Talk show challenges have come in many forms on Drag Race. Off the top of my head, I can think of the interview challenge with Chaz Bono and Georgia Holt on RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 6. Then there was the morning show challenge in Season 9, plus a similar task on Drag Race UK Season 2. One of my favourites, though I know it’s a controversial one, is the Pink Table Talk challenge from All Stars 6. In all of these, the queens are tested on a pretty wide range of skills: How well can you keep a show going? How effortlessly can you charm a guest you’re interviewing? Can you go with the flow if things go wrong? Can you be vulnerable, but not too heavy? It’s a deceptively difficult challenge, and I like seeing how queens respond to it.
By and large, the Canada’s Drag Race Season 6 crew handles “The Shade,” a drag queen take on The View or The Real, with aplomb, They’re split into three groups, each becoming responsible for one “segment” of the show. Dulce, Karamilk and Saltina Shaker take on the show-opening “The Realness,” a chance to connect over general life topics. Then there’s “Tea Time,” a celebrity gossip segment that Eboni La’Belle, Mya Foxx and Van Goth handle. Finally, there’s an interview with guest judge Kiesza in “Couchside Kiki,” handled by PM, Sami Landri and Velma Jones.
There’s remarkably little drama in group or segment selection, although Dulce does try to claim that Karamilk and Saltina didn’t really want her in their team. This is immediately dismissed by Karamilk in confessional as “not that serious” and by Saltina to Dulce’s face as not mattering, but Dulce says her feelings do matter. (I would have more sympathy for Dulce if she weren’t inventing this issue entirely out of nowhere—if anything, Dulce is the one who didn’t want to work with them, as she was clearly initially trying to work with Eboni and Mya.)
This minor moment of drama presages which group will struggle in the challenge—and I do mean which single group. Although this challenge is not judged in teams, and the top three feature two queens from one segment and one more from another, the entire bottom three comes from Dulce’s group. If there’s one thing the talk show challenge tests more than anything else, it’s group chemistry. From the jump, it’s clear that it’s just not there with the Realness trio.
Kiesza joins the judging panel this week, while Brooke Lynn Hytes brings out her inner Detox for a black-and-white runway look Credit: Courtesy Bell Media
We’ll start with them, since the challenge itself does as well. You can see the train derailing as Saltina says that she wants to showcase “a more serious side” of herself in this challenge. While it’s true that vulnerability and a willingness to open up are important, never in a drag competition like this should you think that “serious” is the target. Drag Race wants to find a star entertainer, not a lecturer. But that’s exactly what we get out of the Realness segment: no energy, no charisma and just a lot of queens monologuing to themselves. Where’s the chemistry, the banter?
I hold up Eureka!, A’keria C. Davenport and Trinity K. Bonet in Pink Table Talk as the greatest example of this: they were talking about serious things, and did open up, but also brought a lightness and fun to the proceedings. It was exciting to see them in this format! People were immediately calling for WOW Presents Plus to make their version of Pink Table Talk a real series! That’s not because of how serious they took the material, but how enjoyable and entertaining they were to watch.
Much more enjoyable are the Tea Time trio, with Eboni really holding court as the best. Later in the episode, Brooke Lynn Hytes will say she was “made for TV,” and I couldn’t agree more. Be it in this challenge or in her confessionals, Eboni is just eminently watchable, fully herself in a way that makes her one of the most appealing queens of the season. Mya and Van are both good as well—I screamed at Van bringing up Season 13’s Joey Jay when talking about Brooke Lynn being spotted in drag without a wig—but Eboni’s the star of the show.
The Couchside Kiki trio nails their segment, and two of them ultimately join Eboni in contention for the win. Not only are they the most dressed for the part—ironic, Sami notes later, considering they’re the most “weirdo” queens of the lot—but their personalities are a perfect blend together. Van says during segment selection that a three-on-one interview could get chaotic easily, but Sami perfectly moderates the conversation and keeps it moving. PM also connects with Kiesza over them both being dancers, and asks some really good questions. Kiesza is clearly incredibly comfortable with the three of them, and by my estimation, it’s the most successful segment of the challenge.
Sami Landri, PM, and Velma Jones charm guest judge Kiesza in the talk show challenge Credit: Courtesy Bell Media
At the makeup mirrors, we get to see our clown trio from the Couchside Kiki form an alliance, while Dulce opens up about being in the military and still doing drag. Most affecting in this portion of the episode is Van coming out as HIV-positive and reckoning with that in her look for this week’s “A Perp Walk to Remember” runway category. Van’s diagnosis is still fresh, and I get the sense that she’s still very much reckoning with it. But I admire her willingness to not only speak about it openly, but incorporate it into her art. Much like when Ongina came out as HIV-positive back in the very first season of Drag Race ever, it takes real courage to talk about in a format like this, and their visibility is so effective at battling stigma.
Speaking of the runway: this is a case where the interpretations vary wildly from one queen to the next. Some go quite serious, like Van’s (gorgeous, love the red chain) and PM’s take on the Toronto bathhouse riots from the 1980s (as Brooke Lynn herself puts it, gorgeous and disgusting). Then there are queens who go with more of a fun, campy take on the category, like Dulce’s shoplifting look, Karamilk’s bank robbery look and Velma’s strange maple syrup look. It’s actually somewhat difficult to evaluate the runways against each other, simply because the interpretations are so disparate. What Dulce is trying to accomplish is so different from what van is, for instance, so it’s hard to compare apples to oranges.
By and large, though, I don’t think the runways play much of a role in deciding the top and bottom three this week. Dulce’s whole team must fight for the Golden Beaver, while Sami edges PM and Eboni out for her first maxi-challenge win of the season. It’s a great moment for Sami, and a richly deserved win. Who she will save, though, is a bit of an open question. Yes, Saltina is the only one of the bottom three to be making her debut there, but judging solely on the challenge itself, Karamilk was probably the best of a bad crop.
Van, for her part, admits in confessional that she wants Saltina to have to lip sync. If we take Van’s claim that she really saw Star Doll as bigger competition than PM a couple weeks ago, then the frontrunner’s Golden Beaver MO becomes clear: she wants to send the biggest threats to the lip sync regardless of challenge performance. (Granted, I don’t think Van actually saw Star as more of a threat than PM, but I have to go off what she tells us.) The one queen who seems to be guaranteed to lip sync is Dulce, although she does remind Sami that Saltina once failed to give Sami the Beaver, while unlike Karamilk, Dulce did not argue for Sami to have to lip sync.
Karamilk and Dulce’s double dip in their Lip Sync for Your Life makes for a tremendous moment Credit: Courtesy Bell Media
Still, Sami’s request that the bottom three make their case is a sign that she’s taking this duty seriously, and she indeed saves Saltina. With the queen with the strongest track record safe, it becomes a battle between Dulce and Karamilk to Kiesza’s “Dancing and Crying.” This is a pretty great lip sync, honestly! Dulce moves well, but there’s something just so natural and smooth about how Karamilk performs. She’s really dynamic in a lip sync, captivating not just with her dancing, but with her emoting.
The best moment of the lip sync, and perhaps the whole episode, comes in the final chorus, when both queens do the same dip at the same time. It is so satisfying—Carson Kressley is gagged, as am I—and if we had more episodes to play with this season, you could argue for a double shantay here. But thanks to the full cast of 12 and no elimination in the first episode, we actually need a double sashay to end on time, not a double shantay. So despite her best efforts, Dulce must sashay away.
I do enjoy this episode, if a bit less than the previous four. That’s no knock against this episode, but rather an endorsement of how great the season has been so far. Season 5 was a speed bump for Canada’s Drag Race, but Season 6 is proving to be both great TV and a showcase for some really interesting, cool drag. It’s the kind of season that would make me watch even on Christmas Day—which is indeed what will happen, as next week’s episode is still airing on the holiday. See you next week, when we’ll unwrap what Brooke Lynn and her merry band give us for Christmas!
Untucking our final thoughts
✨ The girls are very scared of going up against PM in a lip sync. Sami goes so far as to compare their performance ability to a kind of immunity in the competition, that’s how much she doesn’t think they stand a chance against PM. I do think there are others who stand a chance—Karamilk proved to be quite the performer in her two lip syncs—but I can’t blame the non-dancers for fearing going up against someone who can move as effortlessly as PM can.
✨ PM takes Eboni not saving them with the Golden Beaver fine to her face, but in confessional, they say Eboni is dead to them in the game. It doesn’t pay off with anything this week, but like Makayla Couture’s frequent negative confessionals about Xana before their feud, I have to assume we’re being shown this for a reason. Stay alert!
✨ I’m perplexed by Saltina’s arc in this episode. After being anxious in the first couple of episodes, she seemed to really shake it off after winning a maxi-challenge. But in the werk room before this week’s challenge is even announced, Saltina has a whole monologue about her “realization” that she wants to be confident, and that she already is—she just needs to embrace it. It’s a little loopy, and some of the other queens shade her in confessionals for it, but it’s mostly just played as a quirky moment. Then, later in Mini-Untucked, when Sami asks the queens to explain why they should say, Saltina … practically repeats the same realization? The details are different, but the core message is the same: she’s been afraid of being too confident, but now she’s realized she can own it. It would be one thing if Saltina acknowledged how, just the day before, she had come into this episode thinking this. That would actually make sense! But at least in what we see in the edit, it seems like she monologues about the same realization twice. (Even odder, no one is shown calling out that it’s the same beat.) It almost feels like this “realization” was Saltina producing a moment for herself, only to have to fall back on it when fighting for her spot later. At any rate, it’s quite strange.
✨ Velma brings up to Dulce that her comments in last week’s challenge about Velma’s mom’s alcoholism were below the belt. Dulce shocks me by not only not really apologizing (“If you felt some type of way about the jokes that I made, I do apologize”), but throwing it back at Velma and saying that by calling her “poor,” Velma was triggering her trauma. I’m not here to litigate what is trauma and what isn’t, but it is plainly true that Velma’s read was about Dulce, while Dulce’s read was about Velma’s mom. This is inherently not an equal trade-off. I would hope that Dulce could see that and more sincerely apologize to Velma for going out of bounds.
✨ The mini-challenge this week is quick drag karaoke to some of the “best” Canada’s Drag Race verses, including Tara Nova’s “Go Off Queen” verse, Xana’s notoriously rhythm-free “Not” verse and even Kennedy Davenport’s “Tongue Pop” verse from Canada vs. The World Season 2. It’s cute! And a nice callback to some fun CDR moments. Dulce wins, earning $2,500 for her pleasure.
✨ I can sometimes be hard on Traci Melchor for her hosting stints in the werk room, but i find her really fun in the mini-challenge—and looking gorgeous in her blonde hair!
✨ Eboni’s confessional about not trusting someone who smiles too much sends me to the moon. “You can never trust a person who smiles too much, you know? Like, if you’re always smiling, what are you hiding?” she says. “Girl, that’s how Star went home. Too damn much.”
✨ PM clocks how much Van says “clock it.” I’ll get more into this in the power rankings, but while it’s a funny moment, I also think it might say something about how the show is editing Van.
✨ Absolutely cracked up at Sami announcing The Shade’s next guest will be Brad Goreski: “Where has he been?”
✨ The “Golden Beaver Not Even Gold” headline during the Tea Time segment … I feel heard.
✨ A couple of quick plugs: I spoke with Silky Nutmeg Ganache about the new season of Slaycation, and we chatted a bit about Canada’s Drag Race. Additionally, as part of Xtra’s Rainbow Rewind 2025 coverage, I put together my list of my 10 favourite lip syncs of the year, including one from this very season quite high in my rankings! This was a ton of fun to compile, and resulted in a very international season-dominant list—highly recommend checking it out and seeking out some great lip syncs that you may not yet have seen.
The next episode of Canada’s Drag Race will be available to stream on Thursday, Dec. 25, at 9 p.m. EST on WOW Presents Plus in the U.S. and on Crave in Canada. You can subscribe to our drag newsletter, Wig!, for exclusive Drag Race content delivered straight to your inbox every month.
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