‘All Stars 6’ Episode 9 Recap: Shady, shady superlatives and ‘Drag Tots’
WARNING: If you haven’t seen episode nine of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars 6, there are major spoilers ahead!
So, the “game within a game” thing is getting closer to being RUvealed. This better be the gag of all gags, because Mama Ru has literally been stretching this out and teasing us with it all season… That’s what she said. I almost got a little happy, because I noticed she told this week’s eliminated queen to head to the main stage. She hasn’t told any of the others that. But, of course, it didn’t happen just yet. *sigh*
But, moving on… So, Pandora was eliminated last week. Yes, I know you all didn’t hear from me last week, but a bish was busy… OKURRR! But yes, Pandora Box was eliminated and I must say I was not shocked. I mean, Pandora has been pretty safe all season — meaning she hasn’t won one challenge yet. I said it in the beginning, but there seemed to be something that just wasn’t allowing Pandora to connect this season. She just seemed very disconnected and maybe even defeated this time around. I’m not sure what’s going on, but I hope Pandora is ok. I quite like her — she’s a legend at this point!
But now, we’re down to the Top 5 — Trinity, Ra’Jah, Eureka, Kylie and Ginger. At the beginning of this episode, Ru (shadily) has the queens sit down for a high school yearbook-style superlatives challenge where they had to name each queen Messiest Queen, Moodiest Queen, Most Likely to Become President of the United States, Most Likely to Go Home Next and so on. This is shady AF, and Ru knows exactly what she is doing with this challenge in an attempt to build tension in the episode that will ultimately decide the Top 4. It’s shady boots, but entertaining to watch.
But honestly, the shade is there’s no shade at all. RuPaul and the producers have obviously been paying close attention to how all these queens talk and relate to one another all season, and they know exactly who’s going to pick who for each challenge. Who else was going to get the worst superlatives but Eureka, being named things like Messiest Queen and Gassiest Queen? Who else was going to be Moodiest Queen but the hypersensitive and emotional Trinity? And although Trinity has more wins under her belt tha Eureka (who has none), she has also been in the bottom more than anyone, including Eureka. So, who else would they vote Most Likely to Go Home Next but Trinity?
But, Trinity didn’t take kindly to being labeled moodiest or most likely to go home, and this set the tone for each queens to have their own personal downhill spiral during the Maxi Challenge, in which they have to design, create and conceptualize their own Drag Tots characters. Honestly, Rupaul and World of Wonder deserve gold medals in the field of marketing — they are obviously inserting Drag Tots into the mix in order to promote the new Drag Tots Cinematic Universe. This is literally a genius marketing move.
Also, let’s talk about how creative the writing team (shade) is for giving each queen their own character ark and journey leading up to the elimination this week. We saw them all go through their personal stress — Trinity attempting to get out of her head about how the others feel about her, Ra’Jah is worried about Mama Ru’s seemingly unimpressed response to her character during the werk room walkthrough, Kylie is having design and time management issues, and Eureka spends a lot of time rolling around on the floor looking stressed while attempting to make a gown. The only one that appears confident the entire time is Ginger, of course.
Honestly, Ginger does seem like she’s being pushed forward to being the winner. Not because she’s untalented. She’s absolutely talented, funny and fierce. But, I do sense just a tiny bit of favortism sometimes when it comes to Ginger. Even though she and Kylie both absolutely killed it last week, I personally think Kylie did a better overall characterization of her snatch game character than Ginger did. But Ginger still won. At the very least, it should’ve been a tie, in my opinion. It’s not like there’s never been a double win before, and those performances definitely deserved a double win.
Anyway, even though each queen had their own personal dilemmas, they all absolutely showed out with the challenge. Trinity served us a runway walking fierce feline-inspired character named Furlesha; Ra’Jah serves us a confidently purple diva named “Iseeya Queen”, who ends up snatching the win as the Top All Star of the Week; Eureka serves us a fashionista villain named Alexander McQueen who is based on all of the negative feedback she’s gotten; Ginger serves us a funny Southern-Belle, Blanche Devereaux-inspired queen with such a long name that I actually forgot it; and Kylie serves us Miss Behave, a witchy queen with a spell book and a gorgeous sparkly black gown. All of these were fierce!
However, we’re at that point in the competition where if you’re not in the top, you’re in the bottom and up for elimination. And since Ra’Jah took the win for “Iseeya Queen” (and, in my opinion, for having one of the fiercest one-liners in Drag Race HERstory: “If someone makes fun of you for being offbeat, you just tell ’em, ‘Baby, you can’t hear my song.’”), she has to decide which one of her sisters she will send home if she wins the lip sync. It’s a tough decision because, honestly, there’s a reason to send every one of them home — Eureka has been consistently safe with no wins, Kylie maybe had the most underdeveloped character of the week (only because all of them, including hers, were so strong), Trinity, despite having two wins, has been in the bottom more than anyone else and Ginger Minj is probably one of the biggest competitors for the crown. “Tough decision” aren’t the right words, I tell ya.
But, Ra’Jah plays the game the right way, because she remains very hard to read. Neither we nor her competitors have a good idea of who she will pick. Like I said, it could be any one of them. Since she didn’t win the lip sync against Kameron MIchaels to Charli XCX’s “Boom Clap” (which we will skip over because it was pretty underwhelming, to be perfectly honest), it will be interesting to see who she picked at the beginning of next week’s episode.
Nevertheless, Kameron shows the lipstick of the queen the group chose, and it’s Eureka. Third time’s a charm, and I guess it isn’t bad that Eureka at least made it to the Top 5. But wait… Seriously, what is this “game within a game?” Silky has been talking about it for weeks on Twitter, and the suspense is killing everyone.
Let’s hope we find out next week, because the Top 4 will GAG at whatever it is. And it could change the whole course of the season!
