‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ Is Gaslighting Its Audience

Welp, it was nice while it lasted. I should have known the second I hit “publish” on a piece declaring that RuPaul’s Drag Race is out of its funk that the show would tank harder than Alyssa Edwards as Katy Perry. The episodes that aired after I declared the season funk-free have been funky AF. But why? But how? After the latest episode’s utterly baffling choices, I think I’ve figured out what this season’s problem is: we’re being gaslit, America!

Obligatory spoiler warning!

To get us all on the same page, here’s how Dictionary.com defines gaslighting:

To cause (a person) to doubt his or her sanity through the use of psychological manipulation.

Replace “psychological manipulation” with “producing and editing” and you got exactly what Drag Race did to us last night. The episode left all of us knee deep in goop, not necessarily because those were the wrong choices (all art is subjective, henny) but because they were totally at odds with the story the season–specifically the episode itself!–is trying to tell.

Instead of being scripted by a writers’ room, reality shows like Drag Race are “scripted” by producers and editors. No one’s telling these queens exactly what to say (although you know producers prompt them to ask each other probing questions, especially if it’s episode three and a bottom-of-the-pack queen still hasn’t talked about her tragic backstory), but the producers and editors know who the stars are and have pinpointed the storylines they want to follow. Does that crush the illusion a bit, knowing that you’re seeing performers perform in a setting more akin to The Truman Show than the Olympics? It does–but only if you can tell.

Drag Race is at its best when it’s controlled like Truman but looks like the Olympics. But now the storytelling has become so wildly inconsistent that it makes viewers feel crazy. Last night that looked like Brooke eking out a victory over Vanessa Vanjie Mateo, it looked like Nina being in the bottom two over Yvie Oddly, and it looked like Silky Nutmeg Ganache somehow scoring the sloppiest shantay in the show’s history.

Lord knows we all love different queens for different reasons, and the judges’ preferences are crystal (how many times has Michelle Visage begged a alternative queen to give a glamour look, only to heap the highest praise on them when they finally break with their aesthetic and give her a treat?). The notion of a competition show built around art is kinda wacky to begin with. Drag Race requires queens to be very good at very specific things, hence fantastic queens like Trixie Mattel and Jasmine Masters bombing their initial seasons hard only to find success in different formats. This is where the show’s editors come in. It’s their job to set up all these peccadillos before the judging, establishing the week’s criteria by slipping in shady remarks and rattle sound effects. Yes, that means that viewers know who’s going to be in the top and bottom because it’s always the people that we’ve seen the most in the episode. This is how these shows make sense. This is how they tell a story during a competition.

That did not happen last night. Every rule that competition show viewers subconsciously know to look for, because our brains are trained to recognize patterns, was broken. The show was edited in one very clear way but resulted in the exact opposite outcome.

Based on the edit and the season’s storyarc, Vanjie deserved to win. Period. The story’s right there: fan-favorite gone-to-soon unlikely meme queen comes back for another season, starts off high, then hits a series of lows culminating in back-to-back lip syncs. The edit gave us that underdog tale, and the runway sure as hell did. Queens get clocked in every makeover challenge for not making their partner look like a clone. Not a sister, a clone. Vanjie and Ariel Versace were identical to the point that I could not tell them apart at first. This was Vanjie’s moment to shine–and Brooke got the win.

Real talk: Brooke and Plastique Tiara also looked perfect, but this was not their episode. Knowing that Brooke was going to win, we should have seen way more of Brooke and Plastique working together, or at least some talking heads of the rest of the room being intimidated by this power couple. We got none of that. Instead, Vanjie was robbed of the win that feels so essential to the narrative that this season is hellbent on telling anyway.

Even more WTF was the decision to put Nina in the bottom over Yvie. Like Brooke, Nina was largely absent from this entire episode–something that almost always indicates a queen is going to be safe. Instead, we had to endure a heated screaming match between the season’s most aggressive rivals, Yvie and Silky, a move that narratively guaranteed we were going to see them take their beef to the mainstage. On top of that, Silky and Yvie were the two queens most called out when Ru posed the shady but essential question “Who should go home tonight?” The entire season has been building to a Silky and Yvie throwdown, and with both of them finally in the bottom, in an episode where they just lashed out at each other and the entire cast called them out onstage, we were gonna get it.

We didn’t. We got Nina instead.

Art being subjective, yeah, the case can one million percent be made for Nina being in the bottom two over Yvie. The show did not make that case. The edit didn’t clock the way Nina beat Shuga Cain’s mug, no one called out those wigs in the workroom, we didn’t even get a “you in danger, girl” confessional comment. The entire episode was built around Silky vs. Yvie, and it didn’t give it to us.

So whatever–Nina vs. Silky to TLC’s “No Scrubs.” After so much talk about how she’s ready to lip sync and how she wants to lip sync, we finally get to see bad bitch Silky do her thing. Silky proves to be all talk and delivers what has to be the worst lip sync in the show’s entire run. Her garment falls apart. There’s a haphazard wig reveal that falls flat. She hugs the back wall for dramatic effect, but it’s more Suits on USA than the Game of Thrones moment she envisioned. And then there’s a clumsy split on the runway.

Nina wasn’t great, but she wasn’t bad as all that. She knew the lyrics and served face. She didn’t go Cirque du Soleil, but her lip sync was the kind that was commonplace in early seasons of this show. When Ru responded to both performances with a “Meh,” a Drag Race first, that made sense. No gaslighting there. A double sashay would have made total sense. I’d even buy a double sashay and a surprise shantay for Plastique for being Brooke’s partner.

But no, Silky got to stay. Imagine if Valentina got a shantay after her shocking “I’d like to keep it on please” moment. That’s what this is close to. We just watched the messiest queen of the season once again refuse notes, lose a challenge, wreck a lip sync, and still stick around because the show has predetermined they want her in the final four.

We were shown an episode that narratively demanded a Vanjie win and a battle between Silky and Yvie (can you even imagine?!). But the producers seem more content to hold that for the finale even if it means breaking the internal logic of the show. It bums me out to say that, at this point, Drag Race needs to either admit that it’s a primarily a messy reality show about queer people shouting at each other, or it’s first and foremost a celebration of the best drag has to offer as an art form. Because right now it’s trying to be both and it means the audience and the producers are watching two different shows.

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