Review: RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 9, Episode 3—”Draggily Ever After”

RuPaul’s Drag Race season 9 gets into a groove, but does it have the endurance to consistently entertain us until the end?

"I don’t want to be the bridesmaid. I wanna be the bride."

So says Trinity Taylor, an adult man, at the top of “Draggily Ever After,” a brand new episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race season 9. She says it with a straight face, fire behind her eyes, and a spirited little head bob.

What a great show.

Even in its middle episodes, that kind of melodrama keeps the proceedings extremely entertaining. And we’ve entered the middle episodes. There are still plenty of girls left, and it’s too late for them to survive on novelty alone. Now it’s all about who can surprise us each week, and who has the endurance and versatility to last to the bitter end.

Much to my delight, the Drag Race producers chose to test those attributes with a design challenge: each girl must hand-craft a gown to go with a princess character they create. They’ve also got to come up with a “sidekick” character who gives running commentary as they strut their outfit on the runway. In recent seasons, the show has relied too much on group performance challenges like last week’s cheerleader contest, particularly in the early going. Those challenges are fun, but at this point, it’s important to see what the girls can do on their own. I hope Drag Race continues to switch it up going forward.

As for who rises and falls this week, Trinity proves she’s got comic chops to go along with her cutthroat attitude when she debuts Stanky the Starfish, a redneck assistant to her undersea princess, on the main stage. The nautical puns aren’t particularly brilliant (Watchword: Clamydia), but there are a a lot of them, and Trinity does a terrific job of reacting to her recorded lines. And her outfit, while not wildly creative, is very well-constructed, and she adds a bit of flair by stripping off the mermaid skirt to reveal a paneled bathing suit. Her drive and versatility win her the night.

Her main competition is Valentina. She just has presence, this girl. Like Trinity, her outfit isn’t particularly remarkable in the abstract. It’s basically another bathing suit, but it’s well-made, and there’s a softness and lightness about Valentina’s makeup and bearing that makes her fascinating to watch. Also like Trinity, Valentina’s sidekick character — a shady fairy godmother — is a lot of fun. And she incorporates it well into her overall performance, contrasting the fairy godmother’s raspy voice and scathing script with her own delicate runway show.

I also loved Valentina in the workroom, where she was wearing a headwrap and sunglasses like Norma Desmond and rattling off lines from Sunset Boulevard. She’s a beautiful girl and a cute guy, but she also comes off as very eccentric, and that’s informing rather than distracting from her design choices. I can’t wait to see more of her.

She’s the flip side of Kimora Blac, a gorgeous queen who doesn’t seem to have any of Valentina’s depth. Kimora’s jungle princess look is standard sexpot stuff, but it’s her sidekick character — Funky Monkey — that really sinks her. The lines are awkward on their own (A sample: “She is so rich, she got all the banana she’s ever wanted.”) but Kimora drags them further down with her wooden, halting delivery. She doesn’t seem interested in committing to this concept.

She doesn’t commit to the Lip Sync for Your Life against Aja, either. The two have to lip sync to Bonnie Tyler’s “Holding Out for a Hero,” which was tailor-made for situations like this. This song is absurdly dramatic, and if it were trotted out once a season, I wouldn’t complain.

Kimora doesn’t seem to know many of the words and displays none of the urgency the song requires. It becomes clear pretty quickly that she’s going home, and while she earned her eviction, I’m sad to see her leave this soon. Alongside Valentina, Kimora may be the queen this season with the most character, even if that character is mostly “empty-headed mean girl.” I would have loved more moments like the one where she puzzled through the meaning of the word “adjective.” (The fact that Cynthia Lee Fontaine, a non-native English speaker, was the one to clear that up made it even better.) Still, credit to the show for prizing talent over charisma.

Aja, on the other hand, committed fully the lip sync, and showed that her exaggerated makeup style, which the judges clocked as overdone, can be helpful when pulling dramatic faces. In fact, she may have committed a little too fully, going full-bore at the beginning when she should have reserved some razzle-dazzle for the end. That was her problem in the challenge, too, where she constructed an elaborate flame-red outfit with spanks and a nonsensical cloud sidekick — none of it quite added up. She’ll have to learn restraint if she wants to go further in the competition.

Farrah Moan, this season’s Pretty Queen Who Can’t Sew, had a rough time, too, and probably didn’t endear herself to fans by whining about it the whole way through. She seems very sweet, but if season 9 is going to focus more on design than the last couple of years, she could be in trouble.

Because there are still so many competitors left, a few of them don’t get much screentime. That’s a shame, because there were some quality outfits on display. Peppermint’s red, black, and silver getup conveyed “fire” much better than Aja’s, and Shea Couleé provided the most dramatic silhouette of the night with her deep blue mermaid gown. Meanwhile, Nina Bo’Nina Brown brought out a bit of her schtick from the first episode by making a chrome headpiece and giving a lot of shimmy on the runway. But you know what? That schtick still works. It’s arresting, and there’s never a moment when Nina’s not performing her heart out. I know it’s early, but I’d love to see Nina in the winner’s circle with Valentina.

So now that the show has cast off the comedy queen and the resident bitch, we have another question: are the remaining queens interesting enough to carry us through 10 more episodes? I’d hate for season 9 to gain the same reputation as season 7, which sported a lot of polished queens but few big personalities. This group is certainly talented enough to go the distance — I haven’t even mentioned Eureka’s inventive sewer princess look — but this is also a reality show designed first and foremost to entertain us. In that context, mild-mannered queens like Alexis Michelle and Sasha Velour will work best when set off against more bombastic characters.

Cynthia Lee Fontaine is certainly a bombastic character — I’d watch her watch TV so long as she occasionally made random interjections about her cucu, which I think we can all assume she does. I get the idea that this is precisely why the producers brought her back, because in terms of fashion, this is the second week in a row that Cynthia’s looked like a bejeweled tube on the runway. There’s a reason she went home early in season 8, but hey, get her to Snatch Game and who knows what kind of fireworks we’ll see?

I think the cast is plenty strong, both on and off the main stage. The show can help them be their best by varying the kind of challenges they face. Next week looks like another group challenge, and that’s terrific, but after that, I hope we see another design challenge, or at least something the queens can do as individuals. The show needs to keep both the queens and audience on their feet if season 9 is going to live up to its potential.

There’s no turning back from this cucu now.

Next: Ten Imaginary Music Collaborations That Would Top Your Playlist

Random Ruflections

• 52-year-old Charlie Hides on the new challenge: “I’m still sore from cheerleading, so I’m hoping it’s not anything physical.” Nina Bo’Nina Brown: “A knitting challenge.”
• I didn’t understand the bit about the hidden camera in the wax statue of RuPaul. There are cameras in there all the time. Why would they be nervous about it? Or is that the point? I not get joke.
• Farrah Moan’s thoughts on the challenge: “This is nuts. Who thinks of this?” I don’t think this challenge was too out of the box, but that does inspire an image of a bunch of writers in a backroom trying to think of crazy s**t for the queens to do. Fun work if you can get it.
• It’s rare for a show to have the sort of tonal flexibility that allows it to include both an origin story for why Cynthia Lee Fontaine says “cucu” all the time and an affecting remembrance of the 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting, at which Cynthia lost a friend. The best thing about the show’s move to VH1 is that more people will see this kind of vibrancy.
• Charlie Hides is still flying a little under the radar, but she previewed her talent for character work with her sidekick, Isabella Snatchpacker, who came complete with a snappy British accent. “She just loves foreign tongues. She’s a cunning linguist, you know? I’m here to protect her from bad puns and double entendres. How am I doing?”
• Moments like these are why I’ll miss Kimora Blac. She wasn’t a great competitor, but she was a fantastic reality TV star:
  • “I don’t sew. I like to pay designers to make my stuff.”
  • “Would Kim K design her own outfits? No.”
  • “I did my best, and I looked gorgeous, and now I’ll be known as one of the pretty ones.”