‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ Season 18, Episode 13 recap: Such a Karen

There’s nowhere to start but at the end, is there? Jane Don’t has been eliminated, and that is a tragedy. Not for Jane, who is going to reap the rewards of being a “robbed” queen for years. (Don’t believe me? Check out how Suzie Toot’s career is doing since her shocker departure last season.) Not for the other queens in the cast, who now have a much better shot at the crown—with the path particularly clear for this week’s maxi-challenge winner. Not even for the idea of “fairness” in the competition, which has always been over-valued by the fandom. As many commentators have said over time, Drag Race is nominally a competition and heavily a drag variety show meant to entertain.

But it is a tragedy for this season, and for Drag Race as a whole. I’ll start more micro and work my way up: no matter who wins this season, their victory will always be haunted by a whisper: “Well, if Jane had made it to the finale …” The queen with the most impressive track record in Drag Race herstory is sent home two episodes before the finale, on her first appearance in the bottom two. She is sent home by a queen on her second Lip Sync for Your Life, Nini Coco. The decision, which seems to have been made more for shock value than anything else—though, interestingly, is not edited as much of a shock—casts a pall on the season as a whole. Any discussions of its reputation will have to bring up this elimination, which will overshadow a lot of good stuff from earlier in the season.

Now thinking macro: Drag Race has lost the plot. Full stop. If I were to put on my tinfoil hat, I’d say that the show saw the response to Suzie’s elimination last season—which drove a lot of conversation and engagement around the show—and said “Hey, why don’t we do that again?” Shock eliminations are nothing new to the show, after all. Way back in Season 1, Ongina was sent home while Rebecca Glasscock remained in the competition. Pandora Boxx, the definitive fan favourite at the time of her original season, prompted no less than Entertainment Weekly to call hers one of the most shocking reality TV eliminations ever. We’ve seen queens like BenDeLaCreme, Valentina, Denali and Plasma sent home too soon in fans’ eyes. And I haven’t even mentioned the various shocking All Stars eliminations!

But herein lies the rub: in almost all of those cases, the elimination was justified. Ongina and Pandora lost lip syncs fair and square to queens with roughly equivalent track records. DeLa was already spared elimination once, and lost the lip sync to Darienne Lake a second time. Valentina didn’t know the words. Denali’s dress kept her from pulling out her usual lip sync tricks. Plasma was blown away in the lip sync by Mhi’ya Iman LePaige. And Suzie completely fell apart in the last challenge of the season, failing every single element of it. Even the All Stars eliminations are justifiable because of the rulesets in play. You might not have liked that Manila Luzon went home in sixth place on All Stars 4, but Naomi Smalls eliminated her within the confines of the game they were playing.

Jane’s elimination is not justified. She doesn’t do well in the challenge, but as we’ll get to, nobody outside of the winner really nails it. She lands in the bottom two with someone with a far worse track record, and while I’d argue Nini out-dances her, it’s hardly a blowout. If, as we’re told, the Lip Sync for Your Life is the queens’ “last chance to impress” RuPaul, neither Nini nor Jane do all that much to move the needle. Plus, hasn’t Jane been impressing Ru all season long? Why is this one below-average challenge performance enough to justify eliminating her? Short answer: it isn’t. And that makes me very nervous about what is in store for Drag Race’s future.

Honestly, this whole episode seems cursed from the jump, as the queens utterly bomb the “Everybody Loves Puppets” mini-challenge. My joy at seeing the puppets challenge return (for the first time since Season 12!) is quickly quashed seeing the cast fail one by one. “The real loser of today’s mini-challenge is our crew, who had to sit through the unedited version of that catastrophe,” Ru says, making no bones about how badly the queens do. He even gives the $2,500 prize for the challenge to the crew to split! It’s a funny moment, but also a bad omen, what with an improv maxi-challenge around the corner.

Juicy Love Dion notes in confessional when Ru announces the “Karens Gone Wild” challenge that, effectively, the whole cast just proved they’re bad at improv comedy. Still, they press on with the task that bears most in common with Season 11’s “L.A.D.P.” challenge. In each task, the queens must improvise through a scene as one of five Karen characters, with only RuPaul as their scene partner. (In that way, it also bears a lot in common with All Stars 9’s “Meeting in the Ladies Room” challenge.) The queens get to pick their own Karen characters, and for the first time all season, there’s no debate over who gets what role. It’s a miracle!

After a surprisingly intellectual bit of improv coaching from Ru during the walkthrough—during which he reminds the queens, “So, the puppet show was a disaster”—we see the challenge itself. First up is Juicy as a Karen—pardon me, Karén—who fights with Ru over a parking spot outside her house. Juicy wisely leans into a character she’s comfortable with, going with a somewhat stereotypical “spicy Latina” that Ru tends to respond to. Impressively, Juicy’s actually pretty funny, with a couple of lines (“They’re coming from salsa class. Not salsa-dancing class, salsa-making class”) that make me laugh. She doesn’t make the most of every opportunity, getting stuck on the same things too often, but she commits to the character and overall does a decent job.

Also decent is Darlene Mitchell, who builds a great “Shoplifting Karen” character who isn’t actually much of a Karen. She’s more of a southern, “bless your heart” type, so there’s not much outward disagreement between her and Ru’s security guard character. Still, the improvised joke about the makeup she stole being a better foundation match for Ru than her is one of the funnier lines in the episode. Then we get to Myki, and this is what we’re looking for. Myki’s “Traffic Stop Karen” is exactly what a Karen should be, as entitled and manipulative as you’d expect. Her physical comedy and comic timing are both excellent, and she makes use of everything she can. Her pushing every button in her van except to roll down the window is so funny. Myki has been good in these comedy challenges, but this is next-level from her.

Then we get to Jane’s “Late for Her Flight Karen.” (Her complaints about long TSA lines feel … timely!) There’s something not quite right about the tone with this character. She’s definitely a Karen, but like Darlene, she leans a bit too much into quirk and not enough into anger and conflict. She’s also not particularly funny, and lets quite a few potential banter bits with Ru fly by her. It’s a surprisingly bad performance from Jane, but it’s more bad in context than in a vacuum. If Juicy delivered this performance, I think we’d be saying it was not bad for Juicy. 

Nini, meanwhile, knows exactly what a Karen should be in her role as “HOA Karen,” and clearly channels Alyssa Edwards in voice and expression for her performance. Unfortunately for her, she’s just not very funny. During prep for the challenge, Nini says that with Snatch Game, she was able to prepare in advance—this is different as it’s something she has to come up with on the fly. You can see her struggling with it, even as she doesn’t break character. Nini has just lost all momentum in this competition, and it feels like she’s limping to the endgame. Her previous highs were high, but they feel very much in the rear-view mirror at this point.

Interestingly, none of them knows quite how well they did in the challenge the next morning, because unlike Snatch Game and the roast, there was no one else in the room to laugh at what they were doing. Juicy is probably the most confident of the group, which decidedly has Jane on high alert. What did Juicy get from Ru in terms of in-challenge feedback to make her so confident—and why didn’t Jane herself get that?

After what might be the best Ruveal runway category in a minute, “From Wholesome to Folsom,” that features some killer looks (Juicy’s Alice in Wonderland-to-Cheshire Cat transformation, Myki’s thorny rose into thorny BDSM look and most impressively, Nini’s Statue of Liberty Ruveal), we get to the judging. Honestly, this is a clear win for Myki. No one else even seemingly scores in the top with her. This is Alexis Mateo in the Season 3 USA PSA-levels of one queen dominating. (Pardon the pun while she’s in BDSM gear.) Darlene and Juicy get good, if qualified, notes, while Jane and Nini bear the worst of the criticism.

And so we arrive at the Lip Sync for Your Life, set to Lady Gaga’s “Garden of Eden.” (Great song.) Nini finally gets to lip sync in an outfit that gives her some mobility, and so we do finally get to see her pull out some stunts later in the song. But for most of it, she and Jane are both stuck in walking-around-the-stage mode, not really giving the levels this performance needs. Again, Nini is better, but Jane isn’t bad. This is the kind of lip sync that, in other circumstances, would end in us all saying, ‘Sure, Nini was better, but there was no way the show could eliminate Jane …’

And then Ru eliminates Jane. It is seemingly as shocking a decision for those in the room as it is to the fans. Until last week, Jane seemed invincible as a competitor. As Myki notes in this episode, she set a new record for number of consecutive weeks in the top. And now she’s just gone, ineligible to win this season’s crown. Even in moments of being contrarian and thinking someone else could win—as I have with Nini and Myki in previous weeks—I never imagined they’d be doing so in a finale that did not include Jane. Her being fifth place is genuinely unprecedented.

I basically know where Season 18 goes from here (more to come in the power ranking, but hint hint, it involves the only queen left with three wins taking the crown), but I don’t know where Drag Race as a whole does. What is the point of these statistically mighty track records—report cards that not only fans cite as a measure of success, but now the show does—if you can be sent home on a whim anyway? Jane’s elimination basically blows up the idea that there’s any strategy to doing well on Drag Race. No one since BenDeLaCreme on All Stars 3 has come to the show as prepared to appeal to Ru, navigate the various challenges and impress fans the way Jane has. And all it got her was fifth place.

Again, don’t cry too much for Jane, who is going to have a tremendous career after this. At the same time, don’t be surprised if a return to All Stars is not in the cards for her. After all, she did everything she could to win this time, and the show dumped her for it. Why should she believe the next time would be any different?

Untucking our final thoughts

✨ After Nini survives the lip sync against Discord Addams while still wearing her makeover look, Myki jokes, “At least another butterfly didn’t die on the stage.” Asia O’Hara is never coming back on this TV show, is she? Miss you, Asia!

✨ Struggling to get her puppet on her fist, Juicy asks, “How’d you get your hand in there?” Myki’s response: “You gotta really want it.”

✨ Our guest judge is Julianne Nicholson! We’re one step further in getting everyone from the August: Osage County judge universe on the show. (Margo Martindale next, please!) She skews a bit too positive for my taste, but she’s having a lot of fun. Her calling Darlene’s piss runway look “the missing Village Person that we all wanted and never got” is hilarious.

✨ RUPAUL: “Hi Karen, hi Karen …”

JUICY: “It’s Karén.”

✨ In a wild coincidence, I was in Las Vegas this past weekend to see Jennifer Lopez’s residency show, and my friend and colleague Mathew Rodriguez and I went to a local bar’s Drag Race viewing party. The guest that night was none other than Jane Don’t! It was pretty wild to be in the room with her as everyone watched her elimination—especially since, as we were watching the delayed West Coast feed, I already had seen what happened. Season 16’s Mirage (the host of the event) did a great job interviewing her throughout, and Jane opened up about her dislike of Karen videos, her feeling that she didn’t do that bad in the puppets mini-challenge and most heartbreaking of all, that her sadness over being eliminated was mostly about not getting to be with her fellow queens moving forward. The whole bar gave her a standing ovation once she was sent home, and the crowd was super supportive.

✨ Not Myki winning tickets to Stop! That! Train! …

The next episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race will air Friday, April 3, 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.