistress, who have been such major characters all season long. And Luxx may have stumbled here, but I can’t see her performing under par in a Rumix. Anetra’s been in the bottom a couple of times, yes, but she also now has three wins—and her most recent bottom appearance produced the lip sync of the season.
It’s going to be a fight to the finish if there really is an elimination next week. In the words of Mistress before the lip sync this week: “Bitch, we’re about to see a show.”
Untucking our final thoughts
✨ Salina EsTitties left a pointed mirror message to Loosey, and according to her appearance at Roscoe’s in Chicago, Salina’s exit was even more dramatic than what we saw. I’ll be talking about Salina more in this week’s edition of Wig!, but suffice to say she’s been vocal about how she feels post-elimination in many ways.
✨ Every bit of interaction between the queens and their partners is so cute. I particularly love the walk-off that Mistress’s partner challenges Loosey’s to—and Loosey and Anetra are right, Lala LaDuca really does eat. I’ve written about this before, but it really is a marvel how the show turned makeover episodes from the consistently most uncomfortable of the season into true highlights.
✨ Luxx gets in her own head a bit this week regarding Loosey’s choice of makeover partner. Loosey herself admits in Untucked that she picked without Luxx’s best interest in mind, but it falls on Luxx to let that go and get her head in the game. Instead, with only a couple of exceptions, she mostly talks about her partner as an obstacle in her way during the competition. And as mentioned above in the recap, instead of taking the time to connect with her (as Mistress notes), she fixates on creating the outfits. For all that Luxx claims she’s going to triumph over Loosey’s machinations this week—and she ultimately beats her in the lip sync—it feels like Luxx does let her frenemy get in her head.
✨ I’m not sure I’ve ever screamed louder at a single word on television than I did as Sasha’s partner Ferocity says her diva inspiration is Leiomy. Absolute taste. Ferocity is a queen! Revive Legendary!
✨ When the queens are counting up wins, Loosey says she has “two main challenge and three mini-challenge” victories. Anetra, in confessional, finally says it: she’s not sure those minis count!
✨ Mrs. Reyes, you’re such a queen, but let’s please get you watching The White Lotus! Get her a copy of Best in Show! We cannot, in the Year of Our Lord 2023, not know who Jennifer Coolidge is.
✨ “Good luck, and don’t flunk it up!” A line so nice, Ru uses it twice!
✨ So let’s talk about this supposed final three. To me, it was surprising to even hear Luxx in a confessional this week insist that someone must be going home at top five, when just last season we had a top five finale. The idea that the show is going to chop down to three queens out of an initial 16, and forego Lip Sync for the Crown with perhaps the strongest final four in lip syncs we’ve ever seen, strikes me as odd. I’d bet good money this is a fakeout, and that for the first time all season, next week we won’t see an elimination.
The next episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race will air Friday, March 31, at 8 p.m. EDT on MTV in the U.S. and on Crave in Canada. Check back every Monday after new episodes for our recaps and power rankings, and subscribe to our drag newsletter Wig! for exclusive Drag Race content delivered straight to your inbox every Tuesday afternoon.
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