‘RuPaul’s Drag Race UK’ Season 3, Episode 3 recap: Wild things

The unconventional materials challenge—in which a look must be made from decidedly unfashionable things—can be traced all the way back to the very first episode of Project Runway. In that series’ premiere, a group of designers who assumed they’d be working with the best fabrics got one hell of a surprise when they were taken to New York City grocery store Gristedes to shop for materials. The prompt was simple: design and construct something surprising, and show you can think on your feet.

Austin Scarlett, who has gone on to tremendous professional success, won that challenge with a dress made of corn husks. It was daring, unusual and showed that Austin had a sense of what could be possible if you looked beyond fabric. Unconventional materials challenges went on to become a staple of Project Runway. So when RuPaul’s Drag Race premiered, with inspirations from both America’s Next Top Model and Project Runway, it naturally started with an unconventional materials challenge of its own.

We’ve come a long way since Drag on a Dime—or as it was known when the Drag Race UK dolls did it in Season 1, “Posh on a Penny”—but the unconventional materials challenge remains part of the fabric (no pun intended) of the franchise. It speaks to the improvisational nature of Drag Race as a whole: Can you roll with the punches and find your way through any task on the merits of your Charisma, Uniqueness, Nerve and Talent? You don’t need to know how to sew (though it helps), as BenDeLaCreme proved in Season 6 with her hot glue Golden Girls dress. You just need to figure out your best path forward in the challenge, and impress the judges with your final product.

In this season, we see a few of the girls come in prepared: Choriza May says she challenged herself to make a dress a day while in lockdown, while Veronica Green found design inspiration during the filming shutdown last season. But in the end, like Austin before her, it’s another Scarlett who takes the win this week. 

The challenge is a two-look tribute to camping and the outdoors, with the first being one brought from home, and another constructed on the fly. With a Cher-inspired blanket dress that is beyond stunning, Scarlett Harlett is the first to break Krystal Versace’s iron hold over the maxi-challenge wins, and snatches her first RuPeter badge of the season.

Before we can properly talk about her victory, though, we must first acknowledge that the competition suffers a difficult loss: Victoria Scone, as predicted, gets sent home based on medical advice. We get a bit of time with her in the cold open this week, but like her time on the show overall, it’s just too short. “This was not in my fantasy. This was not how it was meant to be,” she says, and it puts into perspective just how crushing it is to have this opportunity taken away from you. There’s no explicit open invite to UK Season 4 like there was with Veronica last season, but Ru does say he believes they haven’t seen the last of her.

Speaking of Veronica, we see the toll it has taken on her to have to withdraw after a positive COVID-19 test last season. What she first shows to Ru as her concept for her outfit is ambitious, and theoretically looks like a joyful garment. What she actually produces is beyond dark: it’s a butterfly look rendered in rainbow colours, but she’s absolutely tortured the materials while putting them together. She also chooses to paint the top of her face and hands in a dark black, which makes the whole thing even more dour. 

Judge Graham Norton admits his confusion about how depressing it is, but Veronica explains that the look is an expression of depression. She sees it as an attempt to create something beautiful out of a dark period of her life. I admire that effort, and I think incredible drag can come from our darkest moments, but I do believe those lows require time to process and heal from them. Veronica has said on Twitter she believes she shouldn’t have accepted Ru’s invitation to return for Season 3, and I can’t disagree with her. She’s a tremendous talent, but she’s visibly just not ready to be back in the competition in this episode.

She does turn out a passionate, if messy, lip sync to “I’ve Got the Music in Me” by The Kiki Dee Band, and she holds her own against fellow bottom two-dweller Vanity Milan. But I honestly think the decision is made before the lip sync even happens. Veronica is just not at the place she needs to be to compete at her best, and Vanity still has potential. So even though it’s Vanity’s second time in the bottom, it’s Veronica who sashays away.

And Vanity’s looks are a good bit better. She takes Raven’s advice about her too-shiny makeup, and her jacket on the first look and colour choice on the second are both great. However, her first look doesn’t have much connection to camping, and Ru objects to the lack of finish on her second. It seems like she might be able to avoid lip-syncing again after Choriza May also gets bad feedback, but Choriza tells a frankly incredible story about being blinded and making an owl friend to explain her second look. If Choriza’s uniqueness failed her by modeling two too simple looks, her charisma more than comes in the clutch to keep her out of the bottom two.

On the happier side of the runway, Krystal Versace once again receives praise for her two looks, and it almost seems like Ru wants to give her another win. However, Graham and Michelle Visage pump the brakes a bit, saying they feel they’re getting more of the same from Krystal. It’s an interesting development: Krystal’s track record is beyond incredible, but the judges are getting bored. That’s the tough thing about an early frontrunner: you have to keep raising the bar, and it’s possible that you run out of new sides to show.

Important to remember in this is that Krystal is young. As Raven notes in the workroom this week, Krystal was all of eight years old when Raven’s season was on. She’s immensely talented at makeup, and has already proven to have some hidden depths. But by the very virtue of her having less experience—less time on this earth, even—Krystal does have a ceiling in terms of how much she’ll have to show. I wouldn’t be surprised if she can’t maintain the same level of interest from Ru and the judges across the whole season.

Scarlett is also young, of course, being just 27 (and looking even younger). But even just those few extra years have given her more of a range in her drag, as she demonstrates two entirely different looks on the runway. I like her hunter drag more than the judges do, but I agree that it’s her plaid gown that absolutely smashes expectations. That Graham keeps comparing it favourably to Ella Vaday’s plaid cocktail dress just because they’re of the same material shows how much the panel can’t get it out of their heads. She also pairs it with a flawless wig, and the best makeup she’s done all season. This is a strong win for Scarlett, and a real showcase of what she’s capable of.

I’d be lying to you all if I said UK Season 3 was hitting for me the way the two previous installments did. I’m still enjoying myself, but the cast isn’t popping as a collective quite in the same way, and the results have been repetitive. Losing Victoria is also a major blow, even if it was an expected result after last week’s edit. By this point last season, we’d seen stunning lip syncs (Tayce to “Memory!”), fallen in love with Tia Kofi’s runway explanations (although Choriza is giving her a run for her money) and suffered some brutal eliminations (I will never stop beating the drum for Asttina Mandella).

I’m still interested in seeing where this season goes, but coming off the heels of the excellent All Stars 6, I can’t help but feel a bit let down. Luckily, we’re about to hit an incredibly important milestone, one that might be able to flip expectations of this season entirely. That’s right, folks: it’s Girl Groups challenge time. See you next week, U.K. huns!

Untucking our final thoughts

✨Charity Kase and Kitty Scott-Claus have a beautiful conversation in the workroom about Charity’s experiences as an HIV-positive person. I really appreciate this scene, moreso than I did the extended mirror moments in last week’s episode, because it’s about one person connecting to another by sharing a detailed account of their experience. Too often, Drag Race defaults to platitudes of empowerment before actually addressing the darkness those platitudes are meant to address. I’m so grateful to Charity for sharing her story, and glad that Kitty is there to be such a warm friend. Combined with Trinity K. Bonet’s open, honest talk about being HIV-positive on All Stars 6, it’s nice to see Drag Race really allowing room for these conversations 12 years after Ongina first came out as HIV-positive way back in the show’s first season.

✨That said, I’m getting the sense that we’re building to a real heel turn for Charity. Once again, a good bit of mini-Untucked is devoted to her thinking she should’ve been in the top, and when Krystal comes in, she asks a pointed question about whether Krystal would deserve the win after she receives a lot of help. I appreciate a confrontational queen, but I think this is all presaging a downfall arc of Charity never getting the validation she’s seeking from the judges.

✨Selfishly, I want Victoria back on my TV screen as quickly as humanly possible. But I do think Veronica’s early elimination should be a cautionary tale of sorts. Victoria and the show should work out a way for her to come back when she’s ready—processing having such a big opportunity taken away from you because of your health clearly takes time.

✨Nicola Coughlan is absolutely adorable as a guest judge, and offers up really smart, funny critiques. You can tell she’s just delighted to be there, but doesn’t let her enthusiasm stop her from serving her role with aplomb. Best guest judge in quite a bit, I’d say.

✨On Krystal’s second look, Nicola sums up my critiques better than I ever could: “I mean, the look says Alexander McQueen, but the shoes say Kate Middleton.”

✨We get our first proper mini-challenge of the season, and it’s a butch drag task! The queens must improv through profile videos for Findhr, a new app for heteroflexible men who may not know exactly what they want. Veronica does a wild character in a harness (“My name is Albert Prince, a.k.a. There Is No Safe Word”), while Kitty gets my biggest laugh by pivoting from a super bro-voice to a falsetto. Scarlett takes the win, however, meaning it’s a clean sweep for the East London queen this week.

✨One weakness of this cast that dawned on me this week is that they’re really not organic at bringing up producer prompts in the workroom. You know the type: they’re usually obvious questions fed to the queens by producers about how the other girls are doing, if they’re nervous and so on. They’re in every season of the show, but compared to, say, the All Stars 6 cast, this group handles them in far clunkier and more expository fashion. For example: Scarlett outright asks Choriza what she’s working on, with no effort to pretend it was part of greater workroom banter. They just launch into it like Ru’s doing a workroom visit.

✨Speaking of a Ru workroom visit! He brings Raven in this week for her seemingly obligatory one appearance a season on the foreign, RuPaul-hosted series. (Hey, she’s already there to do Ru’s makeup, so why not?) The queens who ask her for makeup advice—Kitty, Vanity, Scarlett—get extra points in my book. You have one of the world’s most famous makeup queens in the room with you. That’s valuable time to get those tips. And to her credit, all of Raven’s advice is super smart and actionable.

✨RUPAUL: “Michelle, have you ever gone camping?”
    MICHELLE: “Ru, of course! And it was in-TENTS!”

The next episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK will be available to stream Thursday, Oct. 14, at 2 p.m. EST on WOW Presents Plus in the U.S. and OUTtv in Canada, as well as on BBC Three and the BBC’s iPlayer in the United Kingdom. Additionally, episodes are available the same day on Crave in Canada.

Can’t get enough drag content? Check out Wig!, our gag-worthy weekly drag newsletter! Sign up for exclusive content only for Wig! subscribers.