‘RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars’ Season 10’s final bracket rains on the parade

Around the end of the first bracket and the start of the second, the fandom was abuzz that this season of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars might be the best ever. Yes, seasons like All Stars 2 and All Stars 6 loom large, and All Stars 7 will forever have its fervent supporters (despite its hideous finale), but All Stars 10’s bracket format was a breath of fresh air. The casts of the first two brackets worked perfectly together to create compelling competition and television. Yes, by the end of the pink bracket, there was some squabbling online about Mistress Isabelle Brooks’ antics, but that’s par for the course for a Drag Race season. Overall, we were being fed.

And then the purple bracket began.

Let’s call a spade a spade: the third bracket of this season’s casting was not as strong as we saw in the first two. The only real storyline coming into it was seeing Acid Betty and Cynthia Lee Fontaine together again after they previously starred in Season 8 together—and Acid famously and fiercely supported Cynthia during her battle with liver cancer. I guess you could vaguely categorize Alyssa Hunter and Daya Betty being cast together as an attempt at a storyline, but I’m not sure Alyssa saying “Daya, you are the bitch” out of nowhere at the reunion is enough to justify that. Beyond those four, you had Denali, who has made no secret in the years since Season 13 that she considers herself a robbed queen, and Ginger Minj, on her third All Stars run and fourth overall.

Altogether, this was a recipe for mess. Ginger being the most experienced Drag Race queen in all the brackets led to suspicion that this season was a setup for her to get the crown she just missed out on in Season 7 and All Stars 6. A somewhat dubious first challenge win and incredibly dubious second one quickly reinforced that suspicion, and Ginger’s highly divisive second lip sync win over Denali ignited the fandom’s ire in ways we haven’t seen in years. Even alumni who have been on seasons with Ginger joined in to cast doubts on whether the purple bracket was a fair competition.

The passion among fans and fury about perceived injustices made trying to look at the big picture of this part of the season difficult. But now that the bracket has come to an end, I want to zoom out a bit. How well did this part of the season work on its own, and how does it fit into the bigger picture? In thinking about these questions, I surprised myself a bit: I think, for better or worse, this was the most important bracket of all three. Not the best, but the most crucial to understanding this season—and what this format offers moving forward.

Let’s start with the ramifications of our competition. Ginger was awarded three wins and eight points in this bracket. On my own scorecard, I’d have her at two wins and five points—still enough to make the semifinals, but with a bit less pushing to get her there. (For the record: she won the first challenge fair and square as clearly defined by the criteria, even if her look wasn’t the best, and her third was an easy victory. For the second, I’m fine with her lip sync win, but she should’ve never been in the top two in the first place—that was Cynthia’s spot.) She walks into the merge with the most points of any queen, edging Jorgeous out by half a point.

Joining her in the merge is Daya Betty with six points, all of which I’d call fairly earned. This puts her at the same total as her Season 14 sister Bosco: about middle of the pack, under contenders like Irene the Alien and Lydia B Kollins. The shock of the bracket, of course, is that Cynthia is also headed to the semifinals, Cucu first, with five points all gifted to her in the MVQ points ceremonies. Denali joins her Season 13 sister Tina Burner as the only queens with challenge wins to not make the merge.

Like the first two brackets, we see here queens who advance solely on their points won in challenges (Ginger, like Irene before her) and queens who advance on a mix of challenge and MVQ points (everyone else but Cynthia). But crucially, we also see the only other way to get through a bracket in this format, made manifest by Cynthia’s social game paying off. Only now have we seen that All Stars has finally, actually made social game matter—something the show has been trying to foster since back in All Stars 2 with the Lip Sync for Your Legacy format.

There have been signs before that playing well socially will pay off for a queen, most notably when Kylie Sonique Love voted correctly every single week in All Stars 6 and ended the season with no votes cast against her. While that was a fun trivia fact upon her crowning, Cynthia’s social game directly led to her moving forward in the competition. Tight bonds with Alyssa and Acid paid off big, as did her kindness to Daya while working together in the second challenge. That she did this not out of strategy or gameplay, but just by being the kindhearted queen she has always been, makes it all the more heartwarming. I actually teared up when Acid gave her the final MVQ point she needed in this week’s episode.

Of course, this came at Denali’s expense, and hers is maybe the most tragic story of All Stars 10 yet. While other queens came into this season with the belief that they deserved redemption (somewhere in New York, Olivia Lux is likely still mad her alliances didn’t work out), Denali got the closest, with a challenge win and just one point separating her from the semifinals. Much of the discourse online has been focused on Denali being “robbed” once again, with fans turning their ire on production, RuPaul and even Ginger herself for this perceived injustice. Denali herself has kept a level head about it, expressing her disappointment but taking pride in her accomplishments and not casting blame elsewhere.

I find a lot of the histrionics around Denali’s performance to be melodramatic—especially those claiming that her far-too-much “See You Again” lip sync deserved to win—but I personally feel for Denali herself. She did well in this bracket, delivering on the potential she showed in Season 13, and was only aced out because of Cynthia’s superior social positioning. Her failing to qualify for the semifinals is a reminder that, for all the opportunities this bracket system provides queens, there will still be eliminations, and they will sting. Fan-favourite characters like Denali and Nicole Paige Brooks will fall short not because they fail in the competition or as TV personalities, but because there simply isn’t enough room.

(A slightly spoilery aside here for the currently filming All Stars 11, so skip this paragraph if you want to remain unspoiled. Rumours abound that while the bracket format is returning for All Stars 11, only two queens will be advancing from each instead of three. That means that only a third of the cast will make it to the semifinals—and if cuts like Denali and Nicole hurt, I can only imagine how brutal losing four queens in one go will be. But that’s a problem for another season.)

Narratively, I actually thought the purple bracket was quite strong: Cynthia’s story was compelling, and while fans might quibble with her placements, Ginger reminded us why she is so damn good at Drag Race. Daya was left floating in space a bit—her only Season 14 sister being Alyssa, with whom she has a fractious relationship, didn’t help—but she still got lovely moments with Cynthia and demonstrated that her making the finale in her first season was no fluke. Even Acid, though she didn’t snatch any wins, got a remarkable comeback narrative as a loving queen who would do just about anything to boost her Season 8 sister. I’d love to see her come back for another go, because she clearly has the juice to give both good drag and TV.

But let’s circle back to Ginger, because it’s her arc in this bracket that I think is the most important to understanding this format. Because of the fractured structure of the Tournament of All Stars, there isn’t time to properly build winners’ edits the way we’ve seen in other seasons. At most, our eventual winner will have appeared in six episodes of the season, with one of them being the finale LaLaPaRuZa that will have limited time to build a narrative. This is why I’m skeptical that someone like Jorgeous, who took a backseat storyline-wise to the points shenanigans in her bracket, could actually win the season. Meanwhile, Bosco was undoubtedly a main character in her bracket, and thus has a lot of momentum going into the semifinals.

No one, however, has more momentum than Ginger. She is heading straight into Snatch Game, a challenge she’s won twice, with three wins. She had a major moment in her bracket’s first episode with guest judges Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, and stayed a focal point of the story throughout her bracket. Put simply, she is the only queen next to Bosco who comes close to resembling a main character at this point while also dominating the competition. (Mistress is also a main character, but considering she’s coming into the merge with fewer points than even Cucu, I’m dubious about her chances.)

The other brackets may have been more entertaining, but I think they told us more about how the tournament format can entertain—not how it can resolve. For better or worse, All Stars seasons rarely leave much to the imagination about who will ultimately win. Queens like Chad Michaels, Alaska, Shea Couleé, Jinkx Monsoon and Jimbo all won seasons that seemed designed for them to win. Even our most recent All Stars champion, Angeria Paris VanMicheals, did very well throughout the competition, even if Roxxxy Andrews did seem like the more likely victor by season’s end.

Point being, the show hasn’t fundamentally changed how it operates. If anything, the tournament system has given them the chance to have a bit more fun in the brackets without real threats to win. The purple bracket had a few other stories going on, but at the end of the day, it was the start of Ginger’s story. I would be genuinely floored if anyone but her and Bosco were to win it all based on these edits. But who knows? Perhaps something radical will happen in the merge phase to change my mind—and hopefully, the semifinals will help get the All Stars 10 fan parade back on track.