RuPaul’s Drag Race: All Stars S3E3 review: The B*tchelor

A wonderfully entertaining episode of Drag Race highlights the strengths of the All Stars cast and gives us all the drama we’ll ever need.

Going into season 3 of All Stars, did anybody expect BenDeLaCreme to be the frontrunner? I’m not saying BenDeLa didn’t make a good showing during her season; she did. But I don’t know if anyone saw her steamrolling the competition like this. We’re three episodes in, and BenDeLa has been among the top 2 queens every time.

And she’s earned it. This week, the girls had to improv their way through a parody of The Bachelor. It’s The B*tchelor, and it’s pretty brilliant. Like the Snatch Game, this challenge lets the girls follow their instincts, which is probably a comfortable place to be if you’re a drag queen and you do a lot of work in bars and clubs with a live audience. It’s clearly comfortable for BenDeLa, who embraces her cougar character with the skill and passion of someone with battle-tested improvisation skills. From the second she sees the man of the hour (Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman of Lifetime’s UnREAL), she’s bringing the jokes, giving the camera an upskirt shot and slobbering all over her “boy-man” while her martini slops out of her glass. She clinches a win on her double-date alongside Bebe Zahara Benet, when she eats a banana, spits it out, offers it to him, and puts it back in her mouth. “Remember I already ate this once before.” It’s overblown without going over the top, and it all fits into the character she’s created.

Contrast that with someone like Milk, who gets cast in the role of “The Stalker.” It’s funny that she has stray leaves caught in her hair, souvenirs of the many nights she’s spent spying on her one true love, but when the only joke you have is yelling loudly about your obsession, it gets old quick.

Milk has been an odd one to watch over the past couple weeks. She seems borderline delusional about her abilities, expecting to be rewarded for performances that are fine at best, as during last week’s lip sync extravaganza, and painfully overbaked at worst. (Trixie: “Milk someday wants to have a challenge inspired by her, and I betcha next season they’ll be like, ‘This week on the runway you’ll be crying because you’re only safe.'”) I don’t recall her being this abrasive during season 6, and Kennedy Davenport doesn’t recall ever having had a problem with her in the real world. I have to wonder if being on camera again isn’t warping her perception of her own behavior — take an ordinary person, put them on reality TV, and sometimes you’ll barely recognize them.

Kennedy joins BenDeLa in the winner’s circle thanks to her bizarre, can’t-miss take on “Party Girl.” At first, I didn’t get what she was doing, with her janky teeth and out-of-control padding, but around the time she passed out after telling a story about shooting her crackhead ex-boyfriend for stealing her stuff, I just accepted that she had a different idea of “party girl” than I did, and that I was enjoying it immensely. As Ross Matthews points out on the runway, we don’t immediately think of Kennedy as a comedy girl (RuPaul: “It’s probably because of her criminal record.”), but she’s consistently hilarious both in and out of drag, so we shouldn’t discount her when thinking of potential winners.

As funny as she is, Kennedy’s thin skin can result in crackling drama. We see it right at the top of the episode, when she sees Thorgy’s vulgar goodbye message to the girls and, fresh off the scare of nearly being sent home, makes no bones about her disapproval. Shangela: “I don’t hold it against [Thorgy].” Kennedy: “I do.”

She doubles down on that combativeness by getting into a feud with Milk, who dismisses her drag style near the start of the hour. This isn’t a bad thing, being vulnerable, and indeed makes for excellent TV. But it does make me worry about a potential mid-season implosion. There are queens here who equal Kennedy for talent but who have cooler heads — say Shangela and Trixie Mattel. I tend to think they’re better suited for the long-haul in this kind of high-pressure environment, but Drag Race never lacks for surprises, so it’s impossible to be sure. For now, the season is definitely better for having Kennedy around.

Besides Kennedy and BenDeLa, Trixie gave the best performance this week. As she’s proven on her webshow, UHHhhh, she has a lightning-quick wit and excellent comic timing, but her humor can be subtle, and the question was always whether it could work well in the frenzied Drag Race free-for-all.

It almost does. Trixie got off the best one-liners of the night. Here are some highlights from her performance as “The Fake Girl”:

• “You have like this sexy, like Denzel, like Gilbert Gottfried, like, but like sensual, do you know what I mean?”
• “I like my men like I like my coffee: incapable of loving me back.”
• “This is like the prettiest refurbished, like, Cheesecake Factory mall kiosk I have ever been to.”
• “The leaves in your hair are so fun I wish you would leave.”

And remember: most of those are improvised. And we haven’t touched on her consistently funny cutaway interviews. (“In the real world, I’m a Beyoncé, but in the Drag Race world, I’m just a LaTavia.”) The issue, if you want to call it that, is that it can be hard to hear Trixie’s delicate comic grace notes when the other contestants are blaring on their horns full blast. Hopefully she’ll shine in next week’s Snatch Game; I think people want to see her do well.

As for who underperformed, Chi Chi DeVayne joined Milk in the bottom 2. As half of a polyamorous couple with Shangela, you can tell things aren’t going to go well for her the second she flubs a “How’s your head?” serve from Bowyer-Chapman. At this point, how does anybody involved with this show not know the appropriate response to that question?

But unlike Milk, Chi Chi accepts her failures gracefully. She apologizes on the runway and admits to feeling insecure among girls who are better versed in comedy than she is, openly wondering if she wouldn’t have been a better fit for All Stars 4. All this makes us want to root for her in spite of her shortcomings. I hope she finds a way to leave “Turd City,” as she puts it, before the season is out. She may have bombed the challenge, but she doesn’t lack for talent. Her runway look, an understated, colorful, floor-length gown, is striking, and she carries it with a quiet drama that sets her apart from the other girls.

That’s partly because, given this week’s theme of “wigs on wigs on wigs,” most of the queens embrace wackier looks. There’s lots of creativity on display. Milk keeps her ponytail in a tube of hair plastered to her head. BenDeLa has a skirt made of fur. Aja goes full anime with what looks a pair of giant blonde foam tubes jutting out of her head — they come off to reveal a neon yellow wig which comes off to reveal hot purple pigtails. And Shangela dresses as corn. The runway is delightful from beginning to end.

The lip sync between BenDeLa and Kennedy is fine. It’s to a slow pop song — Lorde’s “Green Light” — and while both queens pull out drag tricks to help liven things up — BenDeLa buries her face in a column of hair and Kennedy reveals both an outfit under her outfit and a wig under her wig — neither connects with the lyrics in a way that captivates the audience completely. In fact, the tricks almost distract from the emotion.

In the end, Kennedy digs deeper into the emotion of the song and comes away with the win. She chooses to send home Milk rather than Chi Chi, which again underscores that there’s no agreed-upon metric for sending girls home this year — Milk didn’t hit a home run, but Chi Chi was clearly at the back of the pack. For better or worse, she’s getting shunted into the position Roxxxy Andrews occupied during All Stars season 2: someone who’s constantly bumping along the bottom but who keeps getting through whether she wants to or not.

We’re heading into next week’s Snatch Game on a wave of promise. Even though BenDeLa has been in the top three times in a row, her winning is far from a foregone conclusion, particularly with hungry queens like Shangela and Trixie waiting in the wings. The All Stars format seems to bring out the best in this show, and I think the best of season 3 is still ahead.

Next: Jennifer Garner headed to HBO for new comedy series

Random Ruflections

• Shangela is really embracing this Game of Thrones motif, casting herself as the avenging Daenerys Targaryen in search of allies.
• “If I’m not your cup of tea, then baby, don’t drink it.”
• Trixie: “Another day in the workroom, you get up, you walk in, you step over the body of a dead friend and you just move along.”
• BenDeLaCreme, being seductive: “Have you ever taken out a catheter?”
• Because she was paired up with Chi Chi, who struggled with the challenge, Shangela doesn’t get as much of a chance to shine this week, but she still fired off some terrific improvs. “One of y’all needs to shave. Nobody told me Bush was back in office.” In the right circumstances, Shangela could be unstoppable.
• “The Miss Thing dynasty.”
• “GMO No you better don’t!”
• I barely mentioned Bebe Zahara Benet in this recap. That’s because, for the third time in as many weeks, she’s solid but kinda forgettable. She commits to her virgin character in the challenge but isn’t bursting at the seams with jokes, and her runway look is competent but not a stunner. There’s an relaxed grace to what she does; I just don’t know if it’s enough to take her to the top.