‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ Season 15, Episode 3 recap: RuPaul’s Speed Race

The grand discourse of 2023 has begun: should RuPaul’s Drag Race be an hour-long show, or an hour and a half? We discussed this in last week’s edition of our Wig! newsletter (sign up if you haven’t already!), but I personally think this is a false binary choice. There are much better options—90 minutes, but with Mini-Untucked! Seventy-five minutes for the first few episodes!—than the two being hotly debated in the fandom right now. But what is becoming clear, based on this episode, is that if Drag Race will indeed be only an hour-long show, the edits need to adjust.

In this episode, for example, we get no mini-challenge (although none was filmed, indicating a 90-minute episode wouldn’t have had enough content to fill it), rehearsal and production time for the maxi-challenge is reduced to a short bit for each group, and we absolutely rush through the Metallic runway presentation. The result is a deserving win for a superstar queen, and an understandable elimination—but the approach is so harried that it took me two watches of the episode to really grasp everything.

I praised last week’s two-part premiere for giving us, at minimum, something to latch on to about each of these queens. You may not have known all of them in and out, but for a cast of 16, everyone was in some way identifiable. This episode promptly throws that out the window, giving several queens zero confessionals and no storyline focus. Anetra, the winner of last week’s talent show, who has seen her performance go viral and her Instagram following grow by over 130,000, is practically invisible in this episode. Meanwhile, the queen who survives the bottom two gets the most confessionals, while the eliminated queen feels a bit like an afterthought.

The result is, objectively, not a good episode of Drag Race. But it’s not such a disaster that it has me sounding the alarm, particularly after a great premiere. I just think it might require a rethink of what an hour-long episode edit looks like on production’s part.

The challenge this week is a bit too free-form for a cast this large: write and perform a skit of sorts interpreting what gay heaven—or as RuPaul puts it, “the Queerafter”—looks like. It’s not quite an acting challenge, not quite an improv sketch; it’s very much like the pilot presentation challenge from Season 9. But while that was done in groups of two or three queens at the top seven phase of the competition, this involves groups of five with 15 queens total.

As a result, there are far too many cooks in each kitchen. Anetra’s team fares the best, largely because as the winner of last week’s challenge, she gets to handpick her own team. She picks a flawless set of teammates, with Sasha Colby, Luxx Noir London, Salina EsTitties and Marcia Marcia Marcia all bringing something to the table. The only trouble we see them run into is that Sasha trips over her lines a bit, and gets into her own head when director Michelle Visage rather brusquely tells her she can do better.

This, of course, is a fakeout: Sasha is great in the final skit as God herself! Anetra’s is the only group with a great premise and punchline, as they reveal that heaven for drag queens is a place where you can get tipped dollars for doing absolutely nothing (a fantastic Anetra gag) and get plenty of plastic surgery. Where is this magical place? Palm Springs, of course! “Where drag queens go to die,” Sasha says, nailing the last note of the commercial. Between that and her bit in which cracking her neck allows her and the recently deceased Salina to transport, plus a stunning silver bird runway look, easily nets her her first (but certainly not last!) challenge win of the season.

While everyone is at least decent in this sketch, Salina is so funny that I’m surprised Luxx lands in the top over her. However, Luxx has the stronger runway, wearing something that literally looks like liquid gold. And Luxx has a joke with Marcia (“In my professional opinion, you are wearing just enough makeup”) that really puts her over the top. Salina, on the other hand, wears a campy street-sign runway that I personally love, but lacks the polish of some of the other looks. Salina joins Marcia and Anetra in the safe group, which remains far larger than the group of tops and bottoms. We really can’t spend time critiquing a couple of extra queens, huh?

The second group to go is the set that Amethyst puts together as survivor of last week’s lip sync: herself, Princess Poppy, Loosey LaDuca, Aura Mayari and interestingly, Spice, but not Sugar. This leaves the final group—“Team Leftovers,” as Ru calls them—as Sugar, Mistress Isabelle Brooks, Malaysia Babydoll Foxx, Robin Fierce and Jax. Both groups are pretty bad, but for different reasons: Amethyst’s group prepares a ton of material, but very little of it is funny. Only Loosey stands out, owing to a truly excellent performance as Dolly Parton, aka God. It’s a great gag, sold by Loosey’s spot-on performance. I almost wish she’d have saved it for Snatch Game, honestly.

Aura and Spice wind up safe in that group, while Amethyst and Poppy fall into the bottom two. The judges just aren’t clicking with Amethyst, and I’ll admit, I’m struggling to connect with her as well. The various looks she’s presented in these first few episodes have felt disparate, with her Metallic runway giving an ethereal vibe that hasn’t shown up in any of her other presentations. And her sense of humour, while quirky, isn’t the kind of quirky that Drag Race tends to reward. She’s clearly got something to offer, and she stands out from the pack, but she’d need to do a lot of work to get in a winning groove at this point.

But she does enough this week to survive over Poppy, who fades into the background in a major way. At this point in the competition, with so many queens left to go, being memorable is the most important factor. Poppy just doesn’t pop (sorry) in this cast, as evidenced by her incredibly simple runway look this week. Even before the lip sync begins, it’s pretty obvious who will be going home.

Team Leftovers commits the grave sin of not having any material prepared, but they have at least one truly funny gag to get them through. Their whole premise is that Sugar is a “drag hag” whose version of heaven is endless lip syncs and meet-and-greets, which is actually hell for the queens themselves. The jokes mostly don’t land, but a bit where Sugar mistakes Malaysia, Isabelle, Jax and Robin for Silky Nutmeg Ganache, Eureka!, Shangela and Jaida Essence Hall, respectively, is very good.

Interestingly, Sugar is presented as the hero of this group’s storyline. She tries to suggest ideas during the prep, and is shot down—and without Spice by her side, doesn’t feel confident enough to stand up for her concept. During Untucked, Isabelle (who has taken up Sugar and Spice as her drag daughters on probationary status) tells Sugar that it’s incumbent on her to speak up for herself. It’s a fascinating story beat: Isabelle isn’t denying that Sugar probably deserved to be heard out, but is saying she needs to change her approach.

Regardless, only Jax winds up in the bottom, for falling into the background during their sketch and perhaps taking a bit too much ownership of writing the bad material. Likely because of her high placement last week, she is kept safe, leading to the aforementioned Amethyst vs. Poppy battle to Diana Ross’s version of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.”

Now, Drag Race production: I know you’ve got a tough gig here, trying to take what was clearly filmed for 90-minute episodes and fitting it into an hour frame instead. (With commercials, that’s more like 42 minutes.) But I have faith that you can more compellingly edit a lip sync to a particular result than you do this week. Because spoon-feeding us confessionals of Amethyst calling out Poppy for going too campy on a Diana song? Remarkably unsubtle! I can come to the conclusion that Poppy is not fitting the tone of the song myself, I promise! It’s some of the clunkiest Drag Race storytelling I’ve seen in years, and it really ends this rushed episode on a particularly sour note.

Again, I don’t think this episode is a dark omen for the season or anything. My solution would be that, at least for the episodes with more than 10 queens, we get an extra 15 minutes or so. It’s too late for that to be done this season—unless (until?) Real Friends of WeHo gets a swift cancellation—but I think it’s the one adjustment that could make this new MTV style of Drag Race a slay. Until then, we can enjoy this season for the ride that it is, at a faster-than-expected speed.

Untucking our final thoughts

✨ Amethyst becomes the first queen on the flagship series to survive the first two Lip Syncs for Your Life of a season since Akashia all the way back in Season 1. (Even counting All Stars, vs The World and international seasons, there’s only one other: Samantha Ballentines in España Season 2.) When Drag Race said this season would be back to basics, they weren’t lying!

✨ Irene Dubois’s mirror message to the girls: “I left a poop in one of your stations, but whomsts?” Though if her Twitter presence is any indication, it won’t be the last of Irene we hear this season.

✨ We get a small bit of non-resolution to Amethyst and Robin Fierce’s dating storyline, but again, this is something messier on Twitter than on the show itself. My take: people date sometimes and it doesn’t work out! And that’s okay.

✨ Quite a lot of glaring foreshadowing in this episode: Poppy jokingly flips off Irene with a “fuck you” in her confessional because she was the first out, and then later calls those on Team Leftovers “losers.” Ru even says those words might come back to haunt her, and lo and behold!

✨ Maren Morris barely gets a word in edgewise as guest judge, owing to the abbreviated critiques. She’s very enjoyable in Untucked, though, going to visit with the girls and speaking about country music’s complicated relationship with the LGBTQ2S+ community. Faring much better is Ts Madison in her first outing as a full-time rotating judge, filling the spot only Ross Mathews and Carson Kressley have since Season 7. She’s as terrific as ever, and I’m thrilled she’s joined the panel this season.

✨ I’ve already seen some discourse that Drag Race’s editors kept in a lengthy scene in which Malaysia and Isabelle talk about their trauma from growing up in religious families—which included Isabelle opening up about disconnecting from her family and being on her own at 17—but cut down the actual competitive elements of the episode. I’ll be honest: I think this is the wrong complaint. Part of what Drag Race fans have responded to so positively in recent seasons is the well-rounded edits of the queens. Moments like these contribute to that. If Drag Race becomes solely focused on the competition, fans aren’t going to feel connected to the cast. There are definitely fair critiques to be made of this episode’s edit, but I don’t consider this one of them.

✨ It’s a bit awkward, but ultimately sweet, how much encouragement Ru and Michelle give to Amethyst about her nose. I’m glad to see the amount of focus makeup is getting in the critiques this season (no matter how much controversy the “ChapStick” comment toward Marcia generated). It’s a cornerstone element of drag, and it’s too often ignored in judges’ critiques.

✨ Sorry, we’re doing Snatch Game at top 14? With an hour-long episode? Every queen is going to get exactly one (1) joke in. Messy decision, but we’ll see how it goes.

The next episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race will air Friday, Jan. 20, at 8 p.m. EST on MTV in the U.S. and on Crave in Canada. Check back every Monday 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.