Start your engines racers! It’s Shea Coulee’s Drag Race All Stars 5! Yes it’s that time again, 10 all star queens enter and only Shea Coulee can walk out victorious. Every week I (Deb) will be rucapping each and every episode, dishing you my hot takes and opinions about what I loved and hated, complete with rants about the unfair favouritism (your girl can’t help it, she’s a libra). This week is a double decker of episodes 1 and 2. Why? Because Netflix UK decided to hand it over a week late (so much for our “special relationship”).
As disappointed as I am to not see Kelly Mantle, this lineup is exciting. It’s an eclectic mix of old and new, made possible by our collective amnesia of All Stars 1. If only I could also forget the threatening email Viacom sent me for illegally torrenting it. Anyway, this first episode begins with the classic werkroom walk in, shift weight, pose, snappy catchphrase! As always for All Stars, we get to see everyone’s glow up/plastic surgery journey. Blair has apparently finished puberty, coming out fully formed the other end (can’t relate). Mayhem Miller is told she looks expensive in an outfit she literally got from amazon.com, Jeff Bezos said gay rights? For some reason, their boy looks spoke more to me. India looks like she’s cosplaying as a ketchup bottle, Mariah looks like she works in a library, and Ongina just reminded me of Chicken Run.
As Rupaul welcomes the queens again, we meet special guest, Ricky Martin!! Oh Ricky. He looked as fine as he did uncomfortable. After some reads which they probably bought off Twitter, we learn about the “juicy tea” between Derrick and India. And juicy it is. So it turns out...um India was fired - wait, no, she left and er, went on Instagram live and...yeah I don’t really care. The tea is really a vessel to see Derrick deliver her cutting remarks in her trademark stiff-as-a-brick delivery. Unfortunately, they actually did #FreeBritney. I haven’t seen the rest of the season, but if Derrick was bringing the beef to this salad, it is now sadly vegetarian.
So, the variety show. They used to call this the talent show but they removed it when most of the queens just lip synced to their own song and had to call it “variety”. Most queens end up doing this to varying degrees of success but as a menacing SJW type, Mariah Angelou was the stand out. It’s very easy to stand on stage and make a political statement everyone already agrees with, but it’s hard to simultaneously blend good art and good politics. Cracker, Alexis, and India are the tops while Mayhem and Derrick end up in the bottom. Unfortunately, oops she did it again, and endearingly slow Derrick ends up leaving us far too soon.
Straight after, I watch episode 2 and I don’t know if it was just regular drag race fatigue, but I can’t really remember that much. Rupaul (59) roleplayed a teenage girl writing in her diary and it made me feel uncomfortable. Tessa Thompson was STUNning. Blair in her hot pink runway was giving me the Pink Panther anime main character. Again, my fave was voted out. Bless her heart. 11 years of drag race is a long time and Ongina was in a season where nobody stopped Rebecca Glasscock from walking in in JEANS. She was never going to make it, but we got 2 episodes of that little Chicken Run drag queen, and for that I am grateful.
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