RuPaul’s Drag Race Season-Premiere Recap: Several Points Were Made

The sour taste from last year’s charity and global All Stars seasons might have finally left our mouths thanks to a strong main season of RuPaul’s Drag Race and the crowning of the deserving Onya Nurve. Consider me cautiously optimistic for the return of Drag Race All Sta–oh, sorry, [checks notes] Tournament of All Stars... I’m just going to say off the top: RuPaul, I’m sorry, but we are not going to be calling it that.

All Stars is back and hitting a tenth season milestone! With a lineup of 18 queens, this also makes for the season with the largest cast ever. And, because this is Drag Race, we have a new format to microanalyze! This season will be divided into three preliminary rounds, a semifinal round, and then a final lipsync smackdown. Each preliminary round will feature a group of six different queens, with half of them advancing to the semifinals through a points system. Each week the two best performers earn three points before facing off in a lipsync, with an additional point (oh, and just a little $10,000 bonus) given to the winner; the other four queens have a point each to give to another queen of their choosing.

This new format of points seems both less and more complicated. Forcing drag queens to do math, even simple addition, should be considered cruel and unusual punishment. Ever since various seasons have added badges and stars as a pseudo scoreboard, Drag Race has been slowly morphing into the 1+2+1+1 bit from Clue. But for better or worse, Drag Race is now officially on a point system. Think of it like a reverse of the blocking power or lipstick elimination voting of past All Stars seasons: They’re not keeping their fellow queens from their dreams, they’re helping them. Right? Right?!

Much like the most recent and charity-centered season of All Stars, this format seems like an obvious compromise to draw in queens who might be skittish about returning because they would miss out on touring income or are afraid of going home early after forking out for the high price tag that comes with preparing Drag Race looks. In this season, queens can be guaranteed at least three episodes of airtime, so it lowers their financial risk, but not the stakes. For once, it feels like Drag Race has found a creative solution to its problems. We’ll just overlook that it means this season’s winner will be crowned after appearing in only six episodes, the least since the first All Stars season.

Look over there, the first bracket of queens are entering the workroom!

“Winner Winner, Chicken Dinner”

The bulk of the first episode is devoted to reorienting us to the returning girls. What immediately works about this bracket format is how much time we get to spend with each queen individually, and each of them is coming back with a unique, unmanufactured story.

Drag Race can overemphasize the evolution a queen has gone through between seasons, but Aja has actually had one. She speaks this episode about quitting drag while navigating her transition, and her renewed confidence really shows. Plain and simple, I’m over the moon to have her back on television.

Deja Skye has two credits to her name that put her on a fast track back for All Stars: She is both a Miss Congeniality and Snatch Game winner. This feels like a recentering for her, a return to the spotlight after a traumatic weight loss surgery that almost killed her. Even if she feels like she was overshadowed in her season, it still looks like she’s trying to regain what confidence she had in season 14.

Fans have been bracing for the second coming of Irene the Alien, née Dubois, or as I call her: The Fastest Tongue in the West (Seattle being literally westward). Irene notes that as the Porkchop of the formerly largest cast, she is officially the lowest-ranking queen in the show’s history. But she’s immediately going for the jugular faster than these girls can keep up with, and it’s a scream. She has less of an axe to grind than she does a guillotine ready for the kill.

Trust no bitch who looks down their nose at a seasoned queen like Phoenix. It’s clear from the moment she arrives that she is bringing conceptual high drag to this season, and better than she did back in season two. If you think drag is exclusively a young queen’s game, you probably haven’t stepped foot in your local drag bar, but it can be frustrating to watch early-season queens arrive on All Stars and immediately doubt themselves. It’s like they forget Kylie Sonique Love won after lasting only four episodes in her first season! Phoenix, I’m rooting for you, girl.

Also feeling she has something to prove, Olivia Lux arrives looking as gorgeous as ever. What worries me about Olivia is that she might have misinterpreted her first run on the show, equating her naturally sweet disposition to her downfall. I’m not so sure that was actually the case, and I’m worried that she’s returning as a queen who is even more in her head than she was before.

But Bosco is the only queen in this bracket who was a finalist on her season—sure, sure, on a five-finalist finale, but regardless! Bosco has frontrunner written all over her this time, proving quickly that her looks have elevated while remaining true to her signature aesthetic of, well, nudity. Every rapid-fire joke out of her mouth is gold. “God’s Favorite Transexual”? Let the church say “amen.”

Most importantly, the real challenge for the queens this episode is alliance formation: Operation MiMu (Aja/Olivia), Melanin Squad (Olivia/Deja), the City of Seattle (Irene/Bosco), and Crystal Conners in Goddess at the Stardust (Phoenix/Bosco). Aja makes a few fair points about the four points and how they will shape up: “get your alliances together, know whose back you’re having, and know whose back you’re stabbing.”

The opening girl group challenge has a 1980s heavy metal theme, really playing it straight to the MTV youth audience. While choreography rehearsal scenes are Drag Race at its most carbon-copied — Jamal innocent! — after season 17 rudely denied us a girl group challenge, I’ll take it. For their “Winner Winner, Chicken Dinner!” performance, each of the queens do well proportionate to what I imagine is their ability to name a single Whitesnake song. It’s not all heavy metal, exactly, but it’s a good time.

The runway theme is Tits and Slits, so naturally Bosco is right at home. After Ru calls her “the ultimate in ‘cunt whore’” and she responds “I have a doctorate in Cunt Whore, actually” Bosco, DCW proves the star of the premiere without actually winning it. Meanwhile, Lil Kim’s iconic MTV VMA boob outfit is finally brought to its natural home on RuPaul’s Drag Race by Olivia, and Irene serves Princess Fiona as a Vegas showgirl. Fulfilling the prompt, Phoenix delivers dominatrix, and kind of ignoring it, Deja gives a Disney princess mashup. Aja’s gown is gorgeous, but the judges are right that it’s diminished by her inconsistent purple paint.

Irene and Aja are the top two, no doubt nudging Bosco out of a top placement due to their hilarious, maybe/maybe-not real spat in the workroom. Now, if Irene had been looking to her Drag Race herstory for strategy in defeating lipsync assassin Aja, she would remember that BenDeLaCreme did so through comedy. The producers seemed to give her that exact opportunity with Ice Spice’s “Think U The Shit (Fart)” but Irene mostly plays it straight. A weird missed opportunity for a funny queen, and Aja basically schools her and wins. On to the second episode…

“Murder on the Dancefloor”

Okay, here’s where we get to the major flaw of this new format. The non-top-placing queens are tasked to dole out their individual points face-to-face. And not even in the pressure cooker of the mainstage, but while lounging in the workroom after the dust from the runway has settled. Clearly, Drag Race is trying to stew both drama and gameability among the queens with these stray points, but asking them to do so in the open deflates this potential.

Naturally, what unfolds with these four points is a Nice Off. The queens evenly distribute the points to the queens who weren’t in the top. Olivia debates throwing her point to her top alliance Aja, who already has three points from winning the lipsync, but defers her point to her secondary alliance Deja in order to not ruffle any feathers. Aja distinctly promised backstabbing! Where is the backstabbing?! Would Olivia have made this choice if the points were given Rate-A-Queen style behind closed doors? I think it’s a valid point. Say point again! Point!

The challenge this time is to improv opposite Ru as characters in a Hercule Poirot spoof “Murder on the Dancefloor” a.k.a. Deathdrop on the Nile a.k.a. Murder on the Whorient Express. Dare I say Ru is having more fun in this challenge than we have seen in seasons? As her TikToks will show, Ru is most at home with a dumb joke, even more than she is as a Glamazon. All of the queens once again avail themselves, even those who aren’t natural improvisers. Phoenix is pleasantly surprised with herself, Aja and Irene form a third-tier alliance, and Deja has enough complaints to fill the Nile, venting her frustrations even though she ultimately ends up just outside the top two.

On the runway, it’s Coming and Going, dual looks! While Deja (best she’s ever looked!) and Olivia take floral inspiration, death otherwise permeates this runway. Bosco delivers a Beetlejuice-Elvira mashup in a cinched-waist coffin, Phoenix movingly pays tribute to her sister’s passing, and Irene is dressed as the ongoing death of democracy. I’m sure Aja’s witchy symbols have death in there somewhere.

You guessed it, the lipsync is the reemergent Sophie Ellis-Bextor track. Bosco enters the lipsync in a fabulously flowy shroud, looking like the ghost of Roz Pike in Saltburn, given the song choice. It’s giving (and yes I do mean this as high praise) Judi Dench for peak-Covid-era British Vogue before she disrobes into just a few well-placed straps and a prayer, as is her custom. It’s another decisive lipsync loss for Irene, if not an embarrassing one.

Even though she lost two lipsyncs so far, things are pointing (last one, I swear) in the right direction for Irene, already the season’s surprise star. With her momentum, Irene is already laying a path to deliver what a gay prophecy once foretold: a Porkchop queen who dark horses her way to win All Stars.

But Irene could also provide Drag Race with the type of villain it has struggled to produce lately. Whether it was just good fun or real shade, she got the best of Aja, one of the franchise’s most notorious shit-talkers. While recent seasons have had pot-stirrers who manufacture fruitless drama just because (more on that for a later bracket), Irene has the goods to ruffle feathers just by being her natural self. Get your opera glasses, because I can’t wait to see how this turns out…

Extra Two Pieces and a Biscuit

• The first episode ends with a tribute to the dearly departed Jiggly Caliente–”forever fabulous” is correct. We love you always, Jiggly!

• Ice Spice on a heavy metal challenge?? Look, the internet called her an industry plant, not me!

• Irene says her original name didn’t fit “the thesis” of her drag. Are they giving doctorates to all drag queens in Seattle?

• Aja’s Tits and Slits runway is a reference to Jynx. I gather this is a Pokémon character that gay guys love because she is from the OG card pack and is a lady in a dress. Pokémon is none of my business, but I’m happy to see Aja having fun.

• Aja’s entrance look? Also a Pokémon reference! [Ross Matthews voice] Pokémon HOE to the polls!

• What is the reading challenge going to be like with Irene in it, and will they have to call the fire department?