‘RuPaul’s Drag Race UK’ Season 4, Episode 8 recap: Baby let the Squirrel Games begin

What I wouldn’t give for RuPaul’s Drag Race UK to abandon the late-game acting challenge. For three seasons in a row now, we’ve had the momentum of a season grind to a halt to accommodate an overly long, reference-packed acting challenge. And worse even, no one’s gone home on any of them! Season 2’s “BeastEnders” resulted in a double shantay, while the top two queens lip synced for the win in Season 3’s “Bra Wars.”

This time around, after a reality TV reference-overdosed skit called “The Squirrel Games,” the bottom two are once again preserved from elimination by RuPaul. And while I like both queens involved in the lip sync, and I know we can just have a top four finale instead of a top three, I just have to ask: why? What is it about this particular challenge that Drag Race UK finds so important to keep around, and why can no one be sent home after it? Surely last week’s feel-good makeover task would’ve been a better time to send no one home, no? (And not just because it would’ve avoided angering legions of fans with Dakota Schiffer’s departure.)

Look, I’ve very much enjoyed UK Season 4, and I’ve had a lot of fun writing the recaps for it this season. We’ve been able to talk about bigger themes regarding Drag Race than just what’s on the screen in front of us, and we’ve been entertained by a very strong crop of dolls in the process. But this episode is a reminder that even the most solid of casts can be knocked off their course by the wrong challenge. And hoo boy, is “The Squirrel Games” all wrong.

I say this as a Big Brother devotee who squealed upon realizing Danny Beard would be playing a take on former Big Brother UK presenter Davina McCall: who is this for? A Big Brother parody alone would’ve been fun, but to reverse-engineer it into being a Squid Game parody? One that seems to only vaguely understand Squid Game? This just is excess for excess’ sake, and it makes the judges’ harsh critiques of any queen who goes too big all the richer. What else is one meant to do other than meet the volume of this absurd skit where it is? No one is particularly great in this, but the criticisms the show relies on to sort everyone out—only to not even eliminate anyone!—are enough to make you long for an improv challenge.

Before we can get to the acting challenge, though, we must mourn Dakota. This elimination is hard on the final five, particularly a tearful Danny Beard. The queens consider her like a little sister, so to see her go is always going to be tough. More than that, though, Danny voices that she feels it wasn’t Dakota’s time yet: “I don’t want to make anyone else feel shit, but I just don’t think she was the worst tonight.”

Jonbers Blonde, the only queen without a badge who just barely avoided the bottom two last week, knows what this means. “I don’t wanna fish, but do you think it was me?” she asks. Danny won’t quite go there, but Jonbers is defensive regardless. You can feel some of that defensiveness come out in her confessionals: “I’ve done mediocre in this competition, but some of them have done really mediocre.”

Unable to leave well enough alone, Pixie Polite immediately resurfaces the conversation in the workroom ahead of the next challenge. Jonbers gets defensive, and references the issue raised in last week’s Mini-Untucked: what is Jonbers’ brand? To her, she’s the fashion queen; to the other queens, that’s not enough. “You are the most fashionable person here,” Cheddar says. “What I sometimes struggle with is, ‘What is the story the fashion is telling?’ I want to know you more.”

This is all a setup for either a breakthrough or an elimination from Jonbers, and the fact that it’s an acting challenge means it truly could go either way. While that’s not an exact fit for a fashion queen, Jonbers did score high in both the Rusical and Snatch Game. She’s got performance chops! And a win for her could keep Cheddar and Danny tied at three wins apiece going into the final challenge of the season.

Alas, this development is not to be. Jonbers’ work is read by the judges as too one-note, as is Black Peppa’s as a drag take on Bear Gryllz. Again, it’s kinda rich to drag the queens for going too one-note in a sketch like this, but whatever. I can admit that there’s not much to their characterization beyond yelling, while Pixie at least has the element of perfectly imitating Kim Woodburn, an iconic Celebrity Big Brother alumna. (CBB gets referenced a lot in this episode, as you can imagine, but never more hilariously than when Michelle Visage expresses some… lingering resentments, we’ll call them, over losing her season.)

The top two of the week, and stop me if you’ve heard this one before, are Cheddar and Danny. Cheddar plays a Love Island alum-style player who proudly calls herself “the first solo winner from ‘Lust Isle.’” She gets to ditz it up, and it’s a fun new style of character for the often serious queen. Cheddar’s done a lot of work these past few weeks to change existing perceptions of her, and I do think it’s tipping the scales a bit in her favour. Not only does she have four RuPeter Badges now, but she’s also seemingly winning Ru over. Will it be enough to beat back Ru’s existing love for Danny? We’ll have to wait and see.

However, I will personally say that I once again would’ve given Danny the win. Before anyone points out that, with the win I’d have given her last week, Danny would now be at five badges, I remind you that I would’ve given the improv win to Pixie, and I wouldn’t have given out a team win for the girl groups. Don’t worry, I’m not ready to throw the whole competition into disarray—but I will admit that, with Dakota gone, Danny would be my preferred pick for the win at this point.

There’s just something about the way Danny doesn’t rest on what Ru would naturally love about her: her sense of humour, her accent, her distinctly camp style of drag. We’ve seen queens rely on those things to get them far in the competition—Baga Chipz just got all the way to the finale of UK vs. the World on those things—but Danny continually finds new ways of doing more in the competition. Her take on Davina McCall this week is so hilarious because she leans into the things about the person she’s parodying that would make sense. The dramatic pausing, much as Michelle needs to reign it in, is a smart idea that’s not reliant on what Danny has done before. She’s the kind of queen I’m excited to see work every week.

During Mini-Untucked, Jonbers gets a message from her family, and I immediately think she’s a goner. What more foreboding a sign could there be for a queen about to lip sync than a message from home? Luckily, it’s a fake-out—all five queens get messages from loved ones. There are some really adorable parents and friends in this collection, including Cheddar’s lovely partner and Peppa’s friend doing his message outside in front of a body of water. It’s a really nice segment, culminating in Pixie’s emotional, beautiful reaction to her parents’ message. Quibbles about this episode aside, this Mini-Untucked makes a long, unfunny sketch worth it.

Jonbers and Peppa face off in the lip sync to “Some Kinda Rush” by Booty Luv, and honestly? A bop! I’d never heard this song before, but it’s going straight on my commute playlist. Peppa tears the song up, and Jonbers, to her credit, at least keeps up. Still, I’d just give Peppa the win, since she clearly outperforms JB. But I spoiled the ending way up in the intro, so you know that no one goes home here. Jonbers and Peppa both live to fight another day—and inevitably lose to Cheddar or Danny.

That’s the thing that perhaps frustrates me most about this non-elimination: we know how this is going to end! Cheddar and Danny are putting on a veritable master class of Drag Race, and the only interest left in the competition this season is which one is going to ultimately win out. Why are we keeping around someone whose last win was way back in week one and someone who has consistently underdelivered in the competition? I am still a Peppa stan, and she won this lip sync, so I’m fine with her sticking around. But it just feels like the show is delaying the inevitable by keeping Jonbers in.

Barring a double elimination next week, it’s looking like we’re heading to another four-queen finale. But barring some major change of fortune, this is a battle between two queens. And depending on how things next week go—if Cheddar can pull out a fourth win, for instance—it may be an even bigger blowout than that. Danny’s got one last chance to even the field. Good thing for her that it’s a comedy challenge then!

Untucking our final thoughts

✨ Okay, time to get nerdy with some records. Cheddar Gorgeous is only the second queen in Drag Race UK herstory to win three challenges in a row, after Lawrence Chaney in Season 2. This is a remarkably rare occurrence: it’s actually never happened on the flagship American series, only in All Stars when there have been multiple wins an episode available. (The queens to do it on All Stars: Chad Michaels, Shannel, Alaska and BenDeLaCreme.) Even when you include the many international variants of Drag Race, this number doesn’t get much larger: you only need to add Drag Race Holland Season 1 winner Envy Peru and Drag Race Down Under Season 2 runner-up Hannah Conda to the list.

✨ This list actually gets even tighter if you only count individual, non-team wins. With that criterion, Cheddar is only the second ever in franchise herstory to do it. The first: Envy. Might she follow in that champion’s footsteps with a crown at season’s end?

✨ One final caveat: Drag Race Thailand Season 2’s winner, Angele Anang, actually does have five win credits in a row to her name. However, Thailand’s judging system is also quite different from almost all other Drag Race series, with runway and challenge wins given out every episode. (You can actually win the maxi-challenge and be up for elimination, it’s wild.) This makes it hard to compare across the series, but I do want to make sure Angele gets her flowers.

✨ RUPAUL: “Are there any thesbians in the house?”

DANNY: “The Queen Team are mostly thesbians.” 

✨ Fun fact about “Big Mother,” the fake Big Brother title used for this acting challenge: there was a wildly false rumour that circulated earlier this year that some kind of Drag Race/Big Brother hybrid series would be coming to Netflix. Hearing the name pop up here throws me for a loop. What did Ru know, and when did he know it?

✨ Our guest judge this week is TV chef and former model Lorraine Pascale. She is very game and fun! That’s been the case all season long: a strong set of guest judges that have at the same time not brought much actual critique to the show. The thing is, I’m not sure it’s Drag Race UK’s actual mission to include more critique from the guest judges. Why not just let them have a good time? It’s fun!

✨ Feels like this would’ve been a good point for “Who Should Go Home Tonight and Why?”, huh? Tensions boiling over, frustrations with Jonbers’ continued presence in the competition… Sometimes I wonder if the show purposefully holds off on asking this when the answer is too obvious to ignore.

The next episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK will be available to stream on Thursday, Nov. 17, at 4 p.m. EDT on WOW Presents Plus in the U.S. and on Crave in Canada. You can subscribe to our drag newsletter, Wig!, for exclusive Drag Race content delivered straight to your inbox every Tuesday afternoon.