RuPaul’s Drag Race Recap: Your Story Is Quite Harrowing

What RuPaul’s Drag Race does to Suzie Toot this week is actively mean. Watching it play out, I was overwhelmed with pity for our season’s most divisive queen. But I’m not going to say it wasn’t entertaining. The last 15 minutes or so of this episode is peak Drag Race: A fierce competition in which theater queens are only there to be punished. I just wish the rest of the challenge rose to that level.

The story we’ve been waiting for all season, that in many ways is the point of the season — The Great Downfall of Suzie Toot — doesn’t fully pan out. The show did enough to set up the story that it still has a lot of pathos, but this challenge is just too weird, and we don’t see enough of the planning stages, where we’d need to see her continually making bad decisions, for it to reach its full potential. Seriously, this challenge is insane. It’s nominally based around “auditioning” for RuPaul’s Drag Race Live!, which makes sense in a lot of ways — that’s absolutely something that these queens might be expected to do in the real world — but the audition process is a strange grab bag of challenges that nobody aces, making the judging feel particularly herky-jerky. What actually matters? The two things that end up factoring most into the judging are parts we never saw them rehearse or conceptualize at all. When did they learn a dance? When did they record a video promo? Why aren’t they doing original verses? Why were there no girl groups all season? WHAT IS GOING ON?

The episode begins on a high: Onya and Jewels were both just saved, and the girls are overall thrilled that they’re all still the top five. Ru then enters and announces the convoluted challenge, which comprises taking a publicity photo and filming a publicity video, then doing a “job interview” with Latrice Royale, then performing the song “Gift Shop.” It’s a lot. The function of there being so much to the challenge is that, during my first viewing of the episode, it felt like things were kind of just happening on my screen at random. The queens would talk, then something would happen, repeated ad nauseam all the way through the promo videos that we’re first reminded of during judging when they finally appear. The most important part of this opening spiel, though, is one word: VEGAS. No matter what they’re asked to do this week, the successful girls keep that in mind.

The first scene post-challenge announcement is the girls chatting about what they want to do while holding notepads, which I now think was so they could write their promo videos, but which I initially thought would be for verses that never appear. Seriously: Who told Drag Race not to do verses this year? It’s like everybody’s favorite part of the show. Is it because they all did original songs for the talent show? Because those sucked, and I want to hear Lexi rap. Anyway, during the writing session, Suzie says that she’s doing an Anything Goes theme, and Sam says she’s leaning into her country roots, and Onya and Lexi, respectively, tell the camera that they think that’s a bad idea, which turns out to be right. Okay!

Then it’s onto the photo shoot, coached by RuPaul. This is the best challenge segment, because it’s the only one where we see the process and then the end result on the runway. Jewels is up first, and because her drag so naturally lends itself to “Vegas showgirl,” she kills it. Then comes Onya, whose version of Vegas is basically “glamorous brothel owner,” which strikes me as just right. She’s definitely aged up by the outfit, but despite what I’ll say later about Sam’s runway, that is not an inherently bad thing. She’s fun and friendly and takes a good shot. Sam makes a horrible mistake in choosing an outfit and wig she can barely move in — a rookie move that I’m shocked to see someone as polished as Sam make. Suzie is really bad and her outfit is kind of tragic. Even if she was set on doing Anything Goes, she looks less like a Reno Sweeney and more like an ensemble member. It’s cheap. And here’s the thing I’ll echo about Suzie’s performance all week: If your drag is so limited that it cannot include “Las Vegas,” then it is very limited indeed. Lexi (shocker) gets in her head a bunch, but her outfit looks great in photos, which is half the battle, and she loosens up as it goes.

Then we see the girls interview with Latrice. Sam goes first and she’s good-to-great — polished but personable enough not to seem fake. Michelle gets on her for seeming cocky, and my instinct is that that might have been a bigger issue for people who watched a whole, unedited interview in which Sam kept talking about how great she was. In two-minute form, she seems fine. Then it’s Onya, who makes the intentional choice to drop the “Onya Nurve” persona entirely and to instead talk seriously in daytime drag. That’s fine enough, but I still wanted a bit of drag in it. She’s followed by Suzie, who knows Latrice from Fort Lauderdale (insane). Suzie is just so … theater kid-y sometimes. It feels performed. I wanted to shake her and be like, “TALK LIKE A PERSON.” Suzie’s failings are made even clearer by Lexi, who gives a great interview. Lexi is incapable of not being real, which is often her downfall, but in this situation it really works out. Jewels is next, claiming she wants to combine the worlds of burlesque and high-energy dance, and I don’t think that’s the stretch she’s selling it as, but it’s a functional sound bite. She goes blank when Latrice asks her what she wants to do in five years, because it seems like Drag Race was basically the full goal for her. It’s both an interesting moment and a telling one — it helps her win the challenge since it’s so vulnerable, but it’s the kind of thing that could cost you the season.

Then we get to the “Gift Shop” performance, which I had to watch again because I spent the whole thing waiting for the number to actually start. By my estimation: Lexi does the best because she has a focus-pulling outfit and a great performance; Sam is next because she’s the only other person with a good outfit. Then it’s Onya, who is not the best pop-music dancer but keeps up, then it’s Jewels, who I barely noticed, then down at the bottom is Suzie because of that nude character shoe. It is truly heinous.

The runway category is outerwear, and either the girls knew that this would be the last category or production knew to put it at the end, because all of these looks are basically “best drag.” Jewels looks absolutely amazing in her white outfit covered in feathers. No notes, good drag. I love Lexi’s outfit. There’s technically critiques to be made (the “dress” doesn’t go with the giant puffer), but I like that her drag is more “real fashion” than “drag fashion” sometimes — this is exuberant in the way a drag look is, but the combination feels more runway inspired than it does Drag perfection. Onya’s look is her best all season — a patterned caftan and turban, with huge door-knocker earrings. Couldn’t be better. Sam’s look is an orange gown with giant blonde hair, and I’m sorry, but I hate it. I’ve been very into Sam’s pageant styles all season, but this is where I draw the line: If you told me that this person was 50 years old, I’d believe you. Sam Star is 24 years old, and she cannot carry off this kind of “grande dame” outfit. It doesn’t suit her and she doesn’t have the gravitas. Suzie’s look is great. I’m obsessed. It’s her best look all season.

Then we finally see their Vegas promos with judging. Okay! Jewels’s is good, but she’s about one inch off with her lines. It’s close, but she doesn’t punch them exactly right in the way Onya does. The judges, though, are obsessed with her, which makes sense because she’s the most Vegas girl there. Lexi’s video is awful: She also doesn’t know how to read lines yet and goes too sexual with it. Still, Lexi did a lot right this week, so it ultimately doesn’t matter. Onya gets rave reviews for everything but her talk-show outfit (God, they have a lot to nitpick this week), and her video is by far the best. Like, light-years better than anyone else’s. It’s flabbergasting how much better she is. Sam’s performance is kind of a “death by a thousand cuts” situation — they don’t hate anything she does, but they have critiques on just about everything.

Suzie then gets raked across the coals. It’s tough to watch. Look, the judges didn’t say anything that I don’t agree with, but the cruelty creeps in when you realize that a lot of these seem like seasonlong critiques. Michelle is annoyed that Suzie didn’t switch it up enough, for example. But, as we saw it, the judges never told her that this was an issue. She was never in the bottom before this! She absolutely did the worst this week, but I also think it’s notable that she was never told what she needed to work on. That means that the story fell a little flat for me: It’s not like Suzie had a fatal flaw that she just couldn’t correct, it’s that she never bothered correcting her fatal flaw (an extremely limited point of view coupled with an extreme overconfidence in that point of view) because nobody ever pointed it out until now. This show has judges for a reason: To judge. It feels to me like Suzie’s terrible week is, at least partially, on them. And also … GOD why did she think that it was at all appropriate to do Anything Goes for Vegas? And why did she wear that hideous shoe in the number? And why was she so, so stiff in her promo video (which I haven’t talked about but was, in fact, terrible)? It’s a tragic week for Toot.

Jewels wins the challenge, which means that the math gets all thrown off: She needed to win or else she was going home, and she won. Nice job, queen, but that means that any of the other girls are vulnerable. The lip sync, rightly, comes down to Sam and Suzie. I imagine some people will think that Lexi should have been in the bottom, but I think that’s bull. Anyway, they lip-sync to “Love Child” by Diana Ross and the Supremes, in honor of guest judge Tracee Ellis Ross. It is … not a song that suits either queen. But still, I think Suzie stomps Sam in the lip sync. Sorry not sorry: Sam, though she gives a more classic Diana Ross performance, is not wearing her costume; it’s wearing her. I didn’t buy her for one second up there. Suzie gives a fully embodied interpretation of the song that makes sense for her drag. I think she wins hands down. But she still goes home. It seems that RuPaul might have hated her drag all along? Who can say.

RIP to Suzie Toot (1920-29), you’ve been the talk of the year all season long, the main character of season 17, and, now, its final victim. You will be missed!

Also on Untucked …

• Sam Star does not practice the song, which I do not find surprising given her performance.

• Keep an eye out for my interview with Suzie Toot, which should be out on Vulture at about noon on April 5, thank you very much. Good stuff!

• The hilarious Ross Mathews looks like a sci-fi villain this week for some reason.

• Michelle Visage is bonkers in the critiques this week, giving compliments like, “Your story is quite harrowing” and, “That do impress me much.” I have taken to combining the two and have been walking around my apartment muttering, “Your story is harrowing, that do impress me much” like a crazy person.

• Their doing a top four again just makes it all the funnier that they chose to boot Q at the last minute last season. They really said, “We do not want this bitch, specifically, to be in the finale.”

• Absolutely bonkers that the last person eliminated before Suzie Toot was Lana Ja’Rae.

• Gay thoughts from editor people: My editor, Genevieve Koski, is very disappointed that Suzie left this week because it negatively affected her Drag Race fantasy league rankings. Everybody please pour one out for Genevieve’s fantasy rankings! [Editor’s note: Thank you.]

• Winner pick: Onya Nurve all the way. Dark horse Jewels. Don’t see it for Lexi or Sam.