RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars Season 10, Episode 12
"Tournament of All Stars Smackdown for the Crown"
Director: Nick Murray
Cast: Aja, Bosco, Daya Betty, Ginger Minj, Irene the Alien, Jorgeous, Kerri Colby, Lydia B Kollins
As I did with the Season 17 finale, it's time to evaluate the entirety of All Stars 10. Ru help us all.
The Queens
Let it be said up front: none of Drag Race's shortcomings should be placed at the dainty feet of the queens. There has never been a queen who has shown up and not given it their all, and that "all" can frequently be "all-consuming." So, who am I to judge?
I am, however, a TV critic, and I can get into how these queens and their storylines were presented on television. With the biggest cast of any season ever, All Stars 10 gave us a truly unique ensemble with representation from across the franchise's herstory. Each bracket consisted of Logo-era legends, modern favorites, and a total of six queens from Season 14. We had early outs (Irene the Alien, Nicole Paige Brooks, Phoenix, Alyssa Hunter) and former finalists (Jorgeous, Bosco, Daya Betty, Mistress Isabelle Brooks, Ginger Minj). Everyone came to play — but the format changed how they played.
I'll get into the brackets and whether or not they worked in the Twists section, but from a storytelling POV ... I think that it worked in the micro sense but falls apart in the macro. For each bracket, especially Brackets 1 and 2, the smaller cast allowed for us to really get invested in every queen. Irene, Nicole, and Cynthia really emerged as underdogs to root for — or in Nicole's case, just be grateful that she's along for the ride, chain-smoking in the back seat.
Real rivalries formed, like Mistress versus everyone else, and we got some of the juiciest drama the show has ever produced. Kerri Colby's epic sign off confessional directed at Mistress? Perfection.
But the format, breaking the season down into four three-episode arcs, meant that no storylines carried throughout the season. No matter how invested we got in DeJa Skye or Olivia Lux, they were quickly forgotten after Episode 3 — and that also goes for Phoenix, who I forgot was also in that bracket until right now. The closest we got to a season-long narrative was "The Dark Mistress Saga," a narrative written, produced, and directed by Mistress in Bracket 2. Then the story was taken over by the actual producers for the semi-finals and concluded before the season finale.
Mistress losing control of her own narrative and RPDR production taking over in the semi-finals, was as shaky a hand-off as Rian Johnson returning Star Wars to J.J. Abrams. Where my nerds at ... this school?
Overall, this format was a double-edged sword. It made me really like or love queens that I was previously indifferent towards (Acid Betty, Tina Burner, DeJa Skye) ... only for their stories to be slammed shut and shelved right as things were getting good. Even the queens who showed the most, like Bosco and Irene, I look back at this season and think, "I wish we could have seen more." It feels like wasted potential.
The Challenges
This might be the most self-aware season as far as challenges go. With each bracket given three challenges each, the show wisely targeted the three challenge archetypes: performance (10x01, 10x06, 10x08), comedy (10x02, 10x05, 10x09), and fashion (10x03, 10x04, 10x07). And keeping in mind the expedited nature of each bracket, the producers wisely crisscrossed these objectives, resulting in slightly askew challenges like "Rappin' Roast" — which mixed comedy and performance — and "Wicked Good," which mixed comedy with design.
On that note, though, the challenges from Bracket 3 earned a lot of side-eye when it became apparent that all three felt custom-tailored for Ginger Minj. "Wicked Good" couldn't just be a design challenge; there had to be a comedy element, too. And instead of giving the bracket with three Texas queens (#2), the show saved "Stagecooch" for Ginger, who has her own country album. And then, well, if any queen was going to make "The Golden Bitchelor" work, it was going to be Ginger Minj.
Alleged rigor morris aside, the challenges were more hit than miss, with Bracket 2's three ("Eight Ball," "Rappin' Roast," "Starbooty: The Rebooty") being the high point.
... Seriously, what was "The Golden Bitchelor"? Why weren't they just old, like the TV show its parodying, instead of being dogs? The "Golden" part of the title is there because of age!
The Judging
Now is when I let out a big ol' sigh. Insert sigh here, and make it just a little too long. Like, long enough that it's no longer funny, but not so long that it becomes funny again.
So. While I mostly think the right queens advanced, each bracket contained some of the wildest calls we've seen on Drag Race in a while. Like, truly out of pocket nonsense wherein the show was daring us to not believe what we'd just seen — in a show, mind you, that they produce and edit.
Three names: Olivia Lux, Kerri Colby, and Denali.
All of them were shut out of the top two and denied points after giving performances that — as presented on television — were clear winners. Olivia in the makeover challenge, Kerri in the Rusical, Denali all three weeks — I ask you, World of Wonder, why? Why put Ginger in the top every week, thus showing all your cards? Why show Olivia and Kerri get staggeringly good critiques only to deny them a win? Clean up the narratives and make the judging match the outcome — or do the unhinged thing and present every queen's performance and placement as honestly as possible.
The Twists
After a few seasons of plunger-centric points-systems, with blockings never packing the kind of punch you need in a competition show, I ended up liking this format way more. Unlike in other seasons where half the queens tend to spend the first few weeks coasting, the bracket format pushed every queen to go all-out every week. The fear of not making the cut felt real, and it felt downright sociological watching the queens figure out how gamify the new points system (NPB, quasi master of last-minute strategizing). It was like watching raptors test the fence, and I'm excited to see future queens take what we saw here and optimize new strategies.
But the bracket was not the only twist. All season long, RuPaul spoke of the wild card entrant — one last hope for all the queens who didn't make it. When it came time for that twist to twist, it twisted itself into a knot. It seemed like Ru had explained exactly what would happen 10 times prior: all of the regular judges would pick a queen. Because of how words work, we were left to assume that all five regular judges — Michelle, Carson, Ross, Ts, and Law —would pick a queen to be entered into Bruno's hopper for a random selection. That meant that, presumably, five of the nine cut queens would be eligible. That meant that fans of five queens would get another week of finger-crossing, baited-breath hoping — the kind of energy that keeps us invested week to week.
Nuh-uh-uh, not so fast! When it came time to draw a name, only three of those judges got to pick (Michelle, Ross, and Ts) because they were the only judges who'd judged in all three brackets. Okay, fair, but why wasn't that ever said before? And how did Ross Mathews, who did not judge either semi-final episode, select Mistress to return on the episode wherein she was eliminated? He wasn't there! And why were Ts and Michelle both allowed to pick Kerri Colby? So we went from having potentially five queens in the mix to having two.
I'm under no delusion that this was somehow left to fate; the most likely scenario that I've seen bandied about is that production wanted to give the lottery slot to a local queen. Kerri is the only eligible queen based in Los Angeles. So to make that happen, you retroactively change "regular judge" to "judged in all three brackets" and say that two of them picked Kerri, stacking the odds in her favor. And sure, give the third pick to Mistress so fans can spend another week speculating about her return. This was, after all, Mistress's season.
So I don't know. Like every "twist" on Drag Race, this one ended up an anticlimactic, possibly pre-planned non-event — especially when Kerri lost the first lip sync.
The Lip Syncs
I'll say this: these were the first lip syncs in ages that felt like they had real stakes attached to them — and they seemed like lip syncs that the queens wanted to win. With points and money on the line and freed from the curse of having to send another queen home, these queens actually fought for these wins. Pretty much every lip sync had a moment, or served to further a reputation.
Like, Lydia is absolutely a lip sync assassin, a kind we really haven't seen since Peppermint in Drag Race Season 9. Lydia is unassuming, but she uses that as a weapon, making all of her sly stunts pop even more.
Of course the two standouts, the ones that are now CANON, are Denali's performance to "See You Again" by Miley Cyrus, and Bosco's "Show Me How You Burlesque" in the finale. The former is canon because of, well, the weeks-long shitstorm that was kicked up when Denali lost a lip sync that she had clearly put so much thought, heart, and sweat into.
And the latter earns a spot in the canon because of the way Bosco, using just two hand fans, turned the entire Drag Race stage into a one-woman Vegas burlesque show. Mesmerizing.
Untucked
The new Untucked format, which revitalized the spin-off earlier this year, kinda fell flat in All Stars. The Season 17 queens were way more eager to have side kikis, goof around with the handheld cameras (a.k.a. iPhones), pull a sis over to the chairs for a sensitive convo, or just get messy. The All Stars 10 queens, though ... well, they liked all the new snacks!
Untucked only felt like essential viewing for Bracket 2, where we either witnessed Mistress scheming or dealing with the fallout from her schemes. The rest of the season, though? Kind of a snooze — except for when Daya Betty picked Alyssa Hunter's epic eye booger, like a drag Dr. Pimple Popper. Coming this fall to WOW Presents Plus ... ?
The Finale
Well, they crowned her, gal! The finale felt like a non-event, and not just because we've seen lip sync smackdowns many times before. The format was spiced up by having the queens rate each other, thus determining the face-off pairs.
But while I appreciated the return of Rate-a-Queen, and the show's intention of shaking up a format we've seen done before, I don't think it was successful. This removed a lot of the tension and strategy that actually makes smackdown's exciting. Remember Malaysia Babydoll Foxx picking Marcia Marcia Marcia, hoping to snipe out easy competition, and then Marcia surprising everyone with those tricks? That's the kind of drama we missed this time.
The problem is, not only did we know the format of the finale, but we knew the outcome. Even worse, we knew the outcome from the minute the cast was revealed. And insult to injury, we spent a season (or rather a bracket and semi-final) watching the show warp reality to ensure this outcome, the outcome everyone saw coming. It's a bummer, not only for the viewers, but for Ginger Minj.
Ginger did not need any help from production to secure this win. She did not need comedy shoehorned into a design challenge. She didn't need to win a lip sync against Denali. She didn't even need to win four challenges in a row. Ginger competed three times before. She can survive a design challenge. Losing a lip sync won't make her any less singular of a talent. Her ego can handle not being in the top two one week. She can do more than comedy, and she can also make every kind of challenge her challenge to win. Ginger can bend reality to her will. She doesn't need anyone to do it for her.
All that said, Ginger fucking worked hard this season. Haters will say she was lying about sweating the challenges. I don't think so. I think Ginger is a try hard, a perfectionist, a workhorse, and I don't think she thinks anything will be just handed to her. Clock her responses to winning "Stagecooch" and the Miley lipsync. I just hate that, because it really appears that the show was built around crowning her, it muddies all the work she put into this season.
But you know what would have been a great — nay, a wild, Season 9 finale level shocking finale twist? If Kerri Colby had beaten Ginger in the Lady Gaga "Disease" lip sync — which, honestly, felt like a toss-up to me. Imagine Ginger going home to the wild card queen on a song that she chose. I love Ginger. I am beyond excited to see what she does with that money. But I also love TV, and that would have been a gag — the kind of gag that pushes a Drag Race season from good to great.
I'd be remiss to not talk about Jorgeous, the only other queen with a real winner's narrative this season and a damn fine runner-up. Watching Jorgeous grow — inside, not outside — over the past few years has been so ... miraculous. The Jorgeous that threw down against Ginger fucking Minj in a final two lip sync is light years beyond the Jorgeous we saw in Season 14. The growth is insane, and I think Jorgeous is possibly the best example of how Drag Race can benefit a queen. Jorgeous took every note, applied them, and improved while never taking herself too seriously, while never letting the competition drag her down, and never losing sight of who she is. Like, Jorgeous has learned so much but she's still so dumb — and I mean that in an endearing, positive way. She would have been a great winner, too.
The Score
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