![]() The judges criticize her doing the look straight-ahead, but I think this is as far from “straight ahead” as you can get. I will additionally disagree heartily with the judges on the topic of Darienne Lake’s Billie Eilish look, which is hilarious and nobody can tell me otherwise. The judges like her for a good reason - she’s a talented performer with strong glamor bonafides - but my attention is being grabbed by the many, many queens with bigger personalities this season. Actually, Kahanna generally is not working for me. There’s no spin or commentary it’s just well-put-together outfits that look like the best that Vegas Revue money can buy. Kahanna Montrese, for example, is beloved by the judges later in the episode, but I find her drag here a bit witless. Celebrity cosplay drag doesn’t do much for me. Closet’s looks, which are completely original) rather than the queens who just copied looks from someone who used to be famous and someone who is currently famous. The first category is “Famous then,” and the second is “Famous now,” which is perfectly fine, but I tend to be more excited about queens who came up with something interesting, funny, or ridiculous within those categories (see: Heidi N. Rather than the typical first-episode reading challenge, they pull out the double runway look challenge that appeared in seasons seven, 12, and 13. The first tell we get that production is reconfiguring how they conceptualize the All-Stars season comes from the very first challenge. Alexis is probably not a queen who would be cast if the producers got all their first choices (she’s been passed over four times prior), but in the absence of queens like Gigi, Peppermint, Asia, and Crystal, this might be even better. Last season, I was a fan of Loosey as a character, but in just two episodes, Alexis blows her away in the “theater kid having a prolonged emotional breakdown” department. I was particularly enamored with her breakdown in Untucked over nothing while the other queens looked on disgustedly. ![]() Her manner of speaking is deeply earnest in a way that screams “theater kid,” but it’s also so over-the-top that it reaches past “annoying” and into artistry. Almost everything she says throughout these two episodes is funny, from her extremely impassioned, whispered “Thank you” to Idina Menzel during critiques to her vibrato-heavy delivery of “Broadway’s in the hou uuuse” during a Glam Rock musical performance (?). The best example of this so far can be found in Alexis Michelle, the original Loosey LaDuca, a queen who is allergic to understanding how she comes off on camera. Not necessarily at the challenges (we’ll get to those), but at the interactions between the queens. The side-effect of the competitive nature among slightly less polished girls is that I laughed more throughout these four episodes - two normal, two Untuckeds - than I have in a while on Drag Race. ![]() As proof of this, alliances begin almost immediately and at a level we haven’t seen before, with girls not thinking twice about participating in some potentially shady dealings. Even the frontrunners, based on previous performances (Heidi, Kandy, and Jimbo, approximately), have a lot to prove in this competition. This is a group that came back desperate to prove themselves to Ru. ![]() The unifying factors are an extreme hunger to do well and a (perhaps related) lack of extreme polish that would be normal in a regular season. Rather than a collection of queens who are the best they could get from the second (and third, maybe fourth) tier queens, this group seems to be cast for intra-group dynamics, like a regular season of Drag Race would be. Now, they’ve taken it one step further by creating a group that feels like an actual cast. With Ra’jah and Kylie doing better than expected and the season lasting longer, the overall effect was that season six felt more like a regular season rather than an All-Stars season. With season six, they took a different approach: Cast more queens and support some wild cards, which the viewers might not expect much from. While that happened in seasons three and four, it came to a head in season five, when the final three (Shea, Miz Cracker, and Jujubee) were obvious from the time the cast was announced, and the entire season felt like a slog toward that inevitability and Shea’s equally inevitable crowning. Facing an ever-decreasing list of queens who meet typical All-Stars criteria (did well on the show, has a lot of fans, wants to come back), Drag Race All-Stars, with its yearly schedule, has been forced to cast queens who wouldn’t typically be considered “first choice” among a bunch of first choice queens. The eighth season of Drag Race All-Stars represents a pivot that began with season six but appears to have reached its full form now. Good news: RuPaul’s Drag Race has remembered it’s a comedy.
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