After a gag-worthy, two hour long premiere, RuPaul’s Drag Race season 15 is back for another – very short – episode full of drama, mama.
Previous relationships are exposed, emotional trauma is aired and yet another unremarkable improv challenge joins Drag Race‘s ever expanding canon of skits that made me laugh (exhale slightly harder through my nose) once or twice in the space of 10 minutes.
It would be 15 minutes, but cut-down timings mean the episode feels cramped, with not nearly enough breathing room for 15 queens.
Here are 39 thoughts on episode three of RuPaul’s Drag Race, season 15.
- The girls re-enter the werkroom for the first time this series and my god, there’s still a lot of them, isn’t there? Season eight had four entire less queens than this cast. I know that werkroom smells crazy.
- Still, Irene DuBois has already gotten the chop, and leaves a suitably on brand mirror message: “I left a poop in one of your stations. But WHOMST???” Raise your hand if you were 100 per cent certain she was going to be the franchise’s most iconic villain since Phi Phi O’Hara and make it at least half way. Our hands are raised.
- 40-inch-wig-gate is still going on – long may it continue, tbh.
- As a producer, if two of your competitors reveal that they used to be together – à la Robin and Amethyst – you would think you had struck gold. A pre-made storyline, tension of one kind or another and the opportunity for an eventual lip-sync (presumably to a break-up song of some description); talk about making your job easy. Yes, World of Wonder, you can take that advice for free, but next time I’m charging.
- This season’s episodes – despite being on MTV – are only 40 minutes long, and to be quite honest, you can feel the crunch at the top of the episode, in lack of conversation time before the RuMail message dings. The move was made to accommodate The Real Friends of WeHo launching on the network, and we’d like this article to serve as our formal complaint, because who is watching an episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race and thinking: “God, I just wish Todrick Hall was on my screen right now!”
What’s shorter?
— Mistress Isabelle Brooks (@MistressIBrooks) January 14, 2023
we worked too hard and invested too much money for a 45 min edit
— Salina EsTitties (@SalinaEstitties) January 14, 2023#dragrace
- Luxx’s werkroom outfit is hilarious compared to the other girls.
- This week’s maxi-challenge is acting/improv. Personally, I’m not enthralled to hear this, because never have I ever laughed at a Drag Race acting challenge.
- The queens – in three serparate teams – have to sell an infomercial on their version of the afterlife. Bonus points for whichever twink intern on the writing team came up with the phrase ‘The Queer-after’.
- Ru reading Marcia Marcia Marcia is SO tough: “Maybe you can lend her some false eyelashes!” If Ru said that about me, in front of me, while I was competing on a DRAG competition, I’d cry and then BenDeLaCreme myself.
- An interesting choice to split up Sugar and Spice between teams; the other queens are still getting annoyed with the two, but if you know they can work together, why not use that to your advantage? It’s also sad to see anyone feeling sidelined like Sugar is in her team.
- Sasha Colby being cast as God in one of the teams feels incredibly correct.
Why tf is the episode shorter than @MistressIBrooks heels and @luxxnoirlondon wig combined
— Yeh (@ItsFoRealMoses) January 14, 2023these queens deserve more air time!! #dragrace pic.twitter.com/M9lY4nhxOj
these queens deserve more air time!! - Malaysia Babydoll Foxx, Mistress Isabelle Brooks, Sugar, Jax and Robin Fierce are first, and as Michelle mumbles: “This is not going to be great.”
- Sasha Colby, Salina EsTitties, Luxx Noir London, Marcia x3 and Anetra literally get 45 seconds of screen time to film their infomercial before the episode has to move on to the next team. I blame Todrick Hall.
- Ms Colby struggles with her lines, and if this is setting up the ‘legend in real life that struggles on the show’ storyline that we’ve seen before with Kerri Colby, I will be rioting.
- The remaining team – which contains last week’s bottom, Amethyst – as well as Loosey LaDuca, Aura Mayari, Spice, and Princess Poppy, do not manage to elicit a single laugh from Michelle. Surely, at this point, you shoehorn in a joke about Ru being old/ Michelle being a whore for a guaranteed giggle?
- Aura Mayari is, indeed, the trade of the season.
- Spice tells Sugar to stand up for herself in the same way that she stands up for Spice. It’s genuinely really sweet (no pun intended). These other girls hating on the twins have no reason to do so apart from jealousy, in my humble opinion.
- In the season’s first official ‘tell us your trauma or we’ll send you home’ moment, Malaysia and Mistress share their upbringing and struggles with religion. Mistress was forced out of her family home, and she shares the awful experience of “your family [being] your first bully”. No, I didn’t cry (yes, I did).
“and i love james charles” #dragrace pic.twitter.com/emDGN9iFY1
— ray(@mascarayde) January 14, 2023
(@mascarayde) - TS MADISON IS BACK AS GUEST JUDGE. WE WON.
- Who is Maren Morris?
- Oh wait, she’s the iconic country singer who has vocally supported trans kids all her career. I promise, I will never disrespect you again, Ms Morris.
- Some of the offerings on the ‘Metallica’ runway are making me howl. Salina EsTitties is literally dressed as a streetlamp. Drag is so fun.
- Princess Poppy’s “slutty R2D2” is very much giving bottom three. It’s… a corset.
- These shortened Drag Race episodes are NOT it. Each runway is on screen for about eight seconds?
- Sasha’s team’s infomercial is very funny in the way that some things are only funny to gay people. Salina – who, “died a local girl” – gets a tour of the afterlife from God (Sasha) that includes Valentina references, a drag queen being tipped for doing nothing and a horrific neck crack that accompanies the death drop which signifies a scene change.
- I did not formulate a single thought watching Amethyst’s infomercial, apart from Loosey LaDuca’s Dolly Parton impression being good enough to rival Trixie Mattel’s in All Stars 3. In fact, I think I lost brain cells.
- Sugar is carrying her entire team through their offering – wild, considering she was shunned during the planning and filming process. Bring the drinks back during Untucked, because I want to see the girls fight.
- Sasha Colby – I know that I’m writing a lot about her but I simply will not RuPologise for being obsessed with greatness – looks like a phoenix on the runway, if it was a phoenix raised by Elton John and David Furnish. Read: very gay.
- Love that Ru and Michelle give Amethyst a lesson on loving her nose. As a member of the ‘people have to duck when I turn around’ community, I appreciate.
- Sasha Colby wins the challenge!!! Trans rights!!!
- Princess Poppy (told you), Jax and Amethyst are in the bottom – these feel justified, but again, with the extremely shortened episodes, I feel like I just haven’t seen enough of the queens this week to know whether they’re entirely correct. I worry that this will give more room for production riggory.
- Very bold of Jax to say “I won’t disappoint you again” to Ru after being pronounced safe. VERY bold.
- Poor Amethyst – first, she had to perform Ariana Grande in front of Ariana Grande, and now she has to perform Diana Ross in front of RuPaul.
- PRINCESS POPPY RUNNING ALONG THE BACK OF THE STAGE WITH THE SAFE GIRLS DURING THE LIPSYNC? OH NO BABY WHAT IS YOU DOING?
- Amethyst is saved for the second week in the row and if I’m honest, I did not see that coming. Was sure she was getting the chop.
- Poppy leaves the stage and the competition with two middle fingers and a burp, before telling the camera that she’s now free to start her meth-making business. Queen of having a backup plan.
- It’s the Snatch Game next week ALREADY?
snatch game…with 14 queens…while the episodes are cut down to 45 minutes…i don’t even know what to say #dragrace pic.twitter.com/VycBXWqzLX
— ray(@mascarayde) January 14, 2023
- Some final thoughts to round off episode three. Bring. Back. Longer. Episodes. This is insane – I feel like I’ve watched the first half of every scene in the episode and not satisfactorily finished a single one of them. In fact, a brief foray onto Gay Twitter confirms that everyone – including the queens – are p**sed, and have even started a petition.
- My frontrunner after this week is Sasha Colby. Sorry, not sorry, or whatever Demi Lovato said. She just has IT.
RuPaul’s Drag Race season 15 airs on Fridays 8/7c on MTV in the US and will be available to watch on Wow Presents Plus on following Saturday mornings from 2am GMT in the UK.
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