‘RuPaul’s Drag Race: UK vs. The World’ Did a Queen and the Audience a Disservice with Shock Elimination

What is good television, exactly? That’s what RuPaul’s Drag Race: UK vs. the World has made me wonder from the jump, when we all experienced the first in a string of consistently baffling and/or upsetting eliminations. But the conclusion of this week’s episode, the Snatch Game episode, felt different. It felt like the show, after weeks — if not months or years — of pushing boundaries when it comes to drama, finally went too far. Speaking as a diehard fan who rewatches season after season for comfort, the final moments of Episode 4 were the most uncomfortable, possibly even most painful, moments in the entire franchise. And it ultimately has nothing to do with any decisions made by the queens, and everything with how the moment was presented to us.

To summarize: after Blu Hydrangea wins the lip sync against Baga Chipz, she gets the power to give a queen the chop. She chooses Pangina Heals. Pangina starts to sob. RuPaul tells her to sashay away. Pangina apologizes to all of Thailand, her home country, for not going all the way. She continues to sob. She leaves the stage after saying “thank you” and “I’m sorry” one more time. The sobbing continues backstage. In the Werk Room, Pangina leaves her lipstick message and gives her final talking head to the camera, her makeup and disposition completely wrecked beyond recognition.

Back on the main stage, Pangina’s sobbing is still heard right before RuPaul gives her sign off: “If you cannot love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love somebody else?” The remaining queens give a muted “amen” and the thumping closing music plays.

That’s what happens. And then there’s how it is edited.

Every single second of this elimination plays out entirely too long, with the camera cutting from RuPaul’s gasp to Michelle Visage’s shock; at one point she can’t even bear to look at the stage.

The queens all lay hands on Pangina to comfort her, themselves shook to their cores. Guest judge Clara Amfo — who is brand new to this entire situation — is seen fighting back tears. Even Blu Hydrangea, the queen holding Pangina’s lipstick, looks terrified and devastated — as if she just found out the gun was loaded. Her lip is quivering, her jaw is trembling, and her eyes seem to be screaming, “Uh, hey, RuPaul? You can veto this, right?”

And the way the edit bounces from shot to shot, holding on every moment, the sobs underscoring all of it, you kinda think maybe RuPaul will veto it. She doesn’t, and then Pangina’s sobs continue for the rest of the episode. We linger onstage and watch the queens listen to the sounds of their sister in pain, and then we hear the sobs again right before the inspirational catchphrase, which honestly feels robbed of its meaning when paired with the sounds of a competitor in pain.

To be clear, none of this is the fault of any queen involved. These are the rules of the game, and honestly, this week’s judging felt the most honest of the entire season. Blu and Baga were the tops, Janey Jacké and Pangina were the least successful, and Blu did win the lip sync. The only curveball was really Blu’s choice to eliminate Pangina — the undisputed frontrunner — instead of Janey, who did worse in the challenge. But, again, those are the rules, and All Stars rules have a way of giving frontrunners the chop at the halfway mark. Remember: life’s not fair.

But this moment was light years away from “life’s not fair” or Shangela getting iced out of the top two or even Jimbo’s shocking exit last week — and that has nothing to do with the queens and everything to do with the editing and the choices made by production in this moment.

We’ve seen queens pull surprising lipsticks. We’ve seen queens get emotional upon elimination (June Jambalaya and Lemon this year alone). We’ve heard sobs from backstage (Rock M. Sakura). But the choice to drag this elimination out, to show every single person in the room’s shock and devastation, to leave all the sobs in the mix as if they were a royalty-free Pond5 track, it just felt excessive. It felt like the show wanted us, the audience, to feel awful — as awful as Pangina, if possible. And that choice, to really dig into a person’s very visceral pain and tear it out, splaying it across the main stage, felt wrong.

There’s “life’s not fair,” arguably the only other All Stars elimination of this magnitude, wherein a confident queen (Naomi Smalls) unrepentantly played the game and chopped frontrunner Manila Luzon… but then that elimination followed the exact same editing trajectory. And then there’s … all of this. Within all of the footage captured on the day, there is absolutely an edit that gets across the stakes, the drama, and the emotion that does not amplify backstage sobbing or zoom in on trembling jaws.

This even feels a step too far when compared to other moments of heightened emotions, specifically Roxxxy Andrews venting her trauma onstage after an incredibly intense lip sync against Alyssa Edwards in Season 5 and Raven and Jujubee’s refusal to lip sync against each other in the first season of All Stars.

Those were moments where Drag Race the game broke the queens a little bit. And in those moments, the show treated all of those tears with respect and compassion. No one went home in any of those instances. But All Stars rules weren’t in effect then. Under All Stars rules, queens eliminate each other and, even though RuPaul’s name is literally in the title, she’s somehow powerless to veto a chop. There’s no room for a “we get to choose our families” speech in UK vs. the World.

There are lots of fans who will watch all this trauma drama unfazed, or say that it’s just the way the rules work, or that Pangina got hers for eliminating Jimbo. Trust: you do not have to look far to see these sentiments online. Those sentiments speak to a larger, horrifying culture of cutthroat competition in the gay community. Be it the dysmorphia gay men feel when comparing themselves to Instagram thirst trap influencers, or the way gays conflate cruelty with cleverness; or the belief that the only way to be strong is to be the baddest bitch in the room, to dismiss the pain of others as something they — I don’t know, deserve because they aren’t fierce enough? The kinds of gays who simply need to see queens go home every episode or the gays who cannot fathom why BenDeLaCreme would give herself the chop. Yes, Drag Race is a competition show — but are we really watching the show to see queens get cut or to see queens perform?

In its best moments, Drag Race stands as an example of relentless queer compassion as much as it does powerful queer talent. The way the Season 14 cast rallied around Jasmine on Untucked mere days ago? That is the tea. And Werk Room segments where queens can have emotional journeys… and then still read each other because they’re that close? Perfect. Even the fights between queens, we can get behind those because they’re presented as genuine moments of conflict. But seeing the show, the rules, fighting with the queens? We can all still be messy bitches who live for drama, but do we have to be messy bitches who live for this type of drama — the drama that leads to people, week in and week out, sobbing uncontrollably?

Reminder: there isn’t even prize money at stake here.

If this, all of this, is not proof that there is something clearly broken with the All Stars format, I don’t know what is. This season, specifically, has seen too many queens be torn down. This isn’t what the show should be about. The show should be about the best drag queens in the world doing the best drag in the world. That’s enough. That’s the show. That’s not just good television, that is great television. We do not need to see queer tears exploited like this to this degree, not on our show. There’s already so much of that in the world. Drag Race needs to be a place for queer competition, but dammit, it also needs to be a place for queer compassion.

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