‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ Season 15, Episode 6 recap: Golden oldies

What a strange episode of television.

That was my first takeaway upon finishing up RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 15’s sixth installment, and judging by reactions from friends, I wasn’t the only one. For the first half, it felt like MTV’s take on the reality TV behemoth had finally found its groove: there’s a unique challenge, conflict in the werk room, an appropriate amount of time watching music recording sessions, one of the best mirror moments sequences ever and group performances that don’t feel rushed. 

But the second all that’s over, hoo boy, we’re off the rails. Runways flash by in half a second. Critiques are abbreviated, and deliberations are once again absent. A winner is chosen despite nothing in the episode edit supporting that. And the bottom two might as well have been picked out of a hat. It is a flummoxing hour of Drag Race (or 42 minutes with commercials), and one that sacrifices all sense of pacing that last week’s episode developed—but it’s not an uninteresting one.

Speaking of picking things out of a hat, that’s how the major conflict of this episode reaches its détente. See, the challenge this week is to form three “golden girl” groups, dressing up and performing as if they’re older ladies. It’s a cute but somewhat needless gimmick to add to the girl group challenge, but it does make selection of the original songs crucial. Between a country tune, a hip-hop track and a metal banger, there are different degrees of how much comedy you can wring out of the juxtaposition between genre and the gimmick.

Two groups correctly surmise that grannies doing metal would be best. They both announce their intention to take that genre, immediately developing a stalemate. (This leaves the third group, with Anetra, Loosey LaDuca, Jax and Robin Fierce, to quickly pick up hip-hop for themselves.) One team, made up of Mistress Isabelle Brooks, Luxx Noir London, Salina EsTitties and Marcia Marcia Marcia, get quite assertive in their attempt to keep metal. The other group, which includes Malaysia Babydoll Foxx, Sasha Colby, Spice and Aura Mayari, bristles at their boldness. Finally, to break the tie, they agree to pick names from a cap, and Malaysia’s group gets metal.

This is not the end of this conflict, though—it goes all the way into Untucked (more on that in final thoughts), and we get several pit stops of drama along the way. It’s clear that, although they’re old-school queens with respect for one another, there’s some friction festering between Mistress and Malaysia. The former implies that the latter shouldn’t have been in the top last week, while the latter grows exhausted with Mistress’s trolling. I like this conflict because it’s ultimately harmless: Malaysia has a right to express her frustrations, and Mistress has the right to offer some good old-fashioned drag queen needling. Everyone still loves one another at the end of the day, and it’s a bit of fun for us at home.

Also fun for us at home: the performances! I’ll give the queens this: we may not always get the chance to see everything they’re doing in the challenges, but they’re clearly stepping up to the plate every week. My pick for the best overall group would go to the country queens, who make the genre work for them. Luxx and Mistress are the best in the group, with Mistress getting called out for positive critiques by the judges. Salina and Marcia wind up safe with Luxx, although Ru takes the opportunity during Mistress’s critiques to once again take a swipe at Marcia’s makeup.

There’s something strange about Ru’s fixation on Marcia’s beat. While I’ll admit that Marcia’s seeming unwillingness to fully take the note is unwise in a competition where RuPaul literally decides your fate, I’m also not sure how much more Marcia can do without completely changing her drag. And while I do think she needs more variance in her looks—I can’t believe we get another “Ow, my nose!” reference from her on the runway this week, in a look that does not fit the tie-dye category—there’s only so much to be done about that while she’s in the competition. It recalls when Michelle Visage kept knocking Vanessa Vanjie Mateo in Season 11 for wearing too many bodysuits: she was right, but that was all Vanessa had.

The problem for Ru, who I think is ultimately uninterested in Marcia as a potential winner of this season, is that Marcia does well in the challenges. This week features probably one of her weaker performances, and she’s still rock-solid. So we’re stuck in this stasis where Marcia can’t realistically be eliminated, but Ru is going to clown her for her mug every week. It’s frustratingly repetitive; can we instead spend some time getting to know the queens whom we barely do after six episodes?

Metal features the top two performers of the week: Sasha and Aura. Everything in the episode seems to be leaning toward a Sasha win, as she kills the recording session with Leland and Freddy Scott from the get-go, while Aura suffers. Both are great in the challenge, but as the lead performer, Sasha draws the most spotlight. And while they both look stunning on the runway—Sasha going for a latex tie-dye look while Aura looking quite fashionable—Sasha’s the one who gets a whole featured moment in the werk room.

In a genuinely powerful Mirror Moment (that doesn’t even take place at a mirror!), Sasha and Spice talk about the former being joked about as the mom of the group. Sasha admits she doesn’t mind being called the mother, since so many of her trans women friends haven’t made it past the age of 30. It’s a remarkably frank, reflective conversation, one that actually makes Sasha take a step back and take in the power of her being on a platform like this. Unlike so many Mirror Moments that feel like the result of producer prompting, you can tell Sasha is truly awash in emotion in this moment. It’s the kind of moment you see from eventual season champions.

At least, though, it should amount to a maxi-challenge win, especially when her toughest competition doesn’t get nearly as many story beats. When we see Aura in the recording session, she’s struggling—and while she’s better at performance time, it’s not such a dramatic difference as to be impactful. You’d imagine this will be a week for Aura to be applauded for coming out of her shell, with Sasha taking home her second win.

Nope! Aura wins, and it’s a bizarre moment. Aura is good in the challenge! Objectively, her win is defensible! It’s just so strange that instead of supporting that in the edit, the show went all in on Sasha, only for Aura to take the victory instead. Genuinely the most confusing presentation of a challenge winner since Rita Baga won the acting task in Canada’s Drag Race Season 1. Good for Aura, but she deserves a better winning edit than this.

The final group is our hip-hop queens, and only Loosey makes it out of this performance unscathed. Anetra misses a lot of her words in the performance, nearly putting her in the bottom two. But she’s saved by Ru putting Robin and Jax there instead. Jax being in the bottom makes little sense to me, considering she has a strong verse and performance, but Michelle notes she’s ahead of the beat for a bit. Not enough for me to think she deserves to be there over, say, Spice (who is pretty underwhelming in the metal group), but combined with Ru’s seeming disinterest in Jax, and I get how the decision is made.

Robin, on the other hand, basically makes the case against herself in the challenge. After an impressive dancing performance but a mild verse and runway, Robin basically argues that she’s not one for taking big swings. She’s not a “gambler,” she admits. I applaud Robin for her self-awareness, while questioning whether she remembers she’s in the running to become America’s Next Drag Superstar. Ru wants her to be The Robin Fierce, but Robin is shying away from the kind of ambition that would befit that title. She basically talks herself into the bottom two.

The lip sync is to the Bangles’ “In Your Room,” and it’s a banger of a performance! You’ve got two very talented queens here, and their performance styles complement one another nicely. Were it not for the fact that Ru is seemingly not all that interested in either queen as a potential winner (and we’re clearly going for an elimination every week this season), I could’ve seen a double shantay in the offing. Alas, Jax’s victory means Robin must sashay away.

Again, just a really strange episode. Maybe next week’s acting challenge—a revisit of the beloved Daytona Wind from last season—will be better paced? I’m starting to feel a bit foolish calling for hope at the end of all these recaps. I just find it hard to believe a cast this talented will continue to suffer from edits that make this season borderline incomprehensible. If I don’t have faith that it’ll improve, what else can I do?

Untucking our final thoughts

✨ Once again, the most interesting part of this week’s episode actually doesn’t happen in the episode—it’s from Untucked, now airing a full hour later thanks to MTV’s unwise Real Friends of WeHo experiment. Malaysia explains her frustrations with how Luxx and Mistress stonewalled her and her team during song selection, and Luxx pushes back on being called a bully. Marcia then interjects to say she’s tired of talking about it, and Malaysia shuts her down quickly. It’s a great clip; I highly recommend watching if you also have other things to do on a Friday night than wait around an hour for Untucked.

✨ Whether you enjoy Megan Stalter’s runway banter and “hi, gay!” intro is going to come down to whether you enjoy her humour. I had just as many texts coming in from friends during the episode loving her as I did groaning about her. My take: I enjoy the runway jokes fine! Everyone’s having a good time! And while the “hi, gay!” bit is a couple of years old, I’m guessing the show encouraged it since it’s her most recognizable joke.

✨ 🚨🚨🚨 We have an Anetra confessional alert, everyone! 🚨🚨🚨This week, during the fight, she admits to us at home that she’s loving the drama. Queen of loving drama! Tell us more, icon!

✨ Luxx tells us in a confessional that the four challenge winners at episode’s start—herself, Anetra, Sasha and Loosey—are the frontrunners. This is … literally true, yes! Luxx continues to prove herself the track-record keeper of the season.

✨ You know what might’ve made the Aura winner edit more comprehensible? Judges’ deliberations. I know I’m beating a dead horse here, but it is just so obviously an important part of the episode being excised week after week. Logo-era episodes were 42 minutes long and featured deliberations! Why can’t we have them here?

✨ If she had to go home this week, at least Robin gets an incredible line in her last episode: “I’m so happy to be on a team with a hip-hop icon: Loosey LaDuca.”

✨ MISTRESS: “You have drag delusion.”

MALAYSIA: “You got drag confusion.”

The next episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race will air Friday, Feb. 10, 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.