‘RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars 8,’ Episode 4 recap: Pilot program

Perhaps I spoke too soon about RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars 8’s long-term storytelling! While I do think the cast is still feeling a bit distant from each other—and I’m annoyed that whole plot developments are being relegated to Untucked—this week’s challenge gives us our best sense yet as to exactly what this season is going to be. And what is that, you ask? This is going to be the strategic, messy season.

How else to interpret the heavy focus on alliances this season? We see rumblings of this in every All Stars (remember how much we heard about the Twinners in All Stars 7?), but rarely does it actually seep into how people are playing the game. Really, the only time I can remember it having a big impact is when Blu Hydrangea and Mo Heart kept their promises to one another during UK vs The World, which resulted in them being the final two. Otherwise, any actual alliance play—i.e., Rolaskatox in All Stars 2—has been unspoken, while openly declared alliances rarely amount to much.

This season, the queens are playing the game more like Big Brother: eliminating non-threats early on while solidifying numbers, so that when they do get down to voting each other out, they’ve got the advantage of good relationships. The result of this work, by episode’s end, is a five-queen-wide alliance structure in the middle of the game, with just eight queens left in total, and Kandy Muse and Heidi N Closet smack dab in the middle.

Theoretically, Kandy and Heidi could work together to make sure their allies (Jessica Wild on Kandy’s side, LaLa Ri on Heidi’s and Jimbo shared between them) vote together over the next three weeks, ensuring all five of them make it to the end. But I said this season would be known not just for its strategy, but its mess. That’s because Heidi and Kandy are increasingly growing at odds, and Heidi is threatening a tea spill that could shake up the whole competition.

If it does, however—and we’ll get more into Heidi’s threat in a bit—I’m liking Kandy’s odds to make it through. She benefits from her team selection for this week’s maxi-challenge: a pilot trailer presentation. This is a repeat challenge from an all-time great one in Season 9, but while that version kept queens in the sitcom genre, this cast can create any type of TV show. (Yes, by the way, this means Alexis Michelle is doing this challenge for the second time.)

Kandy, Jimbo and Jessica are teamed up, which gives Kandy and Jimbo the chance to add Jessica to their numbers. I’ll give Jimbo major credit on this one: she’s been working her social game with Jessica all season, and it pays off in how quickly and easily Jessica offers to look out for her two teammates. Considering Jessica has said she plans on not listening to others and always voting with her heart, I’m not sure how reliable a number she’ll be—but I also firmly believe she’ll never vote out Kandy or Jimbo.

Not that they’re in any danger this week, as the three queens score top of the class for their pilot presentation. Theirs is a take on Carrie through a horror-comedy lens: Jimbo plays Muffy, a girl constantly bullied by her cooler classmates. She ultimately takes it out on them through murder … which I would argue makes for a pretty short TV show. A miniseries, perhaps!

But Jimbo makes a point earlier in the episode that explains why Ru and the judges seemingly don’t care about this: Drag Race doesn’t have to make sense. It’s about making Ru laugh, at the end of the day, which Jimbo inherently understands. The fact that Kandy pushes back so hard on Jimbo as she suggests this is bizarre to me. Kandy knows what makes Ru tick; this shouldn’t be news to her. This is fully speculation, but I wonder if there’s part of Kandy that wants to prove she knows Ru better than Jimbo, and that leads to her disagreeing even when Jimbo is right. They’re both Ru faves from their previous seasons, but this, coupled with Kandy’s note in the premiere about how much Ru loves Jimbo, makes me wonder if there’s not another dynamic at play here.

Anyway, all’s well that ends well, and all three turn out strong performances. Jimbo takes her second win, which is somewhat frustrating from a seasonal arc perspective, but understandable from this episode’s perspective. Kandy and Jessica are safe, as are the queens on Heidi’s team: LaLa and Kahanna Montrese. Those three also go the horror-comedy route, with a pilot called “Run, Queen, Run” that is my personal favourite of the lot.

I understand why neither wins—because really, you’d have to reward both together—but LaLa and Heidi are incredible in this. They both fully commit to these grotesque, monster-like characters, with absurd voices to match. Kahanna can’t quite keep up, but she does what she needs to to let the other two shine. My only criticism of the pilot trailer is the same as I have for Jimbo’s team’s: it’s not a TV show concept. It’s not open-ended!

The best TV show concept of the lot is also unfortunately an unfunny dud. Alexis Michelle, Jaymes Mansfield and Darienne Lake decide on Get Off Island, a Lost spoof of sorts in which The Others are actually celebrities that have faked their own deaths to find peace. There’s a clear structure to this: every week, the three heroines run into a new celebrity. It’s Gilligan’s Island with more cameos. And if the queens had managed to actually pack laughs into it, it likely would’ve been a winner!

Unfortunately, this is the least amusing pilot of the bunch, as the premise is too convoluted to explain while also cracking jokes. Alexis doesn’t exactly throw her team under the bus, but as Darienne puts it in Untucked, she steps out of the way so the bus can hit them. She chalks the concept up to Darienne, which is true, but I admire Darienne for digging in and defending it. “Stand behind your dish,” as Antonia Lofaso once said on Top Chef. Plus, Darienne is easily the funniest of the three in the sketch, so it feels wrong that she should take the fall for it.

Alas, all three are placed into the bottom, and it’s looking like curtains for Darienne. This is her third trip to the bottom, and it’s early enough that the queens will still be voting based on track record. (You don’t want to be the first one out of the gate to go against a bigger threat—just ask Pangina Heals.) Jimbo lip syncs against returning legend Shannel, from all the way back in Season 1. She’s not a queen necessarily known for her lip syncing, but she brings some Vegas glamour to the stage with a fun reveal. She beats out Jimbo doing the exact same thing Jimbo always does, and reveals the queens have sent home Darienne.

This week’s result may be sad—I miss Mother Lake already—but it’s not unexpected. However, the choices moving forward will be harder. Every queen left has at least a high placement, if not a win, and the alliance structure will likely be much more important. Which is why the scene we get mid-episode with Kandy and Heidi is so critical: it could shape the biggest battle we see this season.

We see Kandy planting some seeds (she calls herself an “influencer” in confessional) with Alexis about Jaymes, which later pay off in Untucked when Alexis campaigns to Jimbo to eliminate her Season 9 sister. Had she left things here, Kandy likely would’ve skated out of this episode without issue. However, she also reminds everyone that Heidi intimated she might quit during last week’s Untucked, holding her ally’s moment of weakness up for all to see. Heidi clocks this, and in confessional expresses frustration that Kandy would do that to her. She then says, both in confessional and in the werk room, that she has some major tea to spill, and implies it would fully shake up the cast if she were to reveal it.

What the tea is, other than that it involves Kandy saying something off-camera, is unclear. But if it really will “burn this competition down,” as Heidi puts it, then I cannot wait to see this mess. As any Big Brother fan will tell you, watching good gameplay is one kind of pleasure. Watching it all fall apart? That’s where the game really begins.

Untucking our final thoughts

✨ The Other Half of the Story, Fame Games Edition: Surprisingly minimal ass in these Ass the World Turns looks, no? Monica Beverly Hillz’s is only visible through fringe, while Mrs. Kasha Davis has flaps she has to pull up for her rear to be visible. Even Naysha Lopez, the queen of body, only gives a window of derrière in her tuxedo look—though it is an excellent derrière. Overall, though, nothing that impressive in this week’s showcase.

✨ The Other Half of the Story, Deliberations Edition: Not much to deliberations this week, either, save Darienne really trying to make her case to both Jimbo and the rest of the cast. Were we a couple of weeks later in the season, or were there a more threatening option to take out in the bottom, she might’ve gotten some traction. But alas, as the unanimous vote (besides Darienne’s, of course) shows, there really wasn’t another option this week. Interesting that Alexis pitches Jaymes as an option to Jimbo, though! She really is dedicated to giving us good TV every week.

✨ The “Previously on All Stars” recap that starts this episode is quite long, with a breakdown of the Heidi-Kandy-Jimbo alliance and a reminder of previous conversations about how people will vote. It doesn’t seem to come into play this week, but with Heidi promising a big spill of tea coming in the future, I imagine there’s going to be some major payoff. I hope there will be, at least!

✨ The previous week’s vote was 5-4, with Jimbo, Jaymes, and Heidi all voting Darienne out, and all citing track record as their reasoning. Funny enough, by episode’s end, Jaymes has voted Darienne out three times—and there have only been four episodes!

✨ Where are the mini-challenges this season? We actually get a former mini-challenge in this episode, but with no prize attached—it’s just used for team selection. It’s the one where the queens either hump balloons or are humped by Pit Crew members to pop them, with the glitter that comes out colour-coded to their team. Highlights here include Darienne failing to pop the balloon on Bryce at first, Bruno humping Heidi clear off the stool she was leaning on and Jaymes asking to be choked. Well!

✨ Is that Canva that the queens use to create their shows’ key art? Get the queens the Adobe suite, production!

✨ I’ll admit, the Ass the World Turns runway is quite fun! Love Alexis’s ass-less wedding dress (“What’s a wedding without cake?”), but my absolute favourite is Kandy’s “anime sex doll dream come to life.” It’s so fun, with gonzo proportions and a real impact on the runway. My favourite look from Kandy so far this season.

✨ Kandy warns Jimbo that if she’s in the bottom, she thinks the other queens will vote her out. Perhaps to buttress against that, the two of them pull Jessica into a new alliance, giving them even more protection. At this point, only Kahanna, Jaymes and Alexis are not included in the overall alliance structure we’ve seen, while LaLa is only connected to Heidi.

✨ With five total lip sync losses across three seasons and not a single win, it’s fair to say Jimbo’s record is herstoric—although she actually hasn’t set a record for most losses. Several queens have five losses, including Ra’Jah O’Hara (although she has plenty of wins) and Katya (who does have one win under her belt, for her terrific “Twist of Fate” battle with Frisbee Jenkins, née Sasha Belle). Trinity the Tuck actually has seven losses, owing to four in All Stars 7 alone, but also has five wins. Prior to Jimbo’s most recent loss, I believe the longest lip sync losing streak we’d seen was Trixie Mattel’s. She lost four before finally winning her last match-up against Kennedy Davenport to “Wrecking Ball.”

✨ Maude Apatow is our guest judge this week, and Ru delivers the expected “And then there’s Maude … Apatow!” joke during his runway introductions. Maude is okay! She’s clearly excited to be there, as seen in Untucked, but she mostly sticks to generic, positive critiques. They can’t all be JoJo Siwa.

✨ It’s been four episodes, so I think I can fairly make a judgment on this: “Who Is She?” is a terrible runway song. It doesn’t give the kind of beat you need to walk to (think “I Bring the Beat,” “Sissy That Walk,” “Catwalk,” etc.), and the sounds in the chorus are distracting. I’m surprised they didn’t go with a Black Butta song, since that’s Ru’s more recent album. But here’s a question for you, dear reader: if you had the chance to feature any Ru song that hasn’t been a runway track yet, which would you pick?

The next episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars will stream Friday, June 2, at 3 a.m. EDT on Paramount+ in the U.S. and on Crave in Canada. Check back every weekend after new episodes for our recaps and power rankings, and subscribe to our drag newsletter Wig! for exclusive Drag Race content delivered straight to your inbox every Tuesday afternoon.