‘Canada’s Drag Race’ Season 5, Episode 2 recap: PSAshay away

If aliens are truly out there—and I personally believe they are—what would they make of Canada’s Drag Race? Would they be fascinated by the fashions? Would they be entertained by the lip syncs? Would they eagerly tune into Mini-Untucked to see the next major fight? And most importantly, would they stan Melinda Verga?

This week’s episode has me thinking about how extraterrestrials would react to the superior Drag Race franchise, as the queens are tasked with making “interstellar” PSAs. The idea is to teach aliens about three different subjects through public service announcement-style sketches: family, sexuality and manners. It’s an unusual idea for a challenge—almost alien, one could say—but it’s really just a setup to have the queens produce something out of the box.

The teams are led by the bottom three queens from the previous challenge: Tara Nova, Tiffany Ann Co. and Perla. They pick their teams the traditional schoolyard style, although owing to the uneven cast (11 queens), Perla is left with just two members for no clear reason. Tara picks up Uma Gahd, Xana and Sanjina Dabish Queen for a PSA about family, while Perla gets Minhi Wang and Helena Poison for one about manners. This leaves Tiffany with sexuality as her subject and, interestingly, a team of all three top queens from the last challenge: Jaylene Tyme, The Virgo Queen and the queen bafflingly last-picked: Makayla Couture.

I’ll not mince words: the results of this challenge are not great. Only one team does a decent job, and there are remarkably few laughs in all three presentations. I think part of this is the somewhat obtuse challenge instruction—you can tell that Tiffany’s group really struggles with “sexuality” in particular—but it’s also just difficult to write successful material in big groups like this. (I don’t think it’s a surprise that the most successful group is also the smallest.) Still, though, this is a very enjoyable episode, because as Canada’s Drag Race has proven many times, its value as a television program does not live or die based on how the challenge goes.

There’s trouble from the word “go” in the first group, as Tara and her team make on-the-fly edits that Xana notes may cause them issues. What they’re recording is fine, Xana asserts in confessional (based on the output: disagree), but are they getting everything? Plus, despite this being a PSA for the aliens, they choose to feature an alien in their skit. Again, it just feels like the queens didn’t totally understand the prompt when they set out to do this.

Similarly, Tiffany’s team shows up without a scripted storyboard, so they get no help with the lines. Every time someone forgets something, they have to go back to check their own scripts, eating up valuable filming time. Worse, Tiffany is remarkably unsure of herself, performing in a stilted manner reminiscent of other acting challenge losers. Makayla tries to direct her out of it, but seems to do more harm than good, as Tiffany gets in her head about it.

The only group that I would say showed up fully prepared is Perla’s, and they’re very much on the same page about what they’re doing in their skit. It helps that they have a fairly easy, “teachable” subject in manners. Unlike the other two, which have to explain concepts that look very different to different people, this group has socially accepted ideas of what good etiquette is to fall back on.

The group calls themselves the Pretty Housewives Against Grossness (guess what that acronym spells out—if you can’t get it, Perla will tell you), and they smartly use alien-friendly “vocabulary” in their skit. That factor, combined with their tight characterization choices, make them the only team with a truly cohesive, somewhat funny PSA. And this week, that’s enough!

Emotions are high in the werk room ahead of the runway—more on that scene in the final thoughts—because several of the queens have brought very personal garments for the Time and Place runway prompt. I must ashamedly admit I (at first, briefly) thought that this might be a Tati Westbrook tribute category, but alas, that dream of mine will have to wait another day. No, this is actually a fascinating runway idea: a look that represents a particular area at a specific time. It’s broad enough to inspire a wide range of ideas, but still requires specificity on the queens’ part.

Highlights on the runway are Makayla’s Caribana Carnival stunner, Jaylene’s meaningful 1850s Treaty 4 Pow Wow look and Virgo’s reclamation of Romantic era Africa’s royal regalia. Those who get the most specific impress (Tara’s Joey Smallwood tribute, Minhi’s Juice Boxx replica), while it’s the queens who go broadest (Helena in a hellish look, Sanjina’s red light district garment) that pale in comparison. My vote for best of the week, however, must go to Uma, whose post-apocalyptic couture presentation is nothing short of phenomenal.

We finally see the PSAs, and they’re exactly what you’d expect. Tara’s team’s take on family is genuinely so terrible, with Uma being the only one to get an even remarkably funny bit. In fact, the panel ultimately decides not to judge in groups this week, effectively because there are enough bad performances on this team and Tiffany’s that there can’t be one “losing” team. Jaylene and Makayla both get away unscathed, but Tiffany winds up in the bottom three with Tara and Xana from the family group.

The “group” judging doesn’t prevent the panel from simply putting all three members of the top group in the top three, though. All three get praise, but it’s Perla who takes the win. There are reasons to argue for the other two—Helena gets the most memorable moment in the sketch, Minhi’s runway is the best of the three—but I think the judges ultimately give Perla credit for ably leading the team. Just like that, she’s taken from what would’ve been the bottom two last week all the way to the win. Not bad at all, Perla!

Xana wastes no time upon entering Mini-Untucked to make her case to Perla for the returning (thank god) Golden Beaver. Truthfully, she’d be the obvious choice to Beaver anyway, since she wasn’t in the bottom the previous week. But Xana actually takes it one step further, saying that as captains, Tiffany and Tara failed their teams. Tara tries to form a counterargument, but honestly it seems like an easy decision for Perla. She gives Xana the Beaver, and two of the bottoms from the previous wek are left to lip sync.

The Lip Sync for Your Life song is Peaches’ “Fuck the Pain Away,” and this is fun. Tara holds her own, nailing every word and generally giving a high-energy performance. Tiffany, however, cannot be stopped. She pulls out all sorts of tricks, including a twerking-while-backing-up move that fits perfectly for the titular chorus. I’m concerned for her that she used too many tricks in one performance, but that’s an issue for another day. She saves herself, and Tara heads home.

Several things make this episode strong despite the underwhelming challenge: the camaraderie and vulnerability we see from the queens, some genuinely very impressive and thoughtful runway looks and a banger lip sync. But more than anything, there’s confidence in how Canada’s Drag Race presents itself. You can feel the winds of success from Season 4 have emboldened the show. It’s always been North American Drag Race’s quirky kid sibling, but there’s been a couching of that in more traditional Drag Race tropes.

Now? We’ve got a Golden Beaver that’s actually gold, an experienced judging panel and hostess and a comic sensibility that may not be for everyone, but kills for those who love it. I can only hope the aliens would become CDR fans in no time.

Untucking our final thoughts

✨ Bless CDR for keeping the actually gold Golden Beaver from Canada vs. The World Season 2. The show listened!

✨ Truly flummoxed by Makayla being picked last in her group. The show focuses more on her feelings about it (understandably she’s affected), but I more so want to know the logic. Makayla was top two in the previous week! She has previous reality TV experience! She’d be a top draft pick for me, not someone left for last in a schoolyard pick.

✨ Helena tells us that she loves PSAs, and singles out the infamous Hilary Duff homophobia PSA as one of her favourites. That’s so not “girl wearing a skirt as a top” of her.

✨ The entire conversation in the werk room about the Sixties Scoop adoptions, of which Jaylene herself and Xana’s grandfather were a part, is tremendous and heart-wrenching. That they both have such profound experiences with it, and that they’re able to come together in a moment of true healing, demonstrates the power of a platform like this. Canada’s Drag Race has always led the pack for me in terms of meaningful mirror moments and conversations between queens. This adds to an incredible legacy of them, and I’m hopeful for even more thought-provoking, heartfelt conversations like this in the rest of the season.

✨ Xana ends the powerful scene on a lighter note: “Can we take the crying time out of the makeup time? I’d love to get that back.”

✨ Brooke Lynn Hytes takes centre stage this week as both the werk room host and the director of the PSAs. I said in last season’s finale recap that I would like to see Brooke take on the bulk of these duties, with Brad Goreski and Traci Melchor kept more to the typical judging duties. It remains to be seen how this will play out for the rest of the season, but I think Brooke’s able performance here only adds to my argument.

✨ Speaking of Brad, he’s absent this week, with semi-regular judge Sarain Fox filling in for him. I wonder what’s keeping the show from just bringing Sarain on full-time in a rotating capacity with the other two judges. This is her eighth appearance on the show overall, and she appeared three separate times on Canada vs. The World Season 2 (owing to Traci’s scheduling conflicts). Might just be a contract issue, but I’m mentally considering her part of the family at this point.

✨ Peaches is the guest judge this week, and she’s an icon. Brooke practically screams how excited she is during her introduction. She’s fun and on-point in the critiques, and she has a great, enthusiastic response to the lip sync. Canada’s Drag Race has had some struggles getting guest judges in recent seasons, but they’re 2/2 so far this season, with some very exciting names still to come.

✨ “Save Melinda, let’s do a show.” Helena gets the first Melinda Verga reference of the season in, and it rightfully gets a lot of laughs. Mother Melinda, your impact lives on!

The next episode of Canada’s Drag Race will be available to stream on Thursday, Dec. 3, 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.