RuPaul’s Drag Race season 10 episode 3 review: Tap That App

Tonight’s acting-heavy episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race is a good time. But remember: if you’re not watching Untucked, you’re only getting half the story.

Personalities come in all kinds of shapes and sizes. RuPaul’s Drag Race attracts some very interesting — and very contrasting — personalities. Episodes like this week’s put the emphasis on chemistry, on how those personalities mix and match for good or ill.

In “Tap That App,” the girls break into three teams to write and perform original commercials for made-up dating apps. There was End of Days, for doomsday true believers; Fibster, for pathological liars; and Madam Butterface, for, well. Anyway, as usual, the themes don’t matter. It’s all about putting together a team of people who can work well together and put on a good show.

Team leader Blair St. Clair, who immediately comes up with a solid concept for the End of Days commercial, assembles the most cohesive team. Everybody gets a say, whether it’s Eureka and her fat jokes (funny if you can pull them off, which Eureka does) or Blair and her ingenue act. On a scale of 1 to Monique Hart, Blair has a pretty small personality. Thus you might expect she’d be subsumed by more performative queens like Eureka or the Vixen. Yet her concept is so strong that everyone trusts it. Her’s is easily the strongest commercial.

Monique herself, meanwhile, puts together a so-so ad for Fibster. Some of the jokes are confusing or not weighty enough. Kameron Michaels is unable to summon the needed energy as the narrator. Poor Mayhem Miller saddled with a quick, formless bit involving a dominatrix and a menu plus very few lines and unhappy viewers.

Of all the directors, Monique is the most dictatorial. She directs herself during rehearsal, much to the bemusement of actual directors Michelle Visage and Carson Kressley. Plus she answers questions asked of her teammates. With the right people, Monique’s overbearing style might have worked. In this case, it discourages people from voicing their ideas, and the whole thing ends up feeling quarter-baked.

I did like the mania Dusty Ray Bottoms brought to his multiple personality-laden character, though, even if it made little sense for the ad.

All that said, no performer tanks as hard as Yuhua Hamasaki over on the Madam Butterface team. She seems out of sync with the rest of the girls from the beginning, possibly because she’s chosen last when they’re picking teams. She mistakes tips on how to ugly up her face as attacks and writes jokes that have nothing to do with the dating app they’re trying to sell and I’m pretty sure aren’t jokes. (“My hot and flexible body allows me to exercise in all different positions.”)

Team leader Monét X Change is more seasoned than Blair and confident enough to let her teammates fly or fail on their own terms, but when you have a teammate as out to sea as Yuhua, sometimes there’s no pulling her back in.

Yuhua doesn’t help herself on the runway, where the theme is “feathers.” Her black crow dress is good and vampy, if predictable, but the bright orange hair makes no sense with it. She and Mayhem end up in the bottom, where they lip sync to Hole’s “Celebrity Skin” — with a delightfully loopy Courtney Love at the judge’s table, no less.

It’s always fun when the show pulls out a rock song for the lip sync, and this is no exception. Both girls match the high energy of the song, but Mayhem gets grittier and angrier with it. You can just tell she wants it more. Between her tearing the magenta feathers off her outfit, fighting the air, and using the lyrics to shade Yuhua, she edges out the competition and lives to fight another week. Yuhua herself has a big personality. I agree with her that we probably didn’t see everything she has to offer. Still, bigger doesn’t always mean better, and I think Mayhem has more to bring overall.

Even with a few questionable choices, the runway is terrific as a whole. Eureka does Yuhua’s black-feathered goth temptress look right. The Vixen stuns in a shiny peacock flapper number with a tail. Monique Hart looks regal in a flowing white-and-gold gown. Aquaria goes artistic with “a cross between St. Sebastian and a wounded bird.” Kameron Michaels, who ends up in the bottom three thanks to his catatonic performance in the challenge, puts together an absolutely stunning look.

It’s a complicated black feathered gown with massive gold shoulder pads, billowy sleeves that double as wings, sheer fabric on the torso, horns, and makeup that makes her look like she’s possessed by an evil virus. It’s like we caught Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty partway through her transformation into a dragon. Between that and the moment where Kameron calmly disposes of a spider while several other queens (or Monique making noise enough for several other queens) freak the hell out, my esteem for Kameron went way up this week.

Plus we can’t forget Asia O’Hara. She comes out in a voluminous Tweety Bird look complete with giant googly eyes and orange gloves that look like a beak when she clasps them together in front of her.

It’s that kind of detail that makes this Asia’s most memorable outfit yet. Oh, and she wins the challenge thanks to her total commitment to her butterface character. I’m surprised it’s taken me this long to mention that — Asia obviously has chops, and this week indicates that she has staying power, but I still have trouble remembering her.

As the crowd thins, I’m betting that will change. After all, between her and Kameron, the moral of this episode is that people with smaller personalities can slip under the radar right up until they win best in show.

But as entertaining as the challenge and runway were, the drama — both in the main episode and in Untucked — may have been the most fascinating part of this two-hour block. Dusty Ray recounts an incredibly emotional, confusing time in his life when his parents found out he was gay and tried to exercise the “gay demon” out of him with religion. Had he not walked out on his family and forged his own path, he may have ended up in gay conversion camp. Yet he still believes in God.

His is exactly the kind of powerful, personal story that doesn’t get told elsewhere on TV. It’s wonderful to think a young, queer person going through something similar could watch this, realize they’re not alone, and make a change in their life. This is RuPaul’s Drag Race at its most relevant and helpful.

On the other, seedier side of the coin, Aquaria throws shade at the Vixen for wearing someone else’s hair during last week’s “Best Drag” runway. The Vixen comes rocking back at her full tilt by cutting her off, calling her out on her iffy jokes, and badgering her into silence. (Monique: “Vixen handed Aquaria her ass in a gift bag. Gift-wrapped, merry Christmas.”)

Then in Untucked, the girls pile on Aquaria a bit more. She cries, to which the Vixen argues that she’s creating a narrative where she’s the victim and the Vixen is the “angry black woman.” Things get really real, really fast.

It’s a touchy subject, and yet another kind of conflict that doesn’t get aired a lot elsewhere. Does the Vixen have a point about the racial optics of the situation? Should the Vixen take care not to escalate conflicts, as Miz Cracker suggests? Or is she in the right to be unapologetically combative if that’s the way she is. They’re meaty questions, and frankly far more interesting than whether Mayhem threw Monique under the bus on the main stage.

Next: Marc Jacobs pulls out all the stops and proposes to boyfriend at Chipotle

Random Ruflections

• “There wasn’t no sponge, though.” Monet is trying to make sponge happen. Meanwhile, Vanessa Vangie saying her name three times is happening all by itself.
• “Can y’all turn off the HD for this part?”
• RuPaul’s chooses team leaders based on a mini-challenge where the girls take surreal direction while modeling with a bar of chocolate. It’s enjoyably stupid nothing. Monique Hart take hop honors with her posh British accent (“That’s the worst Jamaican accent I’ve ever heard.”) and couch cushion boobs.
• Did RuPaul have a cold during filming? His voice was weirdly quiet the whole episode through. It was bizarre hearing taglines like, “Gentlemen, start your engines, and may the best woman, win!” recited with so little oomph.
• Monique: “Mayhem looks like she has an issue with Kameron being narrator, but closed mouths don’t get fed.”
• “When another drag queen goes, ‘gurl,’ you know it ain’t good.”
• Aquaria could watch Alyssa Edwards struggle to say “doo dah” all day. Agreed.

• “Armageddon laid tonight.”
• Courtney Love: “It was a little meh-hem. I made my first quip.”