‘Canada’s Drag Race All Stars’ Episode 4 recap: The Matrix revolution

Aurora Matrix is probably going to win Canada’s Drag Race All Stars. I don’t think I’m blowing anyone’s mind by saying that, right? Going into this episode, one of only two left before the finale, she is the only queen remaining with maxi-challenge wins—and she’s got two of them. Someone would have to win both remaining episodes to tie her, and even then, she’s likely to have the best track record of anyone left. With her still in the competition, the other queens don’t really stand a chance.

So naturally, the queens are wondering: what if Aurora wasn’t still in the competition?

It starts early, with Juice Boxx’s departing lipstick message proudly declaring herself #TeamAurora. In confessional, Tiffany Ann Co. notes that this only grows the target on Aurora’s back. Then comes the announcement of the maxi-challenge: a branding exercise in the form of a funny political campaign ad to become Canada’s First Drag Prime Minister. This is a bright red flag, considering Aurora’s weakness as a Drag Race competitor is lacking a strong brand. Her competitors either have very strong brand identities (Sami Landri, Jada Shada Hudson) or can turn something about their scrappy performance on the show into a brand (Makayla Couture, Nearah Nuff). The only queen who seems poised to similarly struggle in this challenge is Tiffany.

Still, I wouldn’t have bet on Aurora to win a design challenge either, so maybe there’s hope! And after they’re done recording, Aurora actually seems pretty confident in her chances—while she does allow for the possibility that she might not be in the top, she’s more certain that it’ll be Jada, Nearah and Tiffany down in the bottom. And she and her Kitty Katz are plotting with Makayla to finally take one of the last remaining real threats, Jada or Sami, out.

Unfortunately for Aurora, she misjudges badly. Not just the challenge, mind you, but also how her strategy so far this season might come back to bite her. I would argue Aurora has been one of the most prominent supporters of the “save the weakest queen” metagame this season, starting all the way back in the premiere by saving Juice and sending Jackie Cox to be assassinated by Nearah. Now, it’s her facing elimination, and suffice it to say it feels very different on the other end of this strategy.

Beyond this newfound threat to Aurora, most of the queens’ storylines really crystallize in this episode. The rock-solid voting bloc of Jada and Sami has become the most important duo of the game; after being on the wrong side of things the first two episodes, they were the only votes to save Nearah last week, as Aurora and Makayla split their votes between Juice and Tiffany. (Nearah does not let this go unnoticed—more on her in a second.)

Both Jada and Sami have consistently been top performers this season, and while I don’t personally agree with all those placements on Jada’s end (particularly that design challenge look), there’s definitely a confidence to her and an elevation in her drag that the judges are responding to in a major way. Once again, her performance this week is boldly her, blowing past malapropisms (“Hardy for the tardy”?) and quickly improvising on the fly. There’s always going to be something a bit more impressive about Jada in the process than in the final product: the delightful chaos of her ad’s filming session is better than the ad itself. But her “Turn Up Queen” branding is the strongest of anyone’s this season, and it comes through.

Sami, meanwhile, is locked the fuck in. While I liked Sami quite a bit in Season 6, she did at times feel like she was fine with quirking her way through the competition, content to let Eboni La’Belle and Van Goth dominate both the strategy and the challenges. This time around, Sami understands how to make her Sami Landri signature drag and comedy work for Drag Race. Throughout the filming process for both her ad and her teammates’—a quirk of this challenge is that each queen is “running” against two others, and must include attacks on them in their segments—Sami is as delightfully surreal as ever. But she’s weaponizing that weirdness in competitively effective ways. I’m becoming more and more of a Sami stan every week.

Part of what’s working for Sami is how she’s focusing, rather unapologetically, on herself and what she’s doing. Unfortunately, Makayla is struggling because she’s doing exactly the opposite. In both this challenge and the girl groups task, she’s ceded the spotlight to others when she should be the one out in front. It’s an odd situation for Makayla to be in, considering she is quick to declare herself a star and a force in conversation with the other queens.

I wonder if she feels more comfortable being herself in these “social” settings, like in the werk room and Mini-Untucked, than in an environment where she’s putting herself and her work out to be judged. After all, even though she was a runner-up on both her original Canada’s Drag Race season and her Call Me Mother season, her track records in both of those indicate that she struggles more in the competition than her reputation would indicate. That comes out during deliberations, when Makayla tries to save herself with the argument that she hasn’t actually been doing that well. Sami agrees in confessional … but also says they know what Makayla is capable of. Her potential is what is keeping her a threat, even as she underwhelms.

I find Tiffany’s position in this competition to be kind of pitiful, in the true “deserving pity” sense of the word. She’s been the butt of the joke a lot this season, seen this week in the queens and judges mocking her “five, six, seven, eight” verbal tic as she stops and starts between shots during ad filming. I actually think Tiffany turns in one of her better performances this week—the problem is that she does so in Jada and Sami’s ads. In her own ad, she’s clearly nervous, and her delivery is somewhat painful to listen to. (Brooke Lynn Hytes describes it as “staccato,” and I think that is a very helpfully neutral term for it.) There are also, as Priyanka notes, a bizarre number of bathroom jokes.

More than that, though, Tiffany is left each week to make the explicit argument that the queens should keep her in because she’s underperforming. This is All Stars, yet she exists really only to be saved, as a way for the other queens to kick out stronger performers. While there’s something to be admired about Tiffany using every advantage available to her—as Jada puts it, “Baby, Tiffany’s giving self-awareness”—there’s just no denying that, like Juice before her, she is incapable of performing at the level required for this competition.

I was worried that the same was going to prove to be true of Nearah, too; while she’s great in a lip sync and a performance challenge, through her two seasons she’s largely demonstrated that that’s all she excels at competitively. (Outside the competition, she is also incredible TV.) In the werk room and when she starts filming, it seems like Nearah will once again psych herself out of doing well. But lo and behold, she’s finally able to let go and go balls-to-the-wall throughout her and her team’s recording session. Not only is her ad one of the best, feeling the most like a real political ad, but she’s also the clear standout in both of her teammates’ ads. If Nearah’s story this season is of feeling trapped in the Lip Sync Assassin box of her own making, this week she breaks out.

But there’s another important dimension to Nearah’s story: her bold, brash strategy. Her temper got the best of her in the premiere, and it resulted in her getting no votes to save from her would-be allies after she exposed them. Since then, she’s built her relationships back up, primarily with Jada and Sami—solidified by them voting to save her the previous week. However, Aurora, who should theoretically be her closest connection as her Season 4 sister, hasn’t voted to save Nearah once. Crucially, in the cold open, Nearah doesn’t lash out at Aurora—she recognizes that it’s not personal, but calls it “a wake-up call” to her sister’s face. In confessional, she makes the meaning of this call explicit: she has no plans to have Aurora’s back moving forward.

That sets the stage for this week, where Aurora does intend to save Nearah at first (Makayla later tries to talk her out of it—more on that in the final thoughts), but the roles are reversed. After a genuinely terrible ad, one completely lacking any real message or jokes and in which she gets upstaged by both Nearah and Makayla, Aurora finds herself in jeopardy for the first time. She gives a little spiel about being in the bottom for the first time that is painfully generic, full of platitudes and polished in the way Aurora always is. It is so deeply out of touch with how the queens have wanted to see each other campaigning this season—there’s no fire, just a bit of spin and a smile, emphasizing how good she’s been doing otherwise.

Then Nearah punctures the balloon: “Threat, threat, threat.”

This Mini-Untucked is a bloodbath, and an amazing one at that. Jada can’t lie to Aurora: she is the biggest competition, and saving her would be silly. Sami is also on board, privately admitting in confessional she really wants to see Aurora lip sync in the cat prosthetic she wears on the runway this week. But no one makes the case quite as openly as Nearah, who explicitly tells Jada and Sami that they must save Tiffany to guarantee that one of Aurora or Makayla goes home. They want to do to Aurora what she and her Kitty Katz once did to Pythia: send her to be assassinated by Makayla.

When Aurora asks the queens to “find it in [their] heart[s]” to save her because of how badly she wants to win, Nearah practically licks her lips when she says Aurora can show how much she wants it in a Lip Sync for Your Life. Turning the queens’ logic for not saving her in Episode 1 back around on Aurora is a delicious bit of irony. Aurora seems hurt by this, saying in confessional that while she never gave Nearah her vote, she also never openly campaigned against her the way Nearah is doing to her now. Makayla, meanwhile, keeps her sentiments in confessional much more to the point: “Nearah, shut the fuck UP.”

The voting doesn’t even need to be kept a secret cliffhanger this week. All three vote for Tiffany, with Sami calling this “the easiest vote of all time.” After Nearah wins the challenge—I’m so thrilled for her, she really fought hard for this—she opens the dam and confirms that Tiffany has been saved. The judges gasp at this decision, seemingly in awe of the naked strategy on display and likely thinking what excellent TV this will make.

The lip sync is to Allie X’s “Black Eye,” and here it’s revealed the one flaw with this attempted strike on Aurora: she’s still an incredible lip syncer. Both she and Makayla are fab in this performance, pulling out every trick without letting it become too much. It’s just a great lip sync, one that gets a standing ovation from the judges at the end. Honestly, picking a winner would be near-impossible, as I imagine it is for the judges—so they seemingly default to track record. Aurora shantays to safety, and Makayla sashays away.

I can’t blame the queens for using the strategic apparatus Aurora helped develop against her and taking the shot, but I imagine there will be much on Aurora’s mind next week now that she’s survived. If she is still going to win it all, it’s crucial that she’s had this moment—something queens like Lemon on Canada vs. The World Season 2 lacked. A winner’s journey can be obvious, but that doesn’t mean it should be unchallenged. Thank goodness for Jada, Sami and especially Nearah for having the gumption to try a Matrix revolution.

Untucking our final thoughts

✨ There’s a mini-challenge this week involving reimagining bad former CDR design challenge looks in pairs. Nearah and Sami get Aimee Yonce Shennel’s shower look (which Nearah lip synced against her in!), Tiffany and Jada get Miss Moço’s neon look and Makayla and Aurora get Melinda’s “Vivienne Westwood! … inspired” look. Hilarious that two of the three come from the same challenge in Season 4. Of the looks, only Makayla and Aurora’s actually improves on the OG, so they win for making it “fashion and fun,” splitting $2,500 from the PrEP Clinic for their troubles.

✨ The ad recording segment includes a “nonpartisan Pit Crew” to film with. Jada is, unsurprisingly, horny for them.

✨ I want to highlight how Makayla makes the (ultimately irrelevant) case to Aurora to save Nearah, because I think it presents a kind of meta strategy that American Drag Race is often reluctant to embrace. Her point is not generically that Nearah is a threat, but that she is specifically potentially problematic if there is a Slay-Off challenge in the offing. She admits that they don’t know what else is coming before the finale, but that if it is a Slay-Off, Nearah has already beaten her once. This is so much more interesting to hear than vague notes about a queen being a potential threat, and I hope we see Canada’s Drag Race embrace being transparent about this even more in the future.

✨ A round of applause for guest judge Robby Hoffman, who is fucking hilarious this week. The comedian (and wife of The Traitors winner Gabby Windey!) gets things off to a wild start with the declaration that “Daddy is finally home,” and spends most of critiques trading barbs with Brooke Lynn. When Brooke Lynn puts her People’s Choice Award-winning credentials against Robby’s Emmy, Robby gets in a devastatingly sarcastic “Okay, now I’m proud of you!” that has the queens howling. The energy on that set must’ve been crazy if Sami’s “I’m scared” later is any indication—yes, Sami is scared by uncomfortable energy. But here’s the thing: Robby’s critiques are also really solid! She’s kind of my ideal Drag Race guest judge: fully herself, but also engaged with the competition. Love her.

✨ Jimbo and Priyanka both look positively stunning on the panel this week. I think Pri’s mug is my favourite of hers ever? And Brooke Lynn comes out in a Silky Nutmeg Ganache-inspired runway look that truly delights me. I’ll reserve most of my notes about the judges for the finale, but this is their best showing yet as a panel in my book.

✨ The runway category this week is “Lavender Haze”—“They won’t even let you say ‘purple’ anymore,” Robby jokes at the start—and it’s a strong showing all around! Makayla’s showgirl look is the best thing she’s ever worn on the main stage, so high-impact and impressive, while I love the overall impression of Nearah’s lavender marriage look. (I do wish it weren’t so short, but hey, that’s Nearah for you.) Aurora’s high-fashion cat fantasy is different for her in a way that I like, even if the prosthetic does make her look kinda crazy during the lip sync later. Sami’s “Glami Landri” look is gorgeous and very her but still elevated; I love the sheer cape. Tiffany’s traditional Vietnamese wedding dress is really beautiful, and Jada’s extravaganza look is a lot of look. But it works for me! Maybe the best Canada’s Drag Race runway overall since Season 3’s Paint runway?

✨ With a C.U.N.T. Test on the horizon next week, we are about to retire the Golden Beaver vote for the season. I gotta say: great twist. The Golden Beaver itself remains CDR’s greatest innovation—so much so that other franchises are now cribbing it, cough cough Chippy Tea—but the voting structure gives it an extra dimension. I would love to see this format on a longer season with more queens, honestly.

The next episode of Canada’s Drag Race All Stars will be available to stream on Thursday, August 6, at 9 p.m. EST on WOW Presents Plus in the U.S. and on Crave in Canada. Subscribe to our drag newsletter, Wig!, for exclusive Drag Race content delivered straight to your inbox every month. You can find all of Kevin’s Drag Race coverage on Ruvisiting, and follow @ruvisiting on Instagram.