Season 10, Episode 10
Children, gather around the table — family dinner is served. On tonight’s menu: a platter of hot, steaming man meat, followed by a delightful compote of piquantly dressed fruits and nuts. Join hands, give thanks and let’s tuck in.
First, our mean Auntie who smokes at the dinner table Aquaria served an unamusing bouche of bitter stewed prunes, as she attempted to digest the previous week’s non-elimination. She lamented the fact that she was not part of a “final five,” and crabbed that she would not now be able to benefit from a “double save,” as it can only happen once per season. Our house mother Asia smacked her upside the wig with, “You don’t know that. You turned it into something about you, when this has nothing to do with you!” and sternly cautioned her that if she didn’t stop making that face, it would stick like that.
Our cool older sister Monét X Change smoothed things over with a breezy crack, like she do, and middle sister Cracker somewhat sullenly spit, “I’m gonna be the first winner of ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ to never win a challenge.” Baby Eureka gurgled, “I will fight tooth and nail before I let the top three be from New York! Team Tennessee gonna fight till the bitter end!” Kameron, our daddy who mostly hides in the garage, sat silently, like she do. Aquaria later apologized, but I was so burned out from hearing apologies that shouldn’t have been necessitated in the first place this week that I tuned out, and made some iced peach tea.
Our drunk Grandma Ru then staggered in carrying our first course: an appetizing mini-challenge in which our girls were ordered to become our boys, and butch themselves up for a fake print ad for “Trade: A manly body spray … made from essential oils found exclusively at truck stop restrooms.” A Trailways busful of the gift of fear emptied out into the workroom as the queens brought their hardest, knottiest wood to the chopping stump.
(Full disclosure: Absolutely nothing is funnier to me than the satirization of aggressive, performative heteromasculinity, so this segment nearly led me to choke on a hard-boiled ovary. Like last week’s “Pants Down, Bottoms Up,” this should be its own show.)
Aquaria’s masculinity was certifiably nontoxic as she posed hard in editorial red eye shadow and a Dior-pencil mustache, and Asia served us a Tyson Beckford dinner as she purred and licked her lips. Faring slightly rougher in the trade department were Monét, looking less like a man who chops tinder and more like every man who super likes me on Tinder, and Kameron, who hard-sold a lumberjack story up until a delightfully leaked giggle at the end. Cracker, delivering a weird closeted meth cook, merited a separate challenge, fragrance and gender identity.
Eureka, looking like Susan Boyle after a missed waxing appointment and sounding like that plumber you finally got to show up after you called five other guys, brought her Team Tennessee fight to the bitter end of her … log splitter (Flooring device? I escaped “real America” long ago) and burned the competition.
The entree, served á la Ru, was the season’s requisite makeover maxi-challenge: “Drag Family Values.” Six “social media influencers” (that this is a legitimate career will never not astound me) were paraded out and matched, by an openly criminally-intentioned Eureka, with the queens that would serve as their drag mothers and create them in their own image; female they would create them.
Monét was paired with Tyler Oakley, a charming, 5’3” 29-year-old who makes videos for YouTube and is worth an estimated $14 million USD, and…
