RuPaul’s Drag Race Recap: Mom and Pop
Hey, so you know how the world is going terribly lately? That’s something that affects how I watched this episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race. Historically, both I and the general internet have been (rightly) hard on Drag Race’s serious streak. The “What would you say to little _____” segments feel overtly manipulative, and the Trauma Makeup Corner is hard to take seriously, given its utter reliance on a basic formula for explaining various queens’ hardships. So my knee-jerk reaction when Drag Race goes full bore into sentimentality is to roll my eyes a bit and hunker down for a segment that doesn’t speak to me.
But something else that is true is that there is no other program on TV, period, on which a convicted felon can come and be celebrated for his love of his gay, drag-queen son. I also can’t remember the last time I saw a transphobic mother work so hard to overcome her biases and reconnect with the daughter she threw out of the house. Even Sam Star’s mother, a deeply southern woman who has a fearsome dedication to her child, is a revolutionary figure right now. The world is terrible, corporations around the country are dropping queer people left and right, but Drag Race still exists. It’s nice.
All that to say that I’m not mad at how the episode turned out tonight. Okay, so nobody went home. Sure, whatever. I’m not obsessed with that fact, given that it means we’re probably headed for a top four instead of my beloved top three, but I also didn’t really feel the need to watch Jewels Sparkles’s dad watch her go home. (No, I do not think Onya was ever going to get eliminated.) By the end, this episode was a celebration of families supporting their queer children, and I don’t think that’s something to be mad at. It was a pleasant balm.
The episode begins with a mini-challenge that is not really a mini-challenge but is instead just an opportunity for Lexi to dump on Suzie. The girls vote on each other for various categories, and the girl who agrees with the majority the most wins. Onya, who is the only queen this season who exists in reality, does the best. Notably, they also all think Jewels is going home next because she only has one win. Thus begins Jewels’s fight to defy the odds and not go home this week.
Then, all the parents walk in. Lexi, Suzie, and Sam all get their moms, while Jewels and Onya get their dads. Something I hate is when the show features makeover partners of multiple genders. It’s never fair. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the two queens with dads ended up in the bottom — Drag Race, for all the progress it’s made on accepting alternate forms of drag, still loves high femininity the most. Jewels and Onya get a much bigger challenge than the other queens, and they never recover from the difference.
Also charged with a bigger challenge than the other queens, it turns out, is Suzie, whose mom is much shier and less involved with her drag career than the other queens’ parents. This episode did a lot to humanize Suzie, honestly, and I found myself rooting for her for the first time in a while. It’s not that I was ever cexpressly rooting against her, but seeing her mom showed me a very different life for Suzie than I’d imagined. Rather than an excited stage mom or a positive force, Suzie’s mom is a bit dour, and they clearly don’t have a very strong relationship. Suzie, rather than receiving a collaborator as a makeover partner, had to become a director and a therapist. It’s a little hard to watch, but it’s exactly the kind of “window into their real life” that this challenge is designed to provide.
On the opposite end of things is Sam’s mother, who is wildly supportive of her career. Between her real-life mom and Trinity the Tuck, it’s fair to say that Sam has some strong mothers back home. There’s a moment when Sam’s mom asks Suzie’s mother how often she goes to Suzie’s shows, and Suzie’s mom says she’s been to maybe four. Sam’s mom then reveals she goes once a weekend and is a surrogate mother to everybody at the club. It’s very touching. I also get a sense that she was standing up for Suzie and showing what a mother could be to a drag queen.
The most emotional reunion, though, has got to be Lexi’s time with her mother. We know from earlier in the season that her mother threw her out of the house when she came out, leading to all kinds of bullshit for Lexi to have to push through to get to this point. Seeing them reconnect, as Lexi’s mother struggles to get her pronouns right, is crazy to watch play out onscreen, but it also illuminates Lexi’s behavior throughout the season. She came on this show in the midst of her transition (which is basically a second puberty) and while still reconciling with the mother that threw her out? Now that’s a recipe for … gestures wildly at Lexi’s various breakdowns throughout the season.
Onya has a great story line this week, too, with her father, who missed a lot of her early milestones, like high-school graduation, because he was locked up for robbing five banks. He suggests that his drag name be Roberta (pronounced Rob-her-da) Banks, which Onya wrongly puts the kibosh on. That’s hilarious! It’s hard not to love Onya’s dad — he’s sweet, he’s funny, he’s really committed, and he clearly loves his kid.
Finally, there’s Jewels and her dad. Her dad is also super supportive and even brought her to her first drag club ever, but the real focus of their relationship is on the fact that Jewels’s brother died in 2022, and she now feels pressure to bring joy back into their family. Like almost all these relationships, it’s a lot.
Ru does a walk-through and seems utterly enchanted by all the parents. Something I love is when she talks one-on-one with the parents, and suddenly, the competing queens seem entirely irrelevant to their conversation. More than once, it seems like Ru is able to entirely set the parents at ease. It’s a polite thing to do for the guests and also helpful for a queen like Suzie, whose mom is not naturally going to stop being intimidated by RuPaul.
On the runway, Lexi goes first. She does Valentine’s Day–inspired lingerie, which is an amazing thing to put one’s own mother in. It does feel like it represents Lexi’s drag, which is great. Ultimately, Michelle critiques her for not having enough “family resemblance.” That critique has always remained a mystery to me — it seems to be implied entirely arbitrarily, and it’s particularly ridiculous when the queens are painting faces that look like their own faces by sheer genetics. Anyway, in this case, I think Michelle just doesn’t want to tell Lexi’s mom to her face that her makeup looked jacked, which it kinda does.
Then comes Sam. Generally, the judges tend to overreward pageant queens on the makeover instead of quirky girls (Sam’s mom Trinity won it over Sasha Velour; Jaida won it over Crystal Methyd), and you could interpret Sam’s win over Suzie as yet another example of that, but I think the win went to the right queen. Her mother’s makeup looks incredible, the outfits are incredibly polished, and their performance is a rollicking good time. Sam lucked into a lot this week: It was her mother rather than her father, for one. Plus, they have a great relationship, and her mother has a personality that fills the stage. In that way, you could say that Sam was set up for the win, and you wouldn’t really be wrong. She had the easiest task. But damn, I can’t find one thing wrong with her output this week. Really great work.
Suzie, meanwhile, really managed to work that shit out. Her and her mother’s 1920s-y black-and-white looks are really cute, but the best thing is that Suzie really just takes care of her mom onstage. The other queens look like they’re having more fun, but that was never an option for Suzie. She does the heart part of the challenge very well, being sweet and gracious to a mother who has never fully supported her art. (Shoulda painted farther down the neck, though.)
Jewels should have had a reveal. The judges nitpick other things (that the parkas are shapeless is their main thing), but I think the issue is that if you come out in giant coats, people are expecting a reveal. When that doesn’t happen, it’s disappointing. Nothing more to say, really.
Onya’s looks are really ugly. She wears what I believe is a Princess Peach–inspired look, while her dad is basically the photo negative. His makeup looks great, but I hate his frizzy wig, and the looks just don’t appeal to me at all. Sorry, not working.
Jewels and Onya, rightly but also inevitably, end up in the bottom this week. They lip-sync to “1 Thing,” by Amerie, and it’s pretty evenly matched. Jewels is the more dynamic performer, while Onya mostly just walks across the stage, but Onya is an incredibly fully realized character, and Jewels is at her most generic when lip-syncing. She has yet to figure out how to bring that “demonic Glinda” energy that she has normally into her lip syncs of other people’s songs. So, by that measure, I’d call it a win for Onya, but just barely. Ultimately, though, it doesn’t matter. Both queens get to stay! Fine by me — the top five is so clearly the best five of the season that I’m not mad at getting to keep them for another week.
And also on Untucked…
• I loved getting to spend a little more time with the parents, but my absolute favorite moment of the episode was a crying Sam telling all the girls that she would send home her biological sister if it meant she was closer to the crown. Sometimes you’ve just got to love Sam.
• I liked seeing Suzie and Sam reveal a mutual respect for each other because of their competitiveness. Very sweet — can’t wait to see them both lose to Onya.
• The funniest line of the episode is Jewels’s dad saying “Mickey Mouse is going down” about Suzie and her mom.
• Not that any of the portraits mattered, but Jewels had the best one.
• None of the newly christened drag queens’ names were all that great this season. But I’ll be thinking about Roberta Banks for a long, long time.
• Gay thoughts from gay people: I asked my co-worker Joe Reid to share some thoughts this week, and (unsurprisingly, as he is a scholar of reality TV) he sent a screed: “I need to talk about Suzie Toot. I was so certain this week would be Suzanne’s surprise elimination. Not because the challenge seemed particularly daunting for her, but because fifth place is a graveyard for queens who think too much. How many times has Ru advised a queen to get out of her head or ‘make it stupid’? Ru loves stupidity, and she hates thinking. If she catches you overthinking, you’re out. (Ru hates a thinking queen; I, unfortunately, love them.) At her best, Suzie has been able to serve elevated stupid in acting competitions, but just as often, she’s overthinking things like the Snatch Game and making insanely ill-advised statements in her interviews like ‘my biggest strength in this challenge will be my references.’ Jason, you’d made the astute observation early on in the season that the other girls were allowing Suzie to assume the Jinkx Monsoon underdog narrative. More recently, though, Suzie has allowed the other girls to define her narrative, whether it’s Lexi Love’s frankly psychotic preoccupation with Suzie as some kind of bête noire–slash–sleep paralysis demon, or Jewels Sparkles writing ‘cerebral! cerebral! cerebral!’ in her bio for last week’s mini-challenge. Jewels might as well have been writing her epitaph.”
• Predicted final four: Looks like we’re returning to a final four this year instead of a final three, given that there’s just one episode left before the returnee lip-sync-off. Jewels is going home.