RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season-Finale Recap: LaLaPaSnooze-a

Don’t be alarmed by the humidity rising and the barometer getting low; we have just come to the end of the tenth season of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars. According to all sources (citation pending), it’s a bubbly but unshocking end to a lackluster season. Rainstorms? More like a drizzle.

While the procedural advent of the brackets monopolized much of the conversation, the season has been shockingly short on personality. The semifinals have been a hodgepodge of stumbling to reignite or (if you’re Irene, sadly) completely smother the momentum the queens created in their brackets. But the season wasn’t broken by a new format alone: The quick succession of Snatch Game, talent show, and now Lip Sync LaLaPaRuZa is Drag Race being more snoozily reliant on formula than ever before. In total, the finale gives us seven lip syncs without a dud among them, but they bring All Stars to a close with the season never finding much of a story to tell.

First order of business is that the Wild Card returning queen is revealed to be Kerri Colby. Given the cliffhanger pageantry of last week’s reveal that only she and Mistress Isabelle Brooks would be in the running, her Totally Randomly Selected return to the workroom is rather low-key. It’s one of the signs of the bracket format’s failure: At the close of her bracket, it felt like Kerri got a raw deal. But weeks later, we’re struggling to remember the drama that kept her from the semifinals. If the wild card is meant to shake things up, there should be more momentum behind the returning queen.

There’s a larger excitement roadblock, however, in the lip-sync finale itself. This all but rules out some queens’ chances of winning (sorry, Kerri), while it could have made strong contenders of others who never even made it to the semifinals (Denali). And given the structure of this bracket season, we have already seen these All Stars lip-sync many, many times over the course of their Drag Race tenure. What are the chances we’re going to see something we haven’t seen from them before? To try to make up for that missing drama, Rate-a-Queen is back, once more forcing gay people to understand what a seeded bracket is. (I for one am still confused.)

Aside from this cruel fate, a finale showdown isn’t as satisfying a time for the show to deploy the Lip Sync LaLaPaRuZa. It serves a more dramatic, high-stakes function when it leads to a queen’s elimination or return to the competition. But it’s even better with such subterranean-low stakes as a prize for a previously ousted queen (allowing for surprises like putting respeito on the good name of Megami even when she doesn’t ultimately win). As an avenue to awarding the season’s final champion, it ends up becoming an unbalanced mad dash to the finish line that serves no queen but the one left standing. Anyway, bring back regular eliminations on All Stars seasons.

Ginger and Kerri are first up with Lady Gaga’s “Disease,” and it is a literal face-off — just two faces contorting in Gaga-esque torture in places of shablams. For Ginger, the number is basically a face-acting challenge, and Kerri struggles to keep up. Kerri’s energy is odd on her return, all positivity and catchphrases, but kind of just along for the ride. As unceremoniously as she returned to the competition, the lovable Kerri Colby once again leaves it.

Irene is next to go, and she falls in the lip sync (and she falls hard, bitch), but Lydia would have beaten her even if she hadn’t. Again, I must lament how the show made such a story of her in the first bracket, only to drop her like a hot potato. Her rise from being one of the hardest crash-and-burn first outs to a barnstorming competitor is the kind of organic but earned trajectory we want to see on All Stars. She was never preordained or rigged to win; her narrative came straight from doing great drag, and she should have had a better shot than she ultimately did.

The only signs of Rate-a-Queen riggery is the pairing of Aja and Jorgeous (even though they ranked each other first). Obviously, the temptation to see these two lip-sync titans go head-to-head is real, but Aja ranked sixth doesn’t math up. Aja starting the number dressed as the fiercest sister in the abbey ready to solve a problem like Maria is a highlight of the episode, along with the ebullience she and Jorgeous give Natalie Cole’s “Party Lights.” But like Katy Perry, Jorgeous killed that nun. Aja stifles her sadness at the lip-sync loss, but I think if her goal this All Stars was to announce her reentry into the drag world as a fuller version of herself, no one can say she didn’t achieve that.

Daya Betty’s tearful exit also reflects one of the season’s missed narrative opportunities, with Daya nodding to her strong connection with Bosco. After watching her bracket bond with Ginger, this season’s success for her was clearly about relationships, but we never got enough of that as a story element to feel like we could celebrate Daya. Granted, Daya’s performance in the competition never made her much of a front-runner, despite her punkly ornate but meticulous drag.

A front-runner who does flame out, though, in one of the more obvious calls of the episode, is Bosco. God’s Favorite Transexual shows up in her showgirl finest with basically the city of Las Vegas atop her head, looking jaw-dropping and ready for battle. After a stunning, cinematic performance to “Show Me How You Burlesque,” she sends Daya packing. But in the immediate follow-up against Ginger to a Pink track (let the congregation say “Love Pink!”), Bosco clearly runs out of gas. LaLaPaRuZas are uniquely not Bosco’s thing, so she was probably always screwed here. But her first lip sync of the night — possibly the season’s best — does run against that narrative of her lip-sync abilities and shows that she was always a contender.

Unexpectedly, the star of the episode is Lydia Butthole Kollins. Stunningly dressed like if a Mario World castle were an outfit, Lydia shows a real sense of confidence in her kooky viper abilities, emerging with a fully formed star persona. Even when fairly losing her final lip sync against Jorgeous, her look and two strong lip-sync performances quite possibly stand as Lydia’s single best showing on Drag Race. Unlike some of her fellow uncrowned competitors, LBK is ending her run on a high note, and after debuting only months ago on shakier ground. She’s RuPaul’s self-proclaimed favorite Butthole, and now America’s as well.

It all comes down to Jorgeous and Ginger in the final showdown, marking Drag Race’s first top two without a height requirement. You must be THIS tall to ride Carson Kressley! Miss Muggy puts on the better showing, but the writing is already on the wall for Ginger’s win.

Jorgeous turned out her most consistent season yet, but I wonder if there might have been more reverence for that success if we hadn’t just seen her on the last All Stars. When we’ve had more Jorgeous than we’ve had of some of the main judges, it’s easy for those judges to take her incremental growth for granted. It’s a fine line between Lydia’s quick turnaround and Jorgeous becoming a workroom mainstay, and I think that overexposure of three seasons in four years didn’t help her — even opposite Ginger’s longer but more spread out period of overexposure. Much as Jorgeous’s youth is the brunt of reads against her, I think her “It’s Raining Men” shows the ways in which she’s a classic, timeless drag queen. And having given the better final performance, she’s maybe the season’s ultimate victim of favoritism.

And with that, Ginger wins the season and enters the Drag Race Hall of Fame. She wouldn’t be the first Drag Race winner crowned after being the weakest in their final lip sync. She also wouldn’t be the first All Stars winner whose best days were in their original season — though, yes, her fashion sense has improved, such as her wedding-dress runway. In her brightest moments this season, like Snatch Game, it nevertheless felt like work she had performed even stronger previously. Last call on lamenting favoritism — the laws of Planet Drag Race regularly bend the competition to suit its (dreams of a) golden child, if not quite so openly as it did this season.

It’s not Ginger’s fault that she makes for an underwhelming winner. The show never gave her much of a story line outside of not having a crown. But isn’t part of that problem that we never got a chance to miss her in the first place, when she returned at regular intervals for All Stars 2, 6, and 10? Had she not won this season, we would have expected to see her again on All Stars 14, arriving more promptly on schedule than any major metro’s public-transportation system. Maybe she still will!

Extra Two Pieces and a Biscuit

• All of the queens who got to choose their song both won their lip sync and Just So Happened to be a top-rated queen. Just noting this! I said I was done complaining about riggery!

• Al Pacino : “My eyes see Oppenheimer.” :: RuPaul : “The ball says Ginger.”

• Photo evidence of Lydia’s Shakira birthday cake, or it didn’t happen!

• We couldn’t have had the Rate-a-Queen results given out while the eliminated queens untucked back in the workroom? A tiny addition of drama to the anticlimax might have helped!

Correction: An earlier version of this recap misstated the queen sent home by Bosco.