‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ Season 18, Episode 11 recap: Flipping the roast upside down

How many roast challenges have we seen across the years on RuPaul’s Drag Race? If you just count the flagship series, this week’s “Toast of Alyssa Edwards” is the sixth. If you include All Stars, this is the 11th. And even if you count only the seasons Ru has hosted across the world, this is the 17th. (If you include every season in every franchise, by my count this is the 35th roast or reading battle maxi-challenge. Bonkers!) Think about that from Ru’s perspective: he has sat through this challenge 16 times before this. That’s 16 rounds of the same “Ru is so old jokes,” 16 iterations on the same formulaic routines. There are still good routines, but few really stand out in the sea of the same sets.

I say that so we can all have Ru’s mindset in mind when we talk about the “Toast of Alyssa Edwards,” and who ultimately wins the maxi-challenge. In its conception, this roast is just like any other: queens develop comedy sets based around reading not only the guest of honour, but her fellow queens and the judges. Having the subject just be one Drag Race alumna is new—previous roast targets have been either judges, other drag legends like Lady Bunny, or groups of queens like the Miss Congeniality and villains roasts of Seasons 13 and 17. But Alyssa is one of the show’s most prolific alumni, with three appearances on various seasons to be used as fodder plus all of her off-show shenanigans. There’s a lot of humour to be mined here.

This final seven isn’t the most hilarious cast of queens we’ve ever seen, but with a couple of exceptions—Discord Addams and Juicy Love Dion were pretty rough in the reading challenge—they’re good with a read. You can expect someone like Jane Don’t to be great at this, and both Nini Coco and Myki Meeks did well in another comedy challenge (Snatch Game). Kenya Pleaser is hilarious in confessionals, and her natural charisma should help her out in a roast.

And then there’s Darlene Mitchell. The sweetest queen of the season isn’t who you’d predict to excel in a roast. Darlene herself seems to realize this, as while the jokes she writes in the werk room make her laugh, they’re unlikely to kill on stage. She needs another way through this challenge—but what could that be?

We’ll return to Darlene in a moment, because to quote Kenya last episode, “Here go Nini.” The mechanical engineer continues to fail to read the room, and is growing frustrated with how the other queens respond to her too-sharp jokes. I give Drag Race credit for setting up this storyline well in the last few episodes—this is a natural moment to see what’s been a consistent issue in Nini’s interactions with the other girls come to a head. She’s worried about how to approach the challenge, thinking that if she goes too hard in the paint, that’s just going to piss off her sisters. During the table read prep for the challenge, Michelle Visage tells her she has to get out of her own head, but she struggles for the rest of the episode.

A later werk room conversation with Jane sheds more light on this: the issue isn’t that Nini can’t read the room or that she’s too sharp, it’s that she can’t really own it. Nini admits in confessional that as prepared as she was for the various challenges of Drag Race, she wasn’t really ready to handle the social relationships aspect of it. It’s an interesting storyline, not one we’ve really seen before, and it presents a real obstacle for Nini to get over in her quest to win. While she doesn’t need to be everyone’s best friend to take the crown, having bad relationships in the room leads to difficulties in challenges like this.

Other storylines abound in the werk room: Myki thinks she’s set herself up for failure by putting herself last in the performance order, while Discord has roast experience and is damned and determined to get her first win. But Darlene’s narrative this week remains the most intriguing, as she promises that she’s taking a big swing. Like Discord, Darlene doesn’t have a win, or even a top two placement like Kenya got last week. If she wants to make the finale, she’s running out of time to break out of the pack.

When we get to the main stage for the “Toast of Alyssa Edwards” (who, it must be said, looks incredible), Discord opens the show. She’s decent, but Jane hits the nail on the head in a confessional: she just doesn’t seem to be having much fun. The judges fixate on her knocking off her glass at the start and not recovering well, but I think that’s a symptom of her nervousness, not the problem. Jane immediately comes in and makes up for it, though: her set is a smash, perfectly polished and hilarious. Her “Strictly Cum Guzzling” joke to Michelle is particularly incredible. Already, it’s hard to imagine anyone beating Jane.

We then have to watch Juicy bomb, and it is so sad. While her “Bichon Frisé” joke does make me laugh for how laboured it is, her delivery and material are both lacklustre. Alyssa winds up getting more of a laugh in than Juicy does as she gets her lick back on a joke about needing three runs on Drag Race to win: “Well bitch, at this rate, it’s gonna take [you] more than three!” It’s always bad when the roaster gets roasted on their own turn, and no matter how gorgeous Juicy looks on the later Swept Away wind machine runway, her bottom two placement is inevitable.

And then comes Darlene. She’s smack dab in the middle, which I noted when I did my full analysis of how comedy challenge performance order affects outcomes is a “hit-or-miss” position. It’s about as likely to win from the middle as it is to be eliminated—which makes sense, as if you can stand out in the middle of the set, for good or bad reasons, you’re more likely to be remembered. As she starts, Darlene seems to be falling short: her first joke bombs. But then, something incredible happens: Darlene breaks the roast. Her punchlines are basically all terrible, and then the second they bomb, she does something stupid and crazy. The whole thing is a take on anti-comedy, and I think it’s kinda brilliant—as does Ru!

See, this is why it matters that this is Ru’s 17th time sitting through a Drag Race roast. She’s seen lots of queens do the set Jane does. And Jane does it very well. But she’s never seen someone do what Darlene does here. That’s a major positive mark for Darlene: she’s not just great, she’s surprising. This isn’t a Lexi Love in Snatch Game situation, where she was just not completing jokes and the judges decided that was hilarious. This is an intentional choice to do something very different from Darlene. You can tell she’s nervous—she’s shaking throughout—but she kills it.

The last three are a bit more conventional, with Myki doing well, Nini doing okay and Kenya unfortunately bombing. It’s interesting to compare the three against each other: Myki’s set is not the funniest, but she has a great framing device—doing kind of an exaggerated comic gesture with her arms and face—that makes her material better. Nini has really good material, with a white privilege foundation joke that is one of the sharpest of the night. But you can tell she’s really in her head, and it holds her back. Kenya’s confidence is amazing, but she just doesn’t have the material. None of her jokes are particularly funny, and her charisma isn’t enough to sell them.

After the very fun wind machine runway (standouts include Juicy’s parachute look and Nini’s grieving widow whose husband’s ashes scatter in the wind), we learn that there’s more bad news than good on the runway this week. Darlene, Jane and Myki are in the top, and everyone else is considered for the bottom two. This marks Nini’s first lower-tier placement, and Discord’s dreams of escaping the lower ranks are dashed once again. They’re both ultimately called safe, though, leaving Kenya and Juicy to battle it out—and each of them is on their third bottom-two placement.

But first, we have a winner to crown: and it’s Darlene! This is such a thrill. I imagine there will be some quibbles about Jane technically having the “better” set, but I think this exposes where Jane’s hyper-prepared strategy for Drag Race runs into some issues. You can bring in the best possible roast set, and it’s still just a roast set—one Ru has seen 16 times. Doing what Darlene does is how you stand out, and it’s a well-earned first win for the Los Angeles-based queen.

The lip sync this week is to Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” which was previously used as a Lip Sync for the Win in Drag Race UK’s third-season premiere. (Eventual season champion Krystal Versace won that battle.) The dramatic power ballad pairs well with the wind machine, with Juicy genuinely looking like an angel descending from heaven as it blows. She is excellent in this lip sync, demonstrating her ability to turn out a performance even when she’s not given something she can just dance it out to. Kenya, meanwhile, never quite syncs with the song, and thus sashays away.

I’m very sad to see Kenya go, particularly in a week where Ru’s pretty hard on her on the runway. I do think Ru meant the criticism as tough love, seeing what Kenya is capable of and how she can’t quite put the pieces together. I do hope, though, that Kenya takes the feedback and really does devote time to investing in herself. She could be an easy pick to win All Stars someday—but she needs to come back as a more polished version of herself. If she can do that, though? She may be unstoppable.

Untucking our final thoughts

✨ Discord may have been called out for cheating on the runway and told by every other queen that she should go home, but she doesn’t care! Her Discord delusions are an effective smokescreen against anything the other queens have to say. It’s kinda funny, but also a bit frustrating from a storytelling perspective—I’ll get into that more in this week’s power rankings.

✨ Ugh, Ru Rules is Back. Ru Rule #87: “Throwing shade takes a bit of creativity. Being a bitch takes none.” Well, at least it’s applicable!

✨ We get a mini-challenge (three in a row!) sponsored by Scentbird this week, as the queens produce TikTok-style promo videos for various scents. It’s a pretty forgettable mini, but hey, at least Myki gets $2,500 for her trouble.

✨ Atsuko Okatsuka is both a table read coach and the guest judge this week! I’m most familiar with her work via clips on TikTok, and I think she’s hilarious. She’s a bit more reserved than I expected as a judge, but she gives the queens good notes when they’re going over their material.

✨ Darlene’s joke about how “gerbils are not off the table” for Ru … I gasped, then cackled.

✨ The challenge ends with an Alyssa Edwards variety number, which is fine. I kinda wanted to hear her call them all beasts and gila monsters, All Stars 2 style, but I gotta remember that Alyssa’s a professional.

✨ If we’re in the business of repeating iconic lip sync ballads featured on other franchises, can we please get some of the Celine Dion bangers that Canada’s Drag Race has used for lip syncs on the main show? Who do I have to call at World of Wonder to make it happen?

The next episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race will air Friday, March 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 month.