‘Canada’s Drag Race’ Season 5, Episode 6 recap: The Wooden Beaver has spoken

On Boxing Day 2024, Canada’s Drag Race gave us a surprising gift: the Wooden Beaver. Fashioned like a Survivor immunity idol—one of many nods to the social strategy reality show in this episode—the Wooden Beaver works differently than its Golden sister. While the Golden Beaver only has the power to save one of the queens marked for potential elimination, the Wooden Beaver can save three. However, only one of those saved is to be chosen by the original winner of the Wooden Beaver.

Fans of Big Brother Canada’s last three seasons likely remember the Safety Chain episodes: instead of the traditional nominations-and-eviction structure, in each of these, the houseguests would choose who to pass safety to next, with a competition ultimately determining which of the last three remaining would be safe and who would face an eviction vote. It was just twisty enough to switch up the formula without breaking the game, and owing to slight tweaks in the format every season, it stayed fresh and a highlight of Big Brother Canada’s twilight years.

Canada’s Drag Race showrunner Trevor Boris had left Big Brother Canada before that production team introduced the Safety Chain twist, but his spirit of embracing big-swing reality game twists (the Golden Beaver, the Lip Sync Slay-Offs) makes the Safety Chain a natural fit to bring to his new show. In fact, I’m kind of shocked it took this long to see something like it on Drag Race anywhere. But the Wooden Beaver is indeed our first taste of the Safety Chain in this format, and it falls into just the right pair of hands to create the most possible chaos in this episode.

This week brings us both Snatch Game and Reading Is Fundamental, a usually potent combo that unfortunately falls flat on a cast that doesn’t quite know what to do with either of them. Helena Poison is the only queen to succeed at the reading challenge (“Thank you for jokes, finally!” Brooke Lynn Hytes says, with a palpable sigh of relief after repeated disaster sets), while most of the queens are low-energy and uncommitted during Snatch Game. Brooke even calls the queens out at the start of critiques for underwhelming performances, with a stronger set of critiques than the Season 14 queens got when they bombed their own Snatch Game. Like in that RuPaul’s Drag Race episode, everyone except our winner is left vulnerable for elimination—but instead of a Lip Sync LaLaPaRuZa, it’s only a beaver made of wood that can save them.

We get a bright, flashing sign that things are about to go south when the queens are discussing their character choices. They range from the limited (Uma Gahd as sponge-painting queen Dee Gruenig) to the ill-advised (Makayla Couture doing Oprah Winfrey), and some queens seem unsure of what direction to go at all. How on earth is The Virgo Queen stuck between picking Drake and Judge Lynn Toler? The name of this episode is “Surviving Snatch Game,” and it’s clear as we go through that some of the queens will be lucky just to survive it at all.

Virgo ultimately goes with Lynn Toler, while Helena picks Jennifer Tilly, Minhi Wang picks Chairman Mao Zedong, Perla goes with Mary-Kate Olsen and Xana goes with Bettie Page. The latter three are the only ones who really get how the Snatch Game should be played. Minhi says she can lean into stereotypes with Mao, and while I have a tendency to side-eye those choices usually, I understand what she’s going for here. Certainly the exaggerated accent is part of the performance, but her jokes are more about Mao’s masculinity than anything else. Her little red book of dick drawings is one of the funniest jokes of the whole game. Perla is also very funny as Mary-Kate, but it’s kind of an odd, dated choice for a Snatch Game character—and as the judges later note during critiques, because she’s kind of one-note it seems like she’s losing steam even as she keeps up the same energy level.

That leaves us with Xana’s Bettie, and she commits best to a whole character. She keeps her voice and vibe the entire time, lands some very funny lines (“Sorry, I wore my fisting gloves for this”) and interacts well with Brooke. To further the Season 14 comparison, she has control over the game the way DeJa Skye did as Lil Jon, which stands out all the more in a truly underwhelming crop. She ultimately wins on the spot, which gags her as much as it does the other contestants. Brooke gives her the Wooden Beaver, promising more information to come, while the other queens are left reeling wondering just how much power Xana now has.

More on that in a second, though: we have to discuss the queens who will ultimately make up our bottom three. Makayla fares the best of the three as Oprah, with a funny bit in which she gives out a toy car to one of the participants, but she struggles to express her idea of the character in her banter. Uma similarly gets knocked for relying on props, with only pre-planned bits and no real flexibility in her portrayal of Dee. But no one is worse than Virgo, who bombs like crazy. Not one thing she says is even close to funny, and Brooke tries to get her to banter. At one point, she responds to Brooke trying to rally with her—“Judge Toler, does anything crazy ever happen in your courtroom?”—by simply saying it does. After a beat, she follows up by asking if Brooke wants to hear about it. Brooke can barely mask how annoyed she is when she says, “Please, for the love of God.”

After an overall-pretty-great Alien Superstar runway category—albeit one that can’t help but feel a bit pointless, since the winner has already been decided—Xana is directed to the side of the stage to listen to critiques. Uma gets dinged by Brad Goreski for a below-Drag Race standard caterpillar alien look, while she gets critiqued for too much prop comedy in Snatch Game. Virgo gets the worst critiques (deservedly so), but the judges love her red vinyl alien look as much as I do. Really only Minhi gets mostly positive critiques, although Perla gets solid ones as well, especially for her gorgeous pink makeup and garden dress on the runway. Helena gets lots of praise for her Jennifer Tilly voice, but you can tell the judges are disappointed she didn’t take it much of anywhere.

After the critiques are over, Xana returns to the stage, Wooden Beaver in hand, and Brooke reveals the twist. In Mini-Untucked, Xana must choose one queen to make safe. That queen must then choose another to be safe. The process is repeated one last time on the main stage, leaving a bottom three. What happens from there isn’t immediately clear, but in my head I expected that Brooke and the judges would then save one. (Spoiler: I was wrong.)

Mini-Untucked starts with Uma pushing back that Snatch Game was “not that bad,” a position none of her sisters seem willing to agree with her on. She gets really angry about the expectation that the queens be more passionate, misinterpreting it as some kind of call for them to be fighting each other. (Which is a bit rich to me, considering Uma has been in the most conflicts this season.) Uma even pulls out a Tamra Judge “that’s my opinion!” reference. She is pissed.

Once the queens have pled their case, with Perla specifically citing her previous Golden Beaver save on Xana as a reason for her to get the Wooden Beaver, Xana has to make her decision. She goes with Perla, citing paying back a debt as the reason, but in a confessional she says she wants to keep people she can beat down the line. Surprisingly, she thinks she can beat Perla in a lip sync, which considering that we’ve seen both lip sync multiple times … is an interesting take!

Perla then saves Helena, who is absolutely gagged. She gives a Tatianna-style “for real?!” before thanking Perla for having faith in her. She seems to have a bit of her fire back, which is good—I was worried about Helena losing steam in the competition. Back on the main stage, Helena chooses to save Minhi based on the critiques this week, leaving frontrunners Makayla and Virgo in the bottom three with Uma.

In a surprise, all three are made to lip sync for their lives, and you just know Uma is shitting bricks. There are few worse places to be on Drag Race than in a do-or-die situation next to one frontrunner, much less two! She does what she can in the lip sync to “Hello” by Martin Solveig and Dragonette, but Virgo absolutely smashes this, and Makayla does a good job of commanding attention. Uma kinda gives in by taking a moment to mime filming the other two—it feels like she cedes the stage, similar to how Thorgy Thor did in her battle against the late, great Chi Chi DeVayne in Season 8 of the flagship series.

By the time Makayla and Virgo hit double splits, it’s over: the two frontrunners shantay to safety, while Uma sashays away. It’s an unfortunate last episode for Uma, who goes out on a bit of a tantrum in that final Mini-Untucked. I feel for her, but I think her trajectory this season deserved a better final note. It seems like she decided this week that she no longer wanted to play the game of Drag Race, and the game rewarded her by sending her home.

What’s interesting about this Wooden Beaver twist is that, despite all the drama, it actually produced the correct bottom three. Maybe Uma could argue that in a typical bottom two scenario, she either could’ve appealed to Xana to keep her to let the frontrunners fight it out, or if they had simply cut to a final two after the safety chain, she would’ve been the one to be safe. (I doubt that, considering Makayla’s far superior runway to Uma’s.) But in the end, the twist did exactly what reality TV twists should do: made the episode itself more emotional and interesting, but didn’t dramatically or unfairly change the outcome. What more could you want?

Untucking our final thoughts

✨ There’s a Survivor theme throughout this episode, though it’s never explicitly stated as such. The production design for the Snatch Game set is all wooden, with the answer cards and name plates all looking like parchment. Brooke even dresses like a gay Jeff Probst. And, of course, the Wooden Beaver is meant to recall an immunity idol. I’m not sure why the show never makes the connection clear, but I do appreciate the theming. (And honestly, I’m kind of surprised Canada’s Drag Race did this before RuPaul’s Drag Race, considering the American series shares a corporate parent with Survivor.)

✨ Among all the bad reads in the reading challenge, Perla does get off a pretty good one by calling Makayla “the nepo baby of Season 5.” Listen, it was a struggle for anything good from anyone not named Helena.

✨ The bubbling feud between Makayla and Xana continues to develop. Makayla calls her “so nasty” when Xana offers the queens the chance to give “feedback” to each other in the werk room. She tells Xana to “shut the fuck up” in the reading challenge. And later, when Xana explains why she thinks Makayla’s performance was so bad, we get a confessional monologue from Makayla: “This is what pisses me off about this bitch: I know I did bad. Everything she’s saying back to me, like, I just fucking said that, ho. Like, are you dumb?” Something’s coming here, mark my words.

✨ There’s quite a bit of back-and-forth between Xana and the other queens in the werk room beyond Makayla, particularly with Uma. Xana roasts Uma’s performance, and Uma throws back that she beat her in the Slay-Offs. When Xana tries to say that she was only giving “99 percent” in that performance, Minhi questions why she didn’t give 100 percent. Helena and Perla cannot contain their laughter at the scene, though Helena says in confessional that all this does is make her worry about what Xana will do with great power.

✨ Minhi tells Xana she’s shocked that she won instead of Minhi. Xana’s only response: “How rude!”

✨ All of Xana’s drama aside, we do get a pretty powerful moment with her in the werk room, as she opens up about her mom’s drug abuse and discovering her after she had OD’d. Xana carries guilt that she enabled her mom, which the other queens quickly dismiss and support her. Xana is clearly touched by this, and admits that even though she drags the others a lot, they are her sisters and she loves them. That comes through in the Mini-Untucked deliberation: while Xana definitely milks the moment, she’s not cruel, and really does come from a place of wanting to make the best possible decision.

✨ Love this exploding-heart runway look from Brooke. The fashions are getting better in the back half of the season! I’ll be so intrigued to see how she handles being the muse and model in next week’s design challenge.

✨ Owing to the somewhat unconventional season structure, I hadn’t realized before this episode that “I Bring the Beat” is still the runway song, carrying over from Season 4. We got a different song for the ’90s runway last week, two songs for the two runways in the design challenge episode and no runway at all for the Lip Sync Slay-Offs. So the only times that we’ve only heard “I Bring the Beat” on the runway this season were the first two episodes and this one. Still, as an absolute stan of the song, I’m thrilled it’s back!

✨ Our guest judge is Steph Tolev, who’s a comedian and Canadian by birth. She’s a lot of fun! I think it helps to have her there for Snatch Game judging, since she can speak to comedy better than our usual judges, though it’s notable that she’s actually a bit kinder and more forgiving of them than the rest of the panel is.

✨ “I’m sorry for calling you a hooker! I was trying to ‘yes, and!’” I’m sorry, Virgo is hilarious. Such a shame she couldn’t apply her natural sense of humour to the challenge.

✨ There’s a random shot of Virgo nearly falling over in her ghost heels on the runway during critiques that goes un-commented-upon, but made me crack up.

✨ Poor Scarlett BoBo catching a stray at the top of the episode, when Uma Gahd says it’s okay to win a challenge in the back half of the season: “You can Scarlett BoBo your way to the top!”

Happy New Year, readers! The next episode of Canada’s Drag Race will be available to stream on Thursday, Jan. 2, 2025 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.