Where’s Ru? No, like, seriously, where is Ru? This is not a test. Boot up the emergency-response system and let’s get to the bottom of this. The gay community — no, this nation as a whole — cannot lose one of our best and brightest. Was there some sort of family-emergency scheduling conflict? Did she get “exhausted†like stars used to back in the day when they went to rehab? Was she kidnapped by Extinction Rebellion as some sort of fracked-up protest. Oh, wait. Was she delivering the keynote address at some kind of fracking convention?
We see her at the very top of the episode to let us know this is the “family resemblance†challenge, in which the queens have to make over someone who has never been in drag before. This time it’s the “Queen Team,†the group of six women who work behind the scenes to make sure the contestants are fed, on time, and where they’re supposed to be. In one instance, they even pop under a drag queen’s skirt to pop one stray “bollock†back into her tuck. Now that, ladies and gentlegays, is dedication to your job, but it does sound like she was (ahem) having a ball.
Then Raven, the Drag Race Former Colonies season-two contestant and RuPaul’s tireless makeup artist, pops into the werk room to talk to all the contestants and their Queen Team members. I was like, Okay, this is a little odd, but honestly didn’t think too much of it. But then Michelle ambled down the main stage to the strains of “Covergirl, put the bass in your walk …†and I felt the exact same way I felt every time I saw Betty White’s name trending on Twitter for the past ten years: It’s over, and I don’t know how I’m going to go on.
Michelle tells us that because of “circumstances beyond anyone’s control†Ru couldn’t be with them that week. Instead, Michelle’s the head judge, Raven’s taking her seat, and Graham Norton is being joined by guest judge Boy George and possibly the best hat I have ever seen on my television screen, and I have (hate-)watched every season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
Oh! Now I have a hunch of what could be going on here. Maybe Ru has English COVID! No, we don’t have a different variant over here in the U.K., just a different way of dealing with it. Since the English have decided that the pandemic is over, if you get “flulike symptoms†many will give themselves a test to see if it is COVID. If the test is positive, you are not allowed to tell anyone about it because the government has decided COVID no longer exists. Instead, the patient disappears until testing negative and tells everyone, “Oh, I just had a migraine†or “My cat was in the hospital.†Something like that. Yeah, the English COVID. Looks like a pump, feels like a sneakier version of the flu.
Anyway, this episode wasn’t all about the missing Ru since the members of the Queen Team seemed to be having the time of their lives. They mostly look like your average English woman, and they have the names of every woman in the realm: Gemma, Lucie, Olivia, Wendy, Fleur. The only one who really stands out is Mystique — and not because she’s the only woman of color or that she’s butcher than Kameron Michaels doing lat pulldowns. It’s because she’s named after an X-Man rather than a heroine in a Jane Austen novel.
Since the Queen Team has worked with everyone already, Ru pairs them up, putting Peppa with Fleur, Cheddar with Gemma, Dakota with Lucie, Danny with Mystique, JB with Olivia, and Pixie with Wendy. Each of the Ru girls and the Queen Team coo with delight when they’re given their assignments. Unlike when they usually do this challenge, no one seems put out about who they got or why. It’s nice to see them all come together.
Not much happens in the werk room the first day, but we hear Mystique talk about how she “swings both ways†in terms of gender. Then Lucie says she is “queer,†and Fleur tells Peppa all about her coming-out journey. Wait, are all of these ladies lesbians too? We don’t get confirmation on everyone, but it sure seems that way. You mean there is a whole team of fierce, funny lesbians backstage helping the queens out and popping their balls back in, and they don’t have their own show? Can we focus just on them and call it ReTucked?
Peppa’s life story is actually quite awful. She talks about growing up on St. Martin with a homophobic father. Somebody outed Peppa to her grandmother when they showed her a picture of Peppa at the one queer club on the island. She said she was so miserable at home that she knew she had to get out to find happiness, which makes me very proud of her for getting a scholarship and escaping to the U.K. but also heartbroken that she had to endure all that just to get to a place of safety and love. But the action is so focused on her it seems as if this is her big “werk-room dump†before she’s kicked off that night.
When we finally see everyone stomping the runway, there is no one who is obviously going home, but it is a much more somber affair. Michelle is trying to keep the pun-off going as they show off their family-resemblance looks, but no one is joining in with her. Raven and Boy George I totally understand, but Graham’s whole purpose here is to pick up any obvious puns that Michelle and Ru have left behind, and it seems as though he is nowhere near clocking in.
First up is Jonbers Blonde and Nan Noir (a.k.a. Olivia), and they’re in contrasting black and white ensembles with JB as a blonde (duh!) and NN as a brunette. They do a little mime shtick in which they have to burst through a wall together. I don’t know. You know how Ru says everyone loves puppets? I think they feel the opposite way about mimes.
Pixie Polite and Trixie Truelove (a.k.a. Wendy) look as if they both just stepped out of a panto version of Cinderella as two fairies in bright-blue dresses. I don’t want to say no one backstage is getting laid, but I have never seen blue balls quite like this on the set of Drag Race. Even worse, Pixie’s makeup for Trixie looks like a paint by numbers for a tree trunk. She says the makeup makes her look older. Thank God that isn’t true for most people or else Michelle would be like Melisandre in Game of Thrones after she takes off her necklace.
Danny Beard and Mizzy Mustache (a.k.a. Mystique) gave me a gasp when they came out because Danny convinced Mizzy to wear some fake facial hair on the runway. She was resistant because she said she is often mistaken for a man and that gives her an icky feeling, so she didn’t know about making herself even more masculine. There is nothing masculine here with them both in swinging ’60s looks with “Tutti from The Facts of Life†wigs in contrasting lilac and mint. It’s the Easter Bunny M&Ms come to life.
Cheddar Gorgeous had a brilliant idea to name Gemma “Mini-Cheddar†(which is the English equivalent of a Cheez-It) but instead they call her Brie Gorgeous. They come out grasping each other’s hands in this weird pose and they’re showing off identical draped outfits, Cheddar’s in amber and brown and Brie’s in blue and brown. With their matching hoods, hair curls, and gilded makeup they look like characters in the second Dune movie when everyone decides to trip balls and have an orgy. (Seriously, that happens! It’s in the book!) I’m floored.
Black Peppa and Chili Peppa (a.k.a. Fleur) have a really cute gimmick in which they are conjoined twins linked by a pink braid that unclicks and clicks back together as if they’re Na’vi from Avatar trying to have ponytail sex with each other. Their faces are clown white, but there are lots of stones around their features, and it looks cool but also very busy. The problem both the judges and I have is that their simple black dresses don’t really give us much to look at. They look like a unit but not a very surprising unit.
Finally, we get Dakota Schiffer and Brigitte Schiffer (a.k.a. Lucie) and, as always, they look like beautiful ladies. Dakota has on a long peach (or apricot or some other stone fruit) gown with a train and a huge bow on the bust. Brigitte is wearing a baby-doll dress with an equally huge bow. The biggest problem is that Brigitte is wearing black-and-white-checkered gloves and Dakota has on matching stockings that stick out and don’t look great. I guess even worse than the stockings — and this is a critique the judges hit on too — is that the whole ensemble (minus the stockings) is just pretty. In fact, it’s gorgeous, but is it drag? I don’t know. It just seems like two pretty girls being really pretty.
The judges mostly agree with me because Cheddar takes home the win, quite deservedly. I haven’t seen a performance like that in this challenge in quite some time, and it solidifies Cheddar as my pick to take the whole thing. In the bottom, we have Pixie facing off against Dakota. Peppa better thank her lucky stars her backstory reveal wasn’t also her being-sent-home reveal.
The lip sync itself seems a little bit lackluster. They’re doing “Miss Me Blind,†by Boy George’s Culture Club, and I can almost tell they’re both so young that they’d never even heard the song before it showed up on the world’s last remaining Zunes that they use to practice for the lip-sync backstage. In the end, Dakota gets sent packing, and I’m surprised how emotional it made me. That might be because she got a teary send-off from Lucie from the Queen Team. But next week, RuPaul is back, and it’s going to be an acting challenge. I think Dakota went out at just the right time, though I would have looked forward to her besting my expectations of her once again.