Drag Race: "Tap that App" and swiping left on Vixen/Aquaria

From the desk of sick bed of Nathaniel R

I'm totally sick and two days late so I'm racing through typing up this Race. Please excuse possible incoherency ahead. The mini-challenge was a sleazy commercial in front of wood panelling (very 1990s Calvin Klein) where the queens had to make RuPaul laugh while talking to or um... embodying or seducing a chocolate bar. The winners were the exploitable primness of Blair St Clair, Monique Heart's lusty-busty thirst, and Monet X Change's "Irish" jig. Eureka, totally back on her game, mimed an invisible wall while lustily self-narrating. Weird but also "WERK!".

Winners and losers and drama-creators are after the jump...  

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Drag Race: PharmaRusical

Nathaniel R

A quicker look at the second episode, which featured the girls divvied up into two teams selling Ruco Labs pharmaceuticals... a chance to make lots of crude and intermittently funny jokes about gag reflexes, drag mouth (cliche utterances -- a very real problem!), and tucking. The episode was front loaded since the mini-challenge (a silly country dancing hoedown) was the peak. All in all a decent hour but relatively free of future classic moments so we'll have to call it a filler episode... 

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Drag Race: Tens Across The Board!

Nathaniel R retakes the crown Ruviewing duties from Chris Feil who is on a well deserved short break.

True story. Shortly after I queued up to watch the season 10 premiere online it froze on this image. Was it a meta acknowledgement of all the grumbling about the just completed All Stars 3?  Try again sooner is what they did and the results are sooo promising. 

"10s! 10s! 10s! across the board," was RuPaul's rallying proclamation in promos for the tenth anniversary season of RuPaul's Drag Race. That's a lot to live up to but the show, newly expanded to 2 hour episodes essentially (90 minutes + Untucked), is ready to gag you honey. The premiere episode, to borrow from chatterbox Monique Heart, delivered giving us the 'ooh ah ah sensation'...

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RPDR All Stars 3: Finale - Everybody Say Love! Please!

by Chris Feil

RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars has brought one of its most embattled seasons to an appropriately controversial conclusion. This season has been rife with drama onscreen and off that has made championing the show come with several asterisks and addendums. The show has dug itself into a hole of too many twists, an overestimation of its need for drama to excite us, and a mounting disinterest in the art of drag itself. And yet it remains one of the biggest platforms to showcase the glorious breadth of the queer experience, blessed with an audience that demands it approaches its own shortcomings.

And this week’s finale brought a twist that may have broken the fandom’s resolve in how much they can accept: the final four would be whittled down to 2 by a deciding vote of a jury of the eliminated queens. Once again, subjectivity became the season’s foremost battleground and unsurprisingly this makes for frustrating television when a competition is involved. How would a consensus shake out when every queen has already shown a different perspective on what makes a competitor worthy of the crown?

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RPDR All Stars 3: E7 - And the Oscar Goes To...

by Chris Feil

It was a rough week for Drag Race fans. Not only has this season had an unending barrage of racism and vitriol in the fandom, but RuPaul showed her ass again this week revealing her exclusionary thoughts on trans queens. The whole enterprise, including the supreme leader, needed a post-Snatch Game Latrice Royale table-slamming intervention. If ever there was a time for the show to make essentially zero waves, now was certainly convenient timing.

Maybe it was just aftermath of both Ru’s ignorance and BenDeLaCreme blindsiding us with a tectonic shift self-elimination, but this week’s episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars was a relief partly because it was so predictable. Call it the least essential of the season but when the weight of drama has become so cumbersome, this felt refreshingly unburdened and unbothered. I blame the restorative powers of Nancy Pelosi arriving in the workroom to brandish a rainbow bracelet just, you know, because.

This week’s challenge was also perfectly timed for the remaining afterglow of last Sunday’s Oscars...

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