‘Canada’s Drag Race’ Season 6, Episode 8 recap: Gauntlet, thrown

Charisma, uniqueness, nerve and talent. When RuPaul first conceptualized Drag Race nearly two decades ago, he set these four qualities as those that America’s Next Drag Superstar should embody. Yes, the acronym is a cheeky joke, befitting the series’ roots as a parody of shows like America’s Next Top Model and Project Runway. But along the way, the criteria became beacons for the show and the queens. Think of Jujubee saying that eventual Season 2 winner Tyra Sanchez is “just UNT,” or Michelle Visage putting each of the Season 9 finalists in one of the categories in the Final 4 episode of that season.

But no challenge has used these criteria as just that: categories to explicitly succeed in in order to be in contention for the crown. No challenge until now, that is; for its semifinal round, Canada’s Drag Race Season 6 has come up with the C.U.N.T. Test. Across four “challenges”—not quite maxi-challenges, but definitely not mini-challenges—the queens will test one of the four core qualities in a Drag Superstar, in the acronym’s order. Win a challenge, and you’re through to the finale. You don’t even have to do the rest of the challenges! But if you haven’t won one of the four by episode’s end, you must sashay away.

In premise, this is a really cool idea. It’s a gauntlet challenge of sorts, and makes the semifinals feel like a more competitive round than before. And it does seem to put the queens who have to go through all the challenges through their paces; by the end, at least one of them seems just too drained to keep fighting and performs much worse at her usual strength than you’d expect. I commend the show for once again taking an experimental swing and creating a genuinely ambitious, unusual challenge design.

The problem, however, is that the challenge design’s innovation is not matched by the episode design. You can actually map the parts of this episode directly to a typical episode, beat-by-beat: the Charisma challenge takes the place of the mini-challenge, the Uniqueness challenge is the maxi-challenge (complete with werk room time and mirror moments), the Nerve challenge comes right after Mini-Untucked and takes the place of the Golden Beaver deliberation and the Talent round is just the Lip Sync For Your Life. I would argue not varying up the episode’s structure actually hampers the challenge, as it feels less like a grueling gauntlet and more like just another episode of Drag Race, with immunity thrown in for certain queens along the way.

The first challenge, a test of Charisma, is a lip sync, but not in the way you’re likely imagining. Each of the five queens gets assigned a rap that recaps a previous season of Canada’s Drag Race. (So, uh, spoilers if this is your first season of CDR.) Throughout the raps are soundbites from the season that act as little spoken word interludes. Eboni La’Belle, who is the crowned Lip Sync Assassin of the season, gets Season 1, and she’s good! Her lip sync is technically solid, and that’s important in what is otherwise such an odd task. However, there’s something a bit frantic about her energy, a lack of focus compared to her other performances. Sami Landri gets the vibe much better in her lip sync about Season 2, but she misses some of the lyrics.

Karamilk’s Season 3 recap lip sync is a tale of two approaches: During the spoken word bits, she’s dynamic and expressive. During the rap parts, she dances well, but her face is remarkably static. Meanwhile, PM gets probably the most iconic season of CDR, Season 4, and makes a meal of it. They also dance well, but they go with physical comedy and really nail this. It isn’t until PM goes that I actually realize what the “right” approach is to this challenge, and I think their performance style just makes them a natural fit. Van Goth gives what is probably her best lip sync performance so far for the Season 5 recap, but it’s unfortunate for her that she’s stuck with the least memorable season.

PM wins the first challenge, securing their spot in the finale. This is a super interesting note for the episode to start on, as PM and Karamilk were the two coming into the episode that seemed most at risk to be sent home before the finale. With PM now safe, if Karamilk can secure one of the other wins, it’ll mean that one of the three biggest characters of the season will go home. That will most certainly not be Van, though, as the Uniqueness challenge is another design task: Take a little black dress and make it unique and your own.

This is where my issues with the episode structure really come into play. Immediately throwing us into the Charisma round makes this episode feel like it’s going to be fast-paced, a break from the typical pattern. But for Uniqueness, everything immediately slows down again. This is just another design maxi-challenge in feel, with the rest of the day and the next morning spent in the werk room with the queens. There’s some light drama (Van is staying far away from Eboni as her Scissor Sister asks for help again) and some bonding between the queens (Sami and Van over their Acadian heritage, Eboni and Karamilk over their experiences as Black queens), and it’s all fine! But it can’t help but grind the momentum of the episode to a halt. This can’t feel like a breakneck charge through multiple challenges when we’re spending a good chunk of the episode getting in nice, if last-minute, bonding between the queens.

Anyway, on the runway, Eboni pulls out a surprisingly solid performance outfit that, on my scorecard, might actually be second in the category. A far cry from her design work last week, to say the least! It’s still quite simple, but that’s better than simple, ugly and not fitting the brief, all of which describes Sami’s look. It’s a leopard print gown with no shape or specialness to it, with shreds of the black dress fabric stuck on in random places. Hard pass. I feel for Karamilk, who goes with a tribute to her Blackness on the runway that feels personal and looks great … but I can’t deny that she basically just remakes her dress from last week’s design challenge in a different print. And, like Sami, she barely uses the black dress fabric.

So Van is indeed our Uniqueness round winner with a structured plaid jacket that incorporates the dress material as paneling, paired with a pair of black leggings made out of the dress. It’s a true transformation, a showstopper and simply undeniable. Van earns her well-deserved ticket to the finale, and the remaining queens are left to deliver a monologue for the Nerve category.

Before that, though, we have Mini-Untucked, which is so pointless. There’s no deliberating happening, either in this room or on the main stage. Literally this only exists so there can be a Mini-Untucked, and presumably to give the production some time to reset. I get it, but this is where my patience with the too-conventional episode format is most tested.

For the monologue challenge, each of the queens gets the same, pre-written monologue, and I think this is a bad idea. I guess it’s presumably to create as even a playing field as possible—the queens are even all put in the same red dress—but the category is Nerve! I want to see what the queens have enough nerve to say, not just see them all perform the same monologue like they’re rehearsing for the school play. Eboni wins this round, and she does a good job, but it can’t help but feel like a much hollower win than PM’s or (especially) Van’s by comparison. This is made all the more shocking when all three of them are named co-maxi-challenge winners, each getting $2,500. Wild!

Sami and Karamilk are left as the bottom two, and they must lip sync to “Fix You” by Vita Chambers. By this point, Karamilk seems to have lost some of her fight. We’ve seen her perform at an incredibly high level in other lip syncs, and she feels like she’s at half-power in this one. By contrast, Sami locks in like a college student at 3 a.m. with three term papers due by noon. This is honestly one of my favourite lip sync performances of the season. I love how compelling Sami is without having to go over-the-top. Yes, she has a stunt or two; yes, she’s high-energy. But she grabs your attention most by simply being Sami. I can’t keep my eyes off her.

Sami wins the last slot in the finale, and Karamilk sadly sashays away. It’s a hard final episode for Karamilk, who speaks at length in the opening scene about feeling discounted. I hope that, after some time, she’s able to look back at her journey on the show with a great sense of pride. She delivered incredible lip sync performances all season long, and even thrived in a design challenge—one she never saw herself doing well in! Karamilk has really charmed me, and I’m certain I’m not the only one. She earned her spot in the semifinals.

Despite my complaints with the episode structure feeling too traditional, I will always admire CDR for trying something new. I think, with a bit of retooling, the C.U.N.T. Test could become a regular part of any Canadian season, similar to the Slay-Offs. It’s a very special challenge idea; if the episode itself could feel as special, I think they’d have something really terrific on their hands.

But the semifinals are now over, which means it’s time to crown a champion! Check out this week’s power rankings for my prediction on who will take it all, and we’ll see you next week for the finale!

Untucking our final thoughts

✨ Van clocks in the opening of the episode that she’s only the second queen to get three maxi-challenge wins on Canada’s Drag Race, after Rita Baga in Season 1. (We pointed this out in last week’s power ranking as well!) Of course, that means that with her shared win, Eboni becomes the third queen to three wins—and Van becomes the first in Canada’s Drag Race herstory to four wins. Impressive stuff!

✨ Sarain Fox is back this week, and while it’s always lovely to see her, I do wish the rotating judges had been a bit more varied in their appearances this season. We got Hollywood Jade at the very start, a huge chunk of Carson Kressley appearances, then a bunch of Sarain appearances in a row. I get that Carson being in Canada on a visa likely required this level of block filming, but all that tells me is that, despite being a really great judge on this panel, Carson may not be a permanent solution to the rotating judge problem. We’ll talk about this more next week, but I wouldn’t mind if CDR took a more holistic look at its judging structure going into next season.

✨ Allison Russell, a Grammy-winning singer-songwriter who did a stint as Persephone in Hadestown on Broadway, is our guest judge this week. Honestly, not a gig I envy! Not only did she have to do two days, owing to the structure of the challenge, but she also only got sparse time to comment on each of the various performances. She did a solid job, but I wouldn’t mind seeing her return for a more standard appearance in the future.

✨ My favourite references in the various season-recap raps: “I’ve got a trick up my sleeve” from Season 2, Jada Shada Hudson’s ghost-sex monologue from Season 3 and, of course, Melinda Verga’s iconic meltdown on Season 4. Honestly, the Season 4 recap really had me rethinking my assertion that Season 6 is better than it—I can’t remember a season that I enjoyed watching as much as that one in recent years.

✨ Speaking of Melinda, excited that she’s on the upcoming new season of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK vs. The World! Hopefully she can follow in Suki Doll’s footsteps in changing the fortunes of Canadian queens on non-Canadian seasons; on Slaysian Royale, Suki became the only Canadian to make the finale in such a format. (Lemon and Jimbo both missed out in UK vs. The World Season 1, while no Canadians were even cast for Season 2, and Pythia got eliminated far too early in Global All Stars.)

✨ The queens note that the runway song this season being “Charisma, Uniqueness, Nerve & Talent” was a hint all along as to this semifinal challenge. Cute, production team! Very cute.

✨ Traci Melchor really turns into a rules-lawyer for the Uniqueness round in a way that I appreciate. She knocks Sami for not transforming the little black dress, instead just cutting it up and using scraps, and dings Karamilk for remaking her look for Brooke Lynn Hytes—which is inherently not Unique, the main criterion for the category. Compared with the U.S. show, which can get really loose with runway prompts when they want to, I like that Traci is holding the queens to the task at hand.

✨ Not to be a bitch who can’t move on about it, but really, if we had two design challenges in the can for the rest of the season, we could’ve come up with a more equivalent task to pair with the Snatch Game in Episode 3.

✨ I know seeing the three queens give the same monologue in full would have been boring (all the more reason to let them write and deliver something instead of using the same one) but I especially hate how it’s edited. The jumping around, occasionally repeated lines, choices of who gets shown repeating the same lines—it’s a mess. I think I agree that Eboni is the best of the lot, but it’s hard to tell by what margin based on this edit.

✨ I do think it’s strange that the episode is framed as being four challenge rounds, but only the winners of the first three are considered maxi-challenge winners. I personally wouldn’t have called any of them maxi-challenge winners, just finalists. But hey, anything to help make the field a bit more competitive.

The finale of Canada’s Drag Race will be available to stream on Thursday, Jan. 15, 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.