What is ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars’ afraid of?

Another promising season of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars with the Tournament of All Stars format, another complete collapse in the semifinal rounds. Those who do not learn history are damned to repeat it, and it seems like the World of Wonder offices have a dearth of history books.

In fairness to RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars 11, it held itself together for much longer than All Stars 10 did. Last year’s season was already falling apart come the third bracket, and the semifinals just followed through on the promised failure. In contrast, All Stars 11 had its worst bracket first—and the orange bracket was still pretty good!—followed by a solid pink bracket with a banger ending and then the best trio of Tournament of All Stars episodes ever in the purple bracket. But that momentum came crashing to a halt once the top seven queens (plus wildcard Joey Jay) merged, and all the problems with last year’s semifinal rounds came forth once more.

Two episodes just isn’t long enough for a semifinals. Rumours abound online that this is actually changing for All Stars 12, so I won’t harp on the point, but you simply need more time to build narratives. It’s even worse when you spend a lot of time and energy on a story that goes nowhere: I appreciate the producers (and even Dawn!) for trying, but it was so clear that A’keria C. Davenport and Silky Nutmeg Ganache were not going to air out their beef on TV. Silky not picking A’keria to lip sync against in Round 1 of the finale LaLaPaRuza—notably the second time she has had the chance to pick her finale opponent and opted not to pick her seasonal nemesis—was the final blow to any potential for that storyline to be interesting.

That, however, is not my main problem with All Stars 11’s merge phase. I wrote previously in my pink bracket analysis that the skepticism of former fan favourite Crystal Methyd’s run—that it might be, to borrow one of the fandom’s preferred phrases, “rigged” for her—spoke to a broken contract of trust between the show and the fans. I was clearly premature in my assessment there: Drag Race didn’t just want to break the contract of trust. They wanted to douse it in gasoline, set it on fire and then drop an anvil on the ashes just to be safe.

Before I go any further, I genuinely am so happy for the winner of the season, and none of my issues with this season’s storytelling have anything to do with her. While I may have been pulling for another queen in the end, this season’s champion, like others before her, engaged fully in the process and did her best at every turn. Her runways were stunning, and there were moments of real genius that shone through during some of her challenge performances. She is a queen more than worthy of her crown, and not one word of this should be used as an argument against her or her drag.

But my opinion stands that she—and her competitors—deserved a very different semifinals and finale round than what they got. Because what they got was a trio of episodes produced out of fear, not confidence.

The headline of this essay is “What is RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars afraid of?”, and that’s not a rhetorical question. Is it the fans, a notoriously volatile group that seemingly will never be collectively happy? Is it the queens themselves, whose lack of interest in coming back for All Stars prompted producers to create this format anyway? Is it the greater drag economy that benefits from fan favourites getting crowned, making them extra valuable draws in shows and on tour? Is it some combination of all three?

Whatever the case, the result was a merge phase that promised to put more power in the queens’ hands, but actually gave one queen an absurd amount of protection that all but guaranteed she’d be in the final Lip Sync for the Crown. That queen, of course, is our winner, Crystal Methyd. Ru declared her a winner in both of the semifinal-phase challenges, which both kept her out of the “Rate-a-Queen MVQ Edition” twist (winners did not have to be rated or submit ratings themselves). These wins also gave her a pass out of the first round in the LaLaPaRuZa Smackdown for the Crown, so she only had to lip sync twice: once in the final four, and once for the title.

At this point, it’s worth noting that there’s some subjectivity at play here. While I myself wouldn’t have given Crystal either of her challenge victories—I thought Joey Jay deserved the storytelling task win, while Dawn or, ironically, Sam Star would’ve been my tops in the talent show—others might feel differently. You reading this might be thinking, “I would’ve given Crystal both of those wins.” And that’s your right! But what’s not subjective is that, in both cases, there was a queen on the show questioning the choice. Silky said Joey should’ve won the storytelling challenge while she was submitting her Rate-a-Queen ratings, while Jasmine Kennedie called out Crystal’s talent show win in real time on the main stage.

I don’t understand why you keep these moments in if you want to present Crystal as deserving of the wins. When the victories provide such significant plot armour, you want to feel like the recipient earned them. The show actively undermined Crystal’s wins while positioning her as the champion! It’s just a failure of storytelling, plain and simple. And if you need evidence as to why it’s a failure, look around in Drag Race fan spaces this weekend and see how mixed the response is to Crystal, the fan favourite coming into this season, winning the title.

What’s strange about All Stars 11 producing from a place of fear in this final phase of the season is that the brackets felt much more anything-goes. It’s worth noting that Crystal herself barely scraped into the merge! Had April Carrión opted to give her closest ally Salina EsTitties her final point instead of throwing it to Crystal, the Season 12 runner-up wouldn’t be in the merge at all. (Unless she was chosen as a wild card, of course, but I think getting advanced that way actually builds up some goodwill for her—a “what if” for another day.) That sense of unpredictability made every single final MVQ ceremony this season electric; it genuinely felt like anything could happen every step of the way.

This actually continued into the first elimination of the semifinals: Kennedy Davenport’s elimination was a tremendous shocker, especially after she and A’keria gave a phenomenal lip sync. Kennedy had dominated her bracket—with some stiff competition, too—and it felt like all the momentum was on her side. Perhaps once she was eliminated, the show decided not to take any chances and preserve Crystal as much as possible? I would understand that theory if she was the only viable winner left, but in truth, I’d have been happy seeing any of the final six queens with a crown. (Maybe Dawn less so, but that’s mostly because I think she still has some time to cook before reaching her final form.)

While Crystal getting to skip Rate-a-Queen does bother me—making something your signature twist of the season and the winner never participating in it is lame—it’s the pass in the LaLaPaRuZa that really bothers me. While Crystal has several gifts as a drag artist, I think it’s fair to say that lip syncing to a song that she herself has not chosen is not her ministry. Neither of her lip syncs in her bracket was particularly strong (I’d argue Aura Mayari lost their battle more than Crystal won it), and her performance against Jasmine in Round 2 of this bracket is similarly just okay. I think the show was fully aware that having her win three lip syncs would stretch credulity too far—as we saw with the response to Ginger Minj’s wins in last season’s finale—and so they gave her an opt-out of one.

But like with Jinkx Monsoon and Ginger before her on their All Stars seasons, Crystal was stuck in the final two with someone who simply out-lip-synced her. Joey delivered on the promise she’d been building up all season in this episode, and commanded the stage with a kind of star power that All Stars theoretically is made to recognize. And yet nothing she could do would be enough. While the show does explicitly confirm that winners are chosen based on both the lip sync and their performance all season long, that format is rarely going to produce satisfying final moments. It sucks to see someone give their all in a lip sync only to lose—it’s basically telling them that nothing they did in the performance mattered. The die was already cast.

It’s hard to get too upset with a Crystal victory. As she gave her final confessionals of the season, embracing pride in representing Latina queens and shouting-out her fellow weirdos, it felt right that she had a crown. And she deserves to be a winner! But I can’t help but wonder if she herself is frustrated that the show gave her such kid-gloves treatment. After all, before this season aired, a Crystal crowning would have been a moment for fans to erupt in joy. Now, while there is some celebration, there’s also plenty of frustration.

Still, $200,000 (before taxes) is enough to soothe any bad feelings about the storytelling of her winning season. I truly hope Crystal has a tremendous reign. And I do hope she returns for the crowning in All Stars 11! I love a hot, nearly naked Evan Mulrooney as much as the next homosexual, but it felt a bit strange to have Crystal handed her scepter by the celebrity Pit Crew member instead of Ginger. (I wonder if this was an issue of filming timing, or if Ginger didn’t want to come back—we may never know.)

If I have one hope for RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars moving forward, it’s for the show to not be so afraid. There will always be passionate opinions from fans, resentful tweets from queens and a drag economy begging for newly minted stars to headline shows. Nothing the show does is ever going to change that. Bending over backwards to try and placate is the wrong strategy; confidence in decision making and a willingness to make stories work no matter the competitive results is the right one.

I do believe All Stars 11 proved the value of the bracket format this season, especially with that final purple bracket. There’s real gold to be mined here. If they can figure out the semifinals and finale formats, too, I think this could be the golden version of the show. Until then, though, we’ll be stuck in this loop: an exciting first phase of the competition, only to be brought back down to earth when it matters. A Drag Race season lives or dies by how it lands the plane, and the Tournament of All Stars has yet to avoid a crash when hitting the tarmac.

Untucking our final thoughts on the season

✨ Pour one out for Kennedy Davenport, one of the greatest to ever do it. Her elimination was unbelievably shocking, albeit deserved based on challenge performances and the lip sync, and resulted in an outpouring of love for her online. It’s wild to consider how she’s received now versus circa Season 7, when she wasn’t the most popular. She’s really cemented herself as a legend, and she’s the kind of queen who could come back a million times without me minding. We’ll get you a crown one day, Kennedy.

✨ There are two major areas I thought All Stars 11 performed much better in than Season 18: guest judges and lip sync song selection. Standouts like Evan Mulrooney (such a good sport for coming back to be Pit Crew in this finale), Bronwyn Newport and Brian Tyree Henry really brought an investment to the show, and helped what is otherwise pretty positive judging feel more textured. And my god, huge ups to the music supervisor for these lip sync songs! Granted, we had quite a few repeats, but they were great repeats. Honestly, if you had a “Nobody’s Supposed to Be Here” lip sync every season, I would live.

✨ I feel terrible for A’keria and how this last set of episodes went for her. There have been many jokes about her and Silky’s beef online, but it’s been hard to enjoy the fun when you can just tell how much losing a close friendship weighed on her when filming the semifinals and finale. While Jasmine has claimed that A’keria was unpleasant to crew on set (a claim she couldn’t quite fully back up when pressed on it), in my opinion, any negative feelings could’ve been a byproduct of being part of a cast that just did not fuck with her. I don’t think she could’ve quit again after opting out of the All Stars 6 game-within-a-game, but I got the sense by the finale that A’keria just wanted to be anywhere but there.

✨ Speaking of Jasmine: she’s spent a lot of this season being defensive online about her behaviour, which I both understand (the fandom can be truly rotten when a queen speaks her mind) and wish she hadn’t done (it really only fanned the flames). I mostly enjoyed Jasmine this season, although I thought her actions in the finale’s cold open began to hit my personal breaking point between what’s fun villainy and what’s just being a jerk. I can definitely see her coming back and even winning one day, but I would recommend she get to a really solid emotional place before returning.

✨ Don’t cry for Salina that she didn’t make the merge: she’s competing over on Big Brother now! (Granted, she’s not doing great, but her MVQ points strategy should’ve been our indication that she’s not quite the strategic mind she might believe she is.)

✨ Some quick thoughts on our other merge-phase queens: Sam was robbed blind and it’s still gaggy to me that she went home in seventh place. I don’t think she would’ve won, but her talent show performance was not a losing number. Silky generally underwhelmed me in this bracket, and part of me wishes she’d let her tremendous Canada vs. The World run be her final chapter on Drag Race. Dawn did well, but again, there’s still something that doesn’t feel unlocked within her. I think she’s got the chops to be a mega star, but I do think she might’ve returned too quickly to really demonstrate a glow-up. And of course, Joey should be tremendously proud of what a run she put on—she really would’ve been my pick to win it all in the end.

✨ If the rumoured cast of All Stars 12 (that you can easily find online if you want to) is true, it means this will be the first American All Stars season since All Stars 3 to not feature a single returning All Stars competitor. I have fewer problems with repeat queens than most—consider my desire for Kennedy to keep coming back until she wins—but I do think a run with all queens on their second season ever could be refreshing.

✨ Thanks so much for joining me for our coverage of this season—it’s always such a joy to talk about Drag Race, no matter how a season goes. And until the end, I’d say this was a pretty good one! We’re still covering Canada’s Drag Race All Stars, so follow our coverage here at Xtra, and if you haven’t already, subscribe to our monthly Drag Race newsletter Wig! to get exclusive essays from me delivered to your inbox every month.

American All Stars may be over, but Canada’s Drag Race All Stars is just getting started—and we’re recapping every episode! The next episode will be available to stream on Thursday, July 23, 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.