RuPaul’s Drag Race Recap: Brooks and Dun-dun-duuun …

After the dull predictability of last week’s episode, we’re back to reveling in the possibility of a new format for RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars. This week pivots to a wildly unpredictable new group of six and an episode padded with personality rather than tire-spinning and hand-wringing over Messy Points. And for that, we can mostly thank two queens from the house of Brooks.

What is the opposite of a recession indicator? Tina Burner returning in silver instead of her signature, oft-maligned flame palette. Tina not wearing a red-orange-yellow combo represents some kind of sea change. For Drag Race fans, this is as if the price of rent were lowered or Katy Perry released a halfway-decent song again — it’s jarring and unexpected, as if all hope were not lost. Tina is immediately announcing that we should expect the unexpected and that she has listened to the critiques that have dogged her.

Tranos herself, Kerri Colby, arrives in a confessional look drenched in Infinity Stones. Aside from being the first queen of the Colby dynasty to land on Drag Race, Kerri’s legacy is the warm care she provided her fellow competitors more so than her performance on the show. Whereas some queens are entering All Stars misjudging what kept them from winning, Kerri is spot-on about her issue: not showing herself that same care and getting defeated at critiques. If this confidence holds, I think Kerri is about to give us an entertaining season.

Meanwhile, I have been sitting on these cherry-pie gift certificates for years and I’m ready to cash in. Enter Nicole Paige Brooks From Atlanta, Georgia. For those who might have forgotten her brief season-two run (couldn’t be me!), she immediately announces herself as the Mouth of All Stars 10. Her intro montage is basically just a résumé of shade: “Still can fit in everything I wore on my first season … haven’t had to change my face to change my career … some girls have.” What’s undeniably exciting about her is her self-assuredness and unbridled ego (plus a dash of eccentricity), which stand in sharp contrast to the many early-season queens who immediately doubt themselves when they show up for All Stars. Who cares how well she does with all this personality? You know you want the pie!

Also in the family name is Mistress Isabelle Brooks, Drag Race’s sequined Satan with a smile. Like Bosco in the previous group, Mistress is the only former finalist of her bracket. Her contentious personality and polished presentation also make her its biggest threat, and she makes it clear to the audience and the judges that we’ll be getting more of the same, both in performance and backstage knife-twisting. Is she overselling the gag-worthiness of the (mostly annoying and mild) drama she manufactured with easy targets? Well, there’s still time for her to sow the level of chaos she repeatedly promises.

Now say what you will about Lydia Butthole Kollins returning to film All Stars before her main series debut had even aired, but it’s fair to say her quick turnaround places her firmly in the bracket’s underdog position. However, it takes only a few moments to realize we’ll be getting a sharper Lydia this go around, a tighter Buttho— [trapdoor opens to a tank of electric eels]. She seems very clearheaded about the degree to which she previously missed the mark, which is more than you can say about some All Stars queens this season.

Speaking of quick returns, Jorgeous is back for her third run on Drag Race in four years. Maybe it’s an eagerness to scrub all memory of All Stars 9 from my brain, but I’m willing to give her a fair shot. Sue me, I’m not as sick of Jorgeous as some of the internet is! From first glance, her typically bubbly nature seems to have gained some straight-shooter levelheadedness — I suspect her head is finally in the game, but sure, sure, obviously it better be on her third (nearly consecutive) attempt.

For their challenge, Ru is throwing an Eight Ball with the queens tasked to design a single look that prominently incorporates eight randomly selected items. I know it’s foolhardy to get into a semantic debate with RuPaul Andre Charles, but you can’t call something a ball if the queens are showing only one look! Yet a design challenge is a smart choice to assign this particular group of queens because that means locking them in the workroom to bicker between assembling garments.

I think it’s safe to say the Brooks dynasty will be the eye of the storm for this season’s drama. The dynamic between the Brooks sisters MIB and NPB reveals how Drag Race drama has evolved from seasons old and new — it’s Nicole’s take-no-prisoners verbal laceration vs. Mistress’s winking shit-stirring. Mistress constantly has her wheels turning looking for avenues to rattle the queens, but Nicole does so with a single offhanded comment that cuts to the quick.

Though Nicole reserves her harshest jabs for Jorgeous, the real heat is between Tina and Mistress. Following a tweet in which Mistress mocked Tina’s questionable aesthetics, these two openly, congenially despise each other. Usually when social-media beef penetrates Drag Race, it’s an eye roll, but their sparring is a delight both for its authenticity and its unexpected pairing of queens.

Mistress’s faux-lighthearted reads kept me laughing, but she may be a bit delusional in how she inflates past drama to be more than it was. As usual, Mistress thinks she’s coming for a booger who is the easiest target. This time, she essentially fails, her button-pusher tactics ill-matched to Tina’s unflappable confidence. When Tina turns it back on her, Mistress gets fired up so quickly she looks less like the one baiting the queens and more like the most easily baited. What does it take for Mistress to meet her match? Coming for the terminally unbothered! She thinks she’s burning Tina, but she’s not even smoking.

Mistress, nevertheless, is the episode’s main character and a secretly complex one. Her materials are probably the worst — dowdy copper tones, animal print — but she prevails and looks beautiful as always. Michelle criticizes her for staying too much in her lane of Texas high drag. Mistress’s “I haven’t changed because I have always been perfect” is great for a laugh, but a mentality unwilling to evolve (even in minor ways) isn’t what gets rewarded on All Stars. I think Mistress is in a great position to succeed, though that specific cockiness could be her downfall if the judges get bored.

Mistress delivering the expected also helps underdogs Tina and Lydia edge past her. Tina has never looked so refined on Drag Race, particularly once she takes off the well-tailored but muddy-brown coat. The gold and bronze of her separates also feel adjacent to her signature colors, strongly elevating her aesthetic rather than abandoning it. Lydia, however, finally hits the mark that her previous constructions missed, nailing the so-wrong-it’s-right intention she has long promised. Her neon-and-leopard 1980s fantasy is aspirationally stupid and chic as fuck.

Of the lower-ranked queens, Idina Menzel Paige Brooks is swimsuited as Esther Williams’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Jorgeous ordered a lavender-lemonade fantasy, and Kerri’s braided brassiere (braidssiere!) helps distract from the beaded curtain simply wrapped around her waist. The secret trick to design challenges is making something a queen would conceivably wear in the real world, and that’s exactly what beelines Lydia, Tina, and Mistress to lip-sync consideration.

We’ll forgive Tina for reverting to her old looks for the lip-sync, but regardless, Lydia torches her in “Love Sensation.” After besting Arrietty in “Boogie Wonderland” in season 17, Lydia’s sweet spot may just be … being a total freak on a disco track? I wouldn’t expect Tina or Lydia to steamroll as Irene did in bracket one, but the episode is a full success for both in resetting their narratives: Lydia silenced the skeptics of her speedy return with her best performance yet, and Tina turned out a very polished look.

For now, we’ll say the “pre-alliance” of Miss Flame and the Sphincter prove to be the pre-front-runners — in the words of Tina, they could apply to perhaps be the front-runners. But while the previous bracket dully came to what felt like a preordained (if correct) conclusion, this one could go in a number of directions. And a number of shady showdowns …

Extra Two Pieces and a Biscuit

• Untucked is finally good this season? All it took was making Nicole the main character. She’s showing up Mistress with the shade and Bosco with quotability. “I don’t trust sorcery,” she says of the Magic 8-Ball games.

• “Isabella? … Isabella? …” Nicole wasn’t misnaming Mistress, she was just casting her delayed vote for Best Supporting Actress 2024.

• The criteria for the challenge is that all eight items must be prominently featured in the look, but the judges don’t criticize the queens who hide them in accessories! Isabella literally used one of hers to stuff a purse like it’s tissue paper in a gift bag!

• The Ministry of Cuntfidence, by Kerri Colby — give this queen a branding challenge, already!

• Jorgeous jokes that she “came with the building” after all these returns, and this has me imagining she’s the workroom Phantom of the Opera. Bring back the boat challenge! Honestly [Jorgeous hands], box five is to be left empty, honey!