‘Canada’s Drag Race’ Season 5, Episode 8 recap: Watch what happens

We come into this penultimate episode of Canada’s Drag Race Season 5 with one of the more evenly matched final fives in show herstory. One of the queens with the most wins, The Virgo Queen, has also lip-synced for her life the most of the remaining contenders. Helena Poison, conversely, has never had to lip sync, but she also is the only queen left without a win. (“My sisters love to remind me,” she deadpans in a confessional.) Both Makayla Couture and Perla have won once and had to lip sync once, with inconsistent trajectories in the rest of the competition. Really the only thing we know is that a Toronto queen will win, since all five are from the 6.

The frontrunner at this point is Minhi Wang, who earned two design challenge wins and has never placed lower than safe. There’s a bit of an asterisk on her track record, as she was saved by challenge formats a couple times (most egregiously for the Lip Sync Slay-Off, in which she would’ve been in the bottom three had one other lip sync ended differently), but she’s still definitely entering the endgame with the most momentum. Can she take it over the finish line? Or will one of her competitors ace her out for the crown?

One last maxi-challenge stands between the queens and the finale: a late-night talk show task. This is a new one for Canada’s Drag Race, continuing their pattern of real innovation this season, and it functions almost as a mini-reunion of sorts. The queens look back at the season as a whole with Brad Goreski as their guide, while answering questions—some shady, some silly, some meaningful—and demonstrating a facility in this format.

It’s not much of a challenge, necessarily, evidenced by everyone doing well. But there is a pretty clear winner, as well as someone who falls short, and it overall makes for a nice catch-your-breath moment before the finale.

Things start with a game: the Chomping Block, named after the Golden Beaver twist. Each of the queens has to answer with one of their fellow members of the final five for a series of superlative questions—though they can answer themselves. We see that immediately when Makayla calls herself the most fashionable, while everyone else says Perla. Meanwhile, Makayla gets a vote for least fashionable, while Virgo and Minhi both get two. Ironic that our two-time design challenge winner gets votes here! There’s another near-unanimous vote for best mug: everyone goes for Helena except for Minhi, who votes for Virgo.

Next up is a set of “viewer questions,” including a shady question to Minhi about who made her feel underestimated. She dodges it by saying it’s her own inner saboteur, and it’s the first real moment that makes me question if Minhi can actually win it all. Brad lightly knocks her for it later for being too diplomatic, and I have to agree: as RuPaul told Tatianna once upon a time, it’s an answer for the Miss America contest. I can tell the shady side of drag doesn’t come easy to Minhi—remember her fear at being stuck in a corner with the mean girls, Xana and Tiffany Ann Co., in the premiere? It’s not required, necessarily, but she should be ready to answer a tough question or two even if people won’t all love her answer.

It’s in answering her question that Helena starts to shine in this challenge. When asked if she was surprised Minhi beat her in the two design challenges, Helena complimented Minhi then riffed on her own work: “I designed two beautiful garments. Were they finished? Jury’s out!” She keeps it going during the second game, Defend Your Drag, getting a drive-by shot in at Brooke Lynn Hytes when talking about her quick drag look. “I’m not gonna defend this look,” she says with a laugh. “I will defend bringing up Brooke Lynn’s lace-front eyebrows, though.”

Helena is pretty clearly head-and-shoulders in front of the rest, effortlessly charming and funny without lapsing into a persona or too many jokes. Her performance reminds me of Eureka!’s in Pink Table Talk in All Stars 6: her personality shines through. It’s a tremendous showing for her after a very strong season, but will it be enough for her to take her first win? After all, Virgo also acquits herself well (love her laughing about being cross-eyed in her Judge Lynn Toler drag), and she does open this week’s episode saying she’s hungry for a third win.

But then we get to the Statuesque runway, and it’s all over. Helena comes out rendered as a statue of Medusa, and it is one of the best looks we’ve ever seen on Canada’s Drag Race. The detail here is frankly incredible, reminiscent of Pythia’s own statue look from Season 2. As Brooke later notes during critiques, her blending work to make the sleeve and makeup blend is amazing. (Every queen who has ever been on this show with a visible breastplate neckline, please call Helena for tips.) It feels like the culmination of her drag all season—once again, she made it herself—and it pushes her over the line to her first win of the season. Just in time, too!

Virgo places high for her efforts, while Minhi lands in the safe middle. That leaves Makayla and Perla in the bottom two, and as I said near the top of the recap, they’re very similarly positioned in this competition. Both have done well, but not consistently so, with one win and one Lip Sync for Your Life before this one. But while Perla has been largely overlooked by the edit, much of the season has been about Makayla’s journey. As performers, you could say they’re fairly evenly matched; as characters in the story of this season, Makayla’s role is much larger.

The lip sync song is “Desperate Measures” by Marianas Trench, and I can’t lie: it’s not particularly close. Perla seems to be going at half-speed compared to lip syncs we’ve seen her in before. Makayla, meanwhile, delivers what might be her best lip sync yet: she’s joyous, energetic and builds momentum throughout the performance. By the time she does an extended portion of the lip sync while bent over backwards, it’s over. She shantays to the finale, and Perla is cut in fifth place.

So our final four is Minhi, Helena, Virgo and Makayla! And I’m left at the end of the episode no more confident about anyone winning than I was at the start. I genuinely think all four have a case to be made, either from their early dominance (Virgo), their narrative significance (Makayla), their track record (Minhi) or their consistency throughout the competition (Helena). Love to Denim and Nearah Nuff last season, but I don’t think there was any reasonable chance we were walking out of last season’s finale with a winner other than Aurora Matrix or Venus. So I appreciate this wide-open field.

If I had to put my money on one, I think I’d say Makayla. With the exceptions of Gisèle Lullaby and Ra’Jah O’Hara, the queen with the most central role in the story has always won in Canada’s Drag Race. (And there were mitigating circumstances in both of those cases: Miss Fiercalicious was likely too much of a villain to win Season 3, while Silky Nutmeg Ganache’s strong Canada vs. The World Season 1 narrative was trumped by Ra’Jah’s stronger multi-season narrative.) CDR seems to prefer the main character have a crown on their head at season’s end.

Though they have less significant narratives, I could also see Minhi and Virgo’s edits being substantial enough for the win. Virgo’s late-in-the-game comeback offsets the disadvantage of landing in the bottom twice in a row, though I’d be more convinced had she actually won this challenge. Minhi’s track record would likely guarantee her the win on American Drag Race, but Toto, we’re not in the States anymore. Her chances to win lie more in her Pit Crew-to-drag queen storyline. Helena, sadly, just doesn’t have the narrative to win: like Scarlett BoBo, her last-minute breakthrough and position in the finale will likely be her win.

Who do I think should win, though? I’ve gone back and forth on this, and I’ve settled on two who surprise me: Helena and Virgo. I love Minhi and Makayla—Minhi even being my favourite for much of the season—but I really appreciate how both Helena and Virgo have approached the competition in a way that feels true to them. Virgo has torn up lip syncs, served on the runway and has slowly but surely let us more into her world. Helena, meanwhile, has been an all-rounder all season long, really only faltering in Snatch Game. She hasn’t been the flashiest queen, but I think if you look at her actual body of work both in the challenges and on the runway, she’s proven most impressive week after week.

Whoever wins it all and succeeds Venus will be worthy, but it’s exciting to feel like the finale won’t just be an afterthought. Whoever wins there will likely win it all. See you all next week when we crown Canada’s Next Drag Superstar!

Untucking our final thoughts

✨ The “previously on” recap for this episode is largely about Makayla and Xana’s fight, and the queens spend a bit of time decompressing from it in the cold open. While there are some nice words shared about Xana from the other queens (Virgo admires her being “a bold bitch,” while Helena is sad to lose her “feisty energy”), they’re overall committed to holding space for Makayla’s feelings. When she tries to apologize to the other queens and say they didn’t deserve to deal with it, Perla insists that she has nothing to apologize for. Ultimately, Makayla knows she could’ve handled the situation better, but that she’s a human—and while she doesn’t hate Xana, “she is not my girl.” In the end, Makayla says something that would be good for anyone who goes on reality TV to remember: “At the end of the day, I do have to watch this back and I do have to take ownership of what I said.” Virgo ultimately breaks the tension by having a laugh about it, and it ends on a positive note. (And it does seem like the two have made up IRL!)

✨ The mini-challenge this week features Brad hosting auditions for a Brad News Network correspondent—basically an excuse for one of those “react-to-footage-on-a-screen” challenges. Among other historical footage, including a rocket launch, is the footage of Melinda Verga’s Mini-Untucked meltdown last season. Virgo wins, and if she gets $2,500 solely for her delivery of “The atmosphere is white … dresses,” it’s worth it.

✨ Virgo admits she’s not actually a Virgo. “This isn’t my real hair either!” she jokes. It’s very reminiscent of the Season 10 premiere interaction when Miz Cracker questioned the Chinese-American Yuhua Hamasaki for having a Japanese last name: “Well, you’re not a real woman, either!”

✨ In the challenge, as a reference to WWHL’s Clubhouse Playhouse, the queens reenact a Mini-Untucked fight from Season 3. Helena does a pretty great Miss Fiercalicious, I gotta say!

✨ The last bit of the challenge features “fan messages”—aka video messages from loved ones, including Helena’s mom, Makayla and Perla’s partners and Virgo’s mom and big sister. They’re all so cute, but I gotta give props to Minhi’s brother in particular, who is hilarious. Shin-Ern for Season 6!

✨ Unsure how I feel about Brad’s green suit shorts.

✨ We get another emotional mirror moment session, in which Perla opens up about her father being arrested for child abuse. She says she has a memory of being pushed down the stairs by her dad, which is incredibly harrowing. After, Virgo tells the queens about being drugged and assaulted at one of the bars when her career was just starting, feeling like it was a sign from the universe to not continue drag. This group has collectively gone through so much, but you can tell they have found tremendous healing in their sisterhood. I wouldn’t be surprised if this winds up being one of the closest casts post-show: they’re really bonded.

✨ Ts Madison is our guest judge this week! She made the trip up north! It’s always nice to have someone experienced in judging on the panel; they don’t have the same learning curve to get comfortable with negative critique as others do. (It’s a big reason why one of my favourite guest judges ever is Padma Lakshmi in Season 10.)

✨ Wildly, and completely out of nowhere, Jimbo appears to give Helena her $5,000? There’s no context to this, no buildup: suddenly she’s just there, wearing her crown and opening a prize briefcase filled with golden titties. Brooke tells Jimbo they’re proud of her—this is her first appearance on the show since winning All Stars 8—while Jimbo in turn thanks Brooke for eliminating her. It’s cute, if entirely random.

✨ One of my favourite little pleasures is when all of the queens get into the lip sync song. The whole back row is performing “Desperate Measures” from the jump. Iconic!

The finale of Canada’s Drag Race will be available to stream on Thursday, Jan. 16, 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.