Guest Judges: Leslie Jordan and Jeffrey
Moran
Mini-Challenge: "Read" (insult) the
other contestants
Mini-Challenge Winner: Alaska
Main Challenge: Roast RuPaul, as well as the
judges and fellow queens, in front of a live audience
Challenge Winner: Coco
Montrese
Main Challenge Prize: A custom
gown from Sequin Queen
Bottom Two: Alyssa Edwards and Roxxxy Andrews
Lip Synch Song: "Whip My
Hair" by Willow Smith
Eliminated: None
Mirror, mirror, on the wall: who’s the least coherent of all?
The scientific name for her condition
is Betsey Johnson Disorder.
Of course no one in the room is
thinking much about their fallen compatriot: it’s every woman for herself at
this point. Alaska, in particular, is experiencing a Diana Ross moment (Google
it, Lineysha) and wants to break free from Detox and Roxxxy. It’s time for her
to stop being part of a trio and start being last season’s winner’s boyfriend.
To announce this change, she skips
the “Rolaskatox!” war cry during her workroom entrance, eliciting so many ooohs from
her colleagues that I thought an ambulance was approaching. The editors do
their best to make this a drama worthy of sirens, but everyone insists on
reacting calmly, which honestly strikes me as a little ungrateful. Ru didn’t
cast you for your ability to behave like an adult—you betta pitch a fit for the
camera and earn that free vodka.
After She-Mail, Ru appears wearing a
flower so loud and overdone that I immediately named it Michelle Corsage. Though
we can barely see his face from behind the lurid lavender petals, he manages to
announce the long-anticipated reading mini-challenge. Because it’s what? Sickening,
bitch!
Or the other thing, I dunno.
Everyone gets in a couple of decent
barbs, though many of the reaction shots amused me more than the comments
themselves. Alyssa delivers wild, unpredictable convulsions that are
essentially the full-body equivalent of her make-up faces, while Jinkx doesn’t
laugh so much as hinge her mouth agape like a Pez dispenser.
Special kudos go to Alaska, however,
whose possessed-by-the-sunglasses concept is backed by some of the sharpest wit
in the competition.
After reciting a convincingly chipper
Absolut ad (some of us are willing to work for our booze), Ru announces
the main challenge: the girls will be roasting her. Alaska, as the best reader,
will choose the show’s running order.
I suppose this had the potential to
be a shady and conniving prize, but again, the queens defy the odds and talk it
out calmly like humans instead of their usual
fabulous-apes-flinging-glittery-feces spectacle. They’re awfully composed when
the drinks aren’t laced with Rolaskatox, which I suspect is a frenzy-inducing
hallucinogen.
Here’s the thing: it’s a little silly
to try to build tension over who will succeed, because we’ve been watching for
weeks now—we know who’s funny. The next 30 minutes could pretty much write
itself. Nonetheless, we sit through dreary montages of ladies staring intently
at their notebooks. You don’t need to be psychic to know that Jinkx’s page is
full and Roxxxy’s is blank.
You know the situation is dire when
I’m actually thankful that Alyssa is there: the overconfident gasps and
chortles at her own bon mots are sad and transparent—but at least they break up
the monotony.
For some assistance, Ru introduces
the queens to comedians Deven Green, Nadya Ginsburg and Bruce Vilanch. It’s
unclear whether this panel is giving or receiving help, seeing as their advice
is haphazardly inconsistent and their collective fame couldn’t fill a box on The Hollywood
Squares. (And if you didn’t catch that reference, I’ve made my point.)
There’s a lot of floundering all
around, but Alyssa gets the darkest foreshadowing for not knowing the
difference between telling a joke and just saying something mean. Anyway, the
show quickly jettisons and forgets its guest commentators, as will its
audience.
Before the ladies take the stage to
lightly nibble the hand that feeds them, Roxxxy leads the charge in openly
questioning Jinkx’s self-doubting ways. That expressing insecurity and admitting
your flaws are foreign concepts to this group should surprise no one.
The Roast of RuPaul runs pretty much
how you’d expect: Alaska goes first and is a-mahzing, Jinkx goes in the
middle and kills, and Detox goes last and is pretty good, too. On the other end
of the spectrum, Alyssa and Roxxxy’s roasts are so depressing I almost thought
they were delivering eulogies. (Their own.)
Ivy lives up to her namesake and is
something of a wallflower, while Coco delivers the night’s only surprise with a
clever character, a fictional old friend of Ru’s from the Brewster Projects.
Her performance turns out to be a
twofold shock when she beats perpetual underdog Alaska and newly glamorous Jinkx
for the win. Maybe her best material didn’t make it to air, but it sure seemed
like the other two were funnier.
Alyssa and Roxxxy have been in the
bottom since the episode started, so Ru announcing that they’re up for
elimination is almost repetitive.
They lip-sync to Willow Smith’s “I
Whip My Hair Back and Forth” with great gusto, though their grasp of the lyrics
is oddly shaky for a song that mostly repeats the same seven words ad nauseum.
What they lack in basic verbal capacity, they make up for in gale-force
back-to-front hair-flipping. Roxxxy in particular pulls early focus for calling
in a pinch hitter when her first wig just can’t whip hard enough. Pretty soon
they’re both having seizures like a gay Exorcist sequel that I now
desperately wish would get made.
Who to send home is made even tougher
when Roxxxy suddenly explodes into sobs. With some prompting from Ru, she
explains how being in the bottom two makes her think about the time that her
mother abandoned her at a bus stop when she was a toddler.
At this point Alyssa is probably
furious that she wasted her estranged dad story last week.
In the end, a roasted Ru is a
merciful Ru, and she allows both of her girls to stay. The episode ends in a
group hug. Unfortunately, this tender moment is filmed from above, so it
doesn’t look like a display of affection so much as a pile of discarded weaves.
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