‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ Season 18, Episode 7 recap: Getting political

Myki Meeks is pissed. How could she not be? The cast of RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 18—at least, the half who voted in last week’s Rate-a-Queen Talent Show—undeservingly ranked her last among all the performers and put her up for elimination. She says she’s feeling “the lowest [she’s] felt in the competition.” Worse even, none of the other queens seem particularly apologetic about putting her there. Vita VonTesse Starr practically shrugs as she says she had to prioritize her sister Discord Addams, and that she knew Myki could beat Ciara Myst in a lip sync. Mia Starr says the same thing, but Myki doesn’t accept this explanation. “Now I have a stain on my record because of the strategy of others,” she says in confessional. Who can blame her for walking into the werk room the next day wearing a shirt that says “REVENGE”?

Luckily for Myki, this next challenge is right up her comedic alley. Returning for the first time since Season 8, we have the political ad challenge! Now, if you’re a Drag Race superfan, you may be thinking: Wait, Kevin, this isn’t a U.S. presidential election year! And yes, you’re right to notice that the only other times we’ve had political challenges—in Seasons 4, 8, 12 and 16—they’ve always coincided with presidential elections. But hey, elections happen every year! Being civically engaged is important beyond just presidential elections! And Drag Race leans into that by focusing not on candidates in this challenge, but faux propositions.

There’s Prop 6969, which opposes foreign trade—not the kind you’re thinking—and Prop KIKI, which would outlaw queen-on-queen sexual relations. There’s Prop C, seemingly a normally named proposition until you realize that the C stands for clown, and the argument is to add said C for clowns to the LGBTQIA acronym. Prop 4REAL would ban social media and look queens, while Prop DD would make padding, tits and lacefronts mandatory for all drag queens.

I like these props! The sexual ones are fun and allow a lot of opportunity for comedy, and all the others are referendums on debates that actually happen in the Drag Race fan sphere. By and large, the queens get the ones they want—after they’re randomly paired up by picking coloured Brazilian nuts from Bruno’s nutsack; never change, Drag Race—but there is a bit of a fight over Prop DD. Darlene Mitchell and Mia Starr both want the prop for the role with big breasts, but Mia argues that it’s more fitting for her. Ultimately, Mia and Juicy get it, but not without Darlene extracting a deal that the next time there’s a role or something up for grabs, Darlene will get what she wants. She and Vita settle on Prop 4REAL, which Mia notes is perfect for Darlene as a former bedroom queen.

Here’s the thing: Mia and Juicy, despite being terrific queens who just dominated the “Pretty Ugly” lip sync two weeks ago, are not a dream team for a challenge like this. They lack a comedy queen to drive the creative aspect, with Juicy lamenting that she is not once again working with Myki like they did on RDR Live. “Me and Mia are … very good dancers,” Juicy says in confessional with an appropriately long pause. Their prowess in a lip sync cannot help them here, and it shows in the final product

They’re not the only slightly mismatched pair, though. In a bit of a surprise, Nini Coco struggles when recording her Prop KIKI ad with Discord, and Discord actually has to help her along. Luckily, Discord is great, and their performance together turns out well on the main stage. But it’s a surprising stumble from a queen who has otherwise been quite rock-solid this season. Less surprising is that Vita is out of her element. She has struggled in every challenge besides design tasks this season, and she seems woefully unprepared for her recording session. By the time Michelle Visage is telling her that she only has time to film one more thing, it feels like her fate in the challenge is already sealed.

Jane Don’t and Kenya Pleaser are both great in their Prop C ads: love that Kenya’s attack ad is presented by “The Roxxxy Andrews Fund” and the “Jinkx Monsoon Can Still Catch These Hands Organization.” Athena Dion and Myki, however, may have the single best pair of ads in the episode for Prop 6969. Athena plays up the southern, conservative woman archetype to oppose “foreign trade,” while making just clear enough that, under all her hateful rhetoric, she’s as lustful for non-American hotties as you’d imagine. Myki, meanwhile, plays “concerned American citizen Stephanie Miller,” who is really just a normal party girl who loves hot guys of all kinds. Delightfully, Myki really nails this, understanding the tone you need perfectly. Her jokes are simple without being too dumb, and her comic timing is perfect. She’s a clear frontrunner for the win.

The only queen who stands in her way is Darlene, who knocks her Prop 4REAL attack ad out of the park. She plays a bedroom queen afraid of the outdoors and interacting with people, but who has found real success with cashpigs online. It’s not only funny, it has a real point of view, and is my personal favourite ad of the episode. Darlene hasn’t totally been my cup of tea this season—I like her personality but have been iffy on her drag—but this week is a real breakout moment for her.

The “I Can See Right Through Ha” runway category produces some great looks—Nini is best-in-show for me as a wrapped candy, but I also really like Athena’s executive trenchcoat look and Discord’s pretty amazing biblically accurate angel—but our top two of the week take very different tacks. Myki wears an entirely see-through business suit (because she’s a she-EO who cares about transparency!) with lingerie underneath, while Darlene goes for a Rocky Horror-inspired X-ray look. Again, they’re both good, but I find myself more drawn to what Darlene is doing. Ultimately, Myki takes the win, and from a storyline standpoint, that is quite satisfying. And I think she deserves it! I just personally might’ve gone with Darlene.

While all the queens get critiqued, Ru’s call-out order reveals that Jane is the other member of the top three—a slightly perplexing decision, considering I’d have put Discord and maybe even Athena above Jane—while the bottom three are Juicy, Mia and Vita. This is not surprising for either Vita or Juicy, who really struggles in her ad. She takes an environmentalist angle on why padding and such shouldn’t be mandatory, but she’s one-note throughout the ad and never takes it big enough. Mia’s ad is much better by comparison, although the judges take issue with her not revealing her breasts at any point in an ad all about the power of breasts in drag. On the runway, Juicy’s pink crinoline fantasy is the best of the lot, but Mia’s big-sunglasses look is still decent, and there’s likely not enough difference between them to save Juicy.

Let’s take a second to take stock, though. Of the top three of the week, only one (Jane) has a win before Myki ultimately earns the victory. Meanwhile, the bottom three combined have four wins. That’s wild! I’ve written before about the importance of these episodes that turn the competition on its head, like Season 12’s commercial challenge and Season 17’s roast. Interestingly, those two episodes present a bit of a sliding door as to how the rest of a season can go after that: Season 12’s really did shake up the status quo, and led to the continued success of previous underdog queens like Heidi N Closet and Jackie Cox. Season 17, meanwhile, basically got back to business as usual immediately after giving Lydia B Kollins and Lana Ja’Rae their first flowers of the season, putting them both in the bottom two the next week.

I’m honestly not sure how I want Season 18 to proceed from here. Unlike in Seasons 12 and 17, no one has been that dominant (besides Jane, but she’s terrified of her own dominance so that’s entertaining), with even the first queen to two wins, Juicy, having a bottom three placement from the premiere on her report card. I’m not sure it’s satisfying, exactly, to have queens like Juicy and Mia suddenly on their backfoot for the rest of the competition, but I also don’t want queens like Discord and Myki to suddenly recede back into the background. I appreciate this episode for shaking things up, but I would prefer the rest of the season be more fluid—not a total reversal of fortunes, but a sign that nobody is safe.

I give the show props for being willing to risk Juicy’s fate this early, although I’ll admit Ru doesn’t have much choice here. This is a challenge with a very high GPA, and Juicy and Vita are the only real underperformers. Even then, when Ru announces Mia is in the bottom three, I wonder if he’ll balk and just put Mia against Vita instead. But no, perhaps armed with the confidence of what a good lip syncer Juicy is, Ru plays fair and puts the younger Dion in the bottom two.

The lip sync is Dua Lipa’s “Houdini,” marking approximately the eight millionth Dua song to appear on Drag Race. Listen, I really like Dua, and some of her songs have given us incredible lip syncs (Laganja Estranja and Trinity K. Bonet’s “Physical,” Krystal Versace and Vanity Milan’s “Hallucinate”). But she’s among the most lip-synced-to artists on the show despite only emerging within the last decade. Meanwhile, as I was reminded by Reddit this week, we still haven’t had a Missy Elliott lip sync. I love “Houdini,” but I would happily accept a respite on Dua songs for a bit to get some more classics in the mix.

Anyway, Vita holds her own the best she has in a lip sync so far, and it’s still not particularly close. Juicy is just a masterful performer. She executes stunts perfectly without ever missing a word, and this song is a natural fit for her. She just demolishes, earning her safety easily. That means Vita, who won one challenge and would’ve won another if not for a Lip Sync for the Win, sashays away. It’s shocking to see her go out in 10th place, but only if you don’t consider how weak her performances have been outside of design challenges. With that in mind, it’s only fair to see her depart now.

We’ve got a Snatch Game and a Rusical on the horizon, folks, so we’re getting into the thick of the season. How will this week’s change in the status quo affect things moving forward? Will Darlene finally snatch a win? And will Jane ever miss a top placement? Lots to look forward to in the back half of this season; can’t wait to discuss it all with you!

Untucking our final thoughts

✨ The less said about Athena’s completely arbitrary and contradictory moral rules about Rate-a-Queen in the cold open, the better. Suffice it to say that I agree with Kenya’s confusion that Athena is pressed about the second group’s voting when they had the most blatant alliance of all. I’d much rather focus on her actually pretty great take that she tweeted last week about the voting. I don’t know if it’s an edit issue, or just needing some time and perspective, but she’s much more sensible about the situation in retrospect than she’s being on the show itself.

✨ The queens start the episode proper by seeing the full Rate-a-Queen rankings, and there are some surprises! Let’s talk about the first group: I said in my recap of that episode that I suspected Juicy was the clear frontrunner, followed by Mia and Nini close together, then Darlene and Vita close together, with Ciara the clear lowest-placing queen. At the top and bottom, I got this right—but I vastly overestimated Nini’s support. Relatively low ranks from GLAM! girl group members Myki and Kenya kept her in a distant third place; statistically, she finished much closer to Darlene and even Vita than she did Mia. Between this and her unexpectedly brash criticism of Kenya’s talent show, are we seeing a different side of Nini emerge in the edit—one where she’s a bit unpopular among her fellow queens?

✨ Despite having less information about the Week 2 ratings, I did much better in my approximation in that episode’s recap. The numbers reveal no real conspiracy against Myki, rather that no one was really in her corner. And to be frank … I think Myki herself is partially responsible for that! She knew that the other queens were playing chess, not checkers (her words from the first talent show episode), and had an alliance offered to her with GLAM! But she chose to not follow through, ranking Nini third and Ciara fifth. This signaled to Nini and Ciara not to prioritize her—and fellow GLAM! member Mia had to honour her deal with her Dion sisters first—leaving Myki with only a couple of third-place ratings that couldn’t possibly balance out being ranked last by three queens. I’m glad Myki gets her revenge this week, and I do still think what happened to her in Rate-a-Queen was unfair, but I also think it was preventable.

✨ Nini sets up early in this episode that “halfway through the competition” (well, sorta; there have only been four eliminations), the Florida alliance is still intact. That’s still true by episode’s end, but things are definitely looking shakier for them now …

✨ Still no mini-challenge? What are we doing here, folks? Ninety-minute episodes, and we have no time for a mini-challenge—or this week, even showing judges’ deliberations! I’m a little concerned that the show is becoming worse at using its time, not better.

✨ “For this week’s maxi-challenge, working in pairs, you need to produce and star in totally twisted political ads that parody today’s most polarizing issues,” Ru says. Then, he turns off-camera: “I deserve a fucking Emmy for that line.”

✨ We find out in the werk room that Drag Race legend Kennedy Davenport is Mia’s auntie! Mia even teaches some of the queens some of Kennedy’s most iconic moves. We also later see Mia teach Juicy the “I’m a Slave 4 U” choreo. It’s so cute. I love Mia! I’m so glad she’s safe this week, and I hope she can shake off this low placement and stick around for a while.

✨ In this week’s mirror moments, Discord tells a story from when she first moved to Florida. She moved in with her friend and her friend’s brother, who she’s known for almost his whole life. They were close until he got radicalized on the internet by right-wing politics, and one day, she discovered that he had destroyed “98 percent” of her drag. “To watch this mental decline happen so quickly by being wrapped up in a, let’s call it what it is, a cult …” For a show that often gets a bit soft in its political messaging (I’m twirling a vote.gov sign as I write this), I was pleased to see this amount of time spent on a story that really calls out the dangers of these right-wing online spaces.

✨ Bit of a family affair on the judging panel this week, as resident Drag Race choreographer Jamal Sims and resident Rusical writer Leland join the panel. Jamal delivers one of the worst critiques of the episode (he needs more “frustration” from Kenya—which, what?), but is otherwise fine, as is Leland. I would rather the guest judge spot always go to someone more outside the Drag Race inner circle, just to vary up the points of view a bit, but I’ll never turn down a Jamal appearance.

✨ Not Nini and Discord kissing!

The next episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race will air Friday, February 20, at 8 p.m. EST 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 month.