RuPaul loves disco. This is as close to an enshrined fact as we have on RuPaul’s Drag Race. Be it his everlasting appreciation for Diana Ross, his vested interest in keeping knowledge of the genre alive (remember Season 13’s “Disco-mentary”?) or just the prevalence of disco when it comes to lip sync song choices, it’s obvious that the style of dance music is not just beloved by our host, it’s part of RuPaul’s Drag Race’s blood.
So when the queens of Season 18 are tasked with performing in girl groups to songs of various genres, it’s no surprise that every team wants to do the Sylvester-inspired disco track. They know it’s Ru’s favourite, and they think that’s the ticket to success. There’s a wild battle over it that involves Vita VonTesse Starr and Athena Dion refusing to cede ground, determined to take the genre for themselves. And watching it all go down, I can only ask myself: Why?
Yes, disco is Ru’s favourite. But it also means that choosing that song carries much more significant risk than picking either pop or punk. If you nail it, great! But if you even slightly disappoint, it’s going to be so much more important to Ru than if you fail in another genre. Remember how scared Bianca Del Rio was about doing Judge Judy upon learning that she’s one of Ru’s favourites? Things worked out well for Bianca, because she was great in the character. The group that eventually picks up the disco song is not so lucky.
This episode serves as a cautionary tale for queens. Even as flagship Drag Race has become more and more about simply entertaining Ru as an audience of one—think of Jimbo’s perfectly calibrated drag to Ru’s tastes that won her All Stars 8, or the devolution of Snatch Game into simply who can make Ru laugh most—you can’t always rely on just appealing to Mother. You have to do it right, with the respect he expects. And if you disappoint him when he cares the most, the punishment will be proportional.
RuPaul addresses the full cast for one of the last times, as the first elimination of the season is on the way Credit: Courtesy MTV
For this Q-pop girl groups challenge (Q is for “Quintessentially Queer and Queeny”—sure), Vita and Nini Coco as last week’s top two are made team captains. After a schoolyard pick of four queens each for their teams, the leftover four are made into the final group. Nini immediately snatches up Mia Starr for her choreography experience, then fills out her team with Ciara Myst, Myki Meeks and Kenya Pleaser. Vita picks Briar Blush, Juicy Love Dion, Discord Addams and Jane Don’t. This leaves Athena with DD Fuego, Darlene Mitchell and Mandy Mango as her teammates, and she does not do a great job of hiding her displeasure with this situation.
This tension transfers over to song selection, where the choices are the aforementioned, Sylvester-inspired “Funk Almighty,” the Wham!-esque pop track “Go-Go-Go!” and a punk tribute to The Runaways, “Cherries.” Both because they know Ru loves it and they all have genre-appropriate looks in their wardrobes, every group goes to the mat for disco. There are some clever moments in here: DD baits Discord into disagreeing with her team, knowing that she wants to pick the punk song. (“Discord, shut up,” Jane says in confessional.) Nini’s group wisely tries to grab the pop song discreetly while they can—though DD attempts to stop them in case they lose the disco battle. This ultimately leads to Vita and Athena in a stand-off, but Discord eventually talks Vita down and they take the punk track.
After this, Vita tries to sell both in confessional and to the group that this was all part of her plan to get punk, which is a delightful fairy tale. Vita is pressed in that argument, and I don’t believe for one second she actually wanted punk. But hey, we all tell ourselves white lies to get through the day, don’t we?
The next drama on the agenda is a medical one: Nini’s voice is going in-and-out. She says she lost it during the screaming mini-challenge, and while I’m a little surprised that such a short amount of time spent screaming could shred one’s voice this much, she genuinely sounds terrible. It seems like her stressing out about it is making the problem worse, which makes sense. Meanwhile, Athena calls it karma for not picking “the goddess Athena” for her team.
Athena Dion can’t quite keep the disappointment off her face upon not being chosen by one of the two team captains Credit: Courtesy MTV
When we get to the main stage for the performances, the “Studio 50-Whores” reveal that they have taken entirely the wrong approach to “Funk Almighty.” Instead of infusing the soul into disco that Ru wants to hear, they have almost made a parody disco song—and Ru’s pissed about it. I personally think Athena has the most blame to shoulder here, being the one who worked most with the choreography. But Darlene also looks a mess, and Mandy is too hectic with a generic verse. My standout of the performance is actually DD, with a pretty good verse that includes the line, “I’m not your cup of tea? Okay, I’m tequila!”
Ru ultimately puts all of them in the bottom, choosing two to lip sync. Mandy’s strange choice for her runway look, a table with her own picture on it, confuses the judges, so she’s looking like a lock for the bottom two. But when Darlene earns praise for her comic take on a big falsetto note, it clearly comes down to Athena and DD as to who will be joining Mandy in the bottom. This is made a bit more interesting when DD pushes Athena forward to the judges as the queen who was the leader of the group—throwing her under the bus more than a little bit.
The other two groups each produce one contender for the win: Mia from Glam!, and Jane from the Tucked Aways. Glam! is the inferior group of the two, but they still do much better than the Studio 50-Whores. If anything, their group’s performance is just a little generic, from the verses to the costuming. The choreography is anything but, though: Mia does a great job of getting her team together, and I think it’s why all but her skate to safety while she is in contention for the win.
The actual best group of the week is the Tucked Aways, and hearing the song, it’s shocking that the groups were fighting not to get punk. It’s the best song! It allows for so much room for characterization, and the queens who do best in this team understand that. I give props to Briar for a very fun verse and performance, but it’s ultimately Jane who earns top honours. They’re well-deserved, too: Jane’s verse is witty and well-written, and she switches between a lighter and deeper voice for comedic effect. Hers is the standout performance across all groups, and she earns the maxi-challenge win for her efforts.
Dove Cameron returns to the judging panel for the first time since Season 14’s infamous Snatch Game Credit: Courtesy MTV
After deliberations, Ru ultimately puts DD in the bottom over Athena. I personally don’t get this, but I also just don’t think the show is very interested in DD. Athena is a major character so far in these first two episodes, while when it comes to DD and Mandy, I think either could go and not upset the show’s plans for the season much.
The lip sync song is Dove Cameron’s “Too Much,” and while Mandy struggles at first to free herself from her runway, once she’s out, she tears it up. This is actually a bit of a massacre for a first-elimination lip sync, reminiscent of when Laila McQueen tore up “Applause” against a woefully unprepared Naysha Lopez in Season 8. Mandy shantays, and DD sadly sashays away as our Porkchop of the season.
I’m really enjoying this crew of queens: They’ve got a friendliness but an undercurrent of rivalry that really stands out. And the diversity of drag is refreshing, especially after last season, when a lot of the early weeks were spent trying to distinguish queens from each other. After just two episodes, I feel like I understand the aesthetic, vibe and personality of everyone left standing. Let’s see how they do in their first improv challenge of the season next week. Until then!
Untucking our final thoughts
✨ Mia asks Nini how it feels to win last week after most of the girls counted her out. (This mostly took place in Untucked.) Nini says it’s “water off a duck’s back.” Always a smart idea to invoke the spirit of a winner!
✨ The constant discussion about this being a more “mature” season—Drag Race, I promise you, we’ve noticed that the cast is older. Thank you for listening. We can move on.
✨ RuMail is rebranded “Ru Rules”—not sure if just for this week or for the season moving forward—and we get our first, Ru Rule #72: “Everyone has a voice, but not everyone deserves a microphone.”
✨ “All movement is not Discord’s strong suit,” Jane says as her group learns the choreography. Judging by the fact that Discord keeps her absurd runway walk this week, I think she’s right about that.
✨ When talking about her punk aesthetic, Discord makes the argument that drag needs to go back to its punk roots—that it’s gotten “Disney-fied,” and a lot of drag doesn’t make much of a statement anymore. I agree with her, and I also find it very interesting that Drag Race is platforming that argument. If there’s a clear culprit for the “Disney-fied” modern drag climate, it’s Drag Race itself. In fact, in a 2019 interview with NPR, Randy Barbato, one of the heads of World of Wonder, said this exact quote: “But if drag were to be totally—become totally commodified and Disney-fied, that’s the world I want to live in.”
✨ NINI: “Oh my god, we’re gonna have our first mirror message!”
MYKI: “Oh my gosh! What are you gonna say?”
✨ Ts Madison returns to the judging panel, after actually making the most appearances of any recurring judge last season. I’m admittedly surprised to see her back, considering her controversial statements have been attracting more attention in the last year. Personally, I think Drag Race could stand to take a look at some new rotating judges, but they’ve been remarkably resistant to real change besides gradually adding Ts (and, for a couple of appearances a season, Law Roach). It’s been over a decade since Carson Kressley and Ross Mathews joined the panel—time for some fresh perspectives.
✨ Dove Cameron is back from the doomed Season 14 Snatch Game to serve as this week’s guest judge. She’s really good! She’s got sharp, specific critiques, and she’s not afraid to be critical. My favourite moment of hers comes in deliberations, when speaking about Mandy’s table look: “When she said that the skirt was supposed to be wood … I did my own little Google Maps zoom-out and went, ‘Oh, that really doesn’t read!’”
✨ The runway prompt is “Your Neck, Your Back, Your Pussy, Your Crack,” a reference to the classic Khia song (before her name became slang for a flop). In reality, though, it’s a return of the favourite body part runway from Season 5. I’ll have more thoughts on the individual looks in this week’s power ranking, but in general, I do wish they had been a bit stricter about making the queens pick one body part. Kenya goes with her “everything,” Mia just does the whole category and Discord goes with both back and crack. I appreciate the queens who throw a curveball: Briar with one finger, Nini with her brain and Jane with her mouth, in a very clever Carol Burnett reference.
✨ When Ru names Mia and Jane as the tops of the week, he adds, “Bet you don’t hear that often.”
✨ In an emotional back-and-forth with Ru, Darlene opens up about her sobriety—nine years!—and banters about her name. Ru says it’s one of the stupidest names she’s ever heard, and she loves it. Better this than Ru constantly trying to change your name like he did with Heidi N Closet!
✨ RDR Live is back next week. I deeply want to know who in Drag Race production has decided that we love RDR Live enough for it to be a recurring challenge. Because let me tell you, we simply do not. ❤️
The next episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race will air Friday, January 16, 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.
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