![]() ![]() ![]() Recording starts with the help of Michelle, and all seems to be going pretty smoothly. The longtime songwriting pair give some brief advice on writing about “getting fucked hard in the arsehole” and being a “big bottom bareback bottom raw-dog bottom bitch,” advice that’s decidedly more useful than anything Taika Waititi or Kylie and Dannii Minogue had to offer. The queens begin to write their verses for “Queens Down Under,” but not before another prerecorded guest spot, this time from Leland and Troye Sivan. Such is that four-dimensional chess game we call RuPaul’s Drag Race Down Under!) (As ever, Maxi has burnished her reputation this week while doing very little, while Scarlet has somehow done nothing for her reputation while over-performing. Maxi “couldn’t give a rat’s arse,” thereby winning this week’s pettiness cold war. ![]() The queens split into teams led by dancing divas Elektra and Scarlet with surprisingly little fanfare - although Scarlet explicitly states that she doesn’t want Maxi in her team. It’s not my fault that I have high standards!Īfter a piece of spon-con for the terrifyingly named company Manscaped masquerading as a mini challenge - in which the queens have to dress as lifeguards, while Ru looks on hornily and screams things like “Jiggle dem titties, bitch!” - Ru announces that this week, the queens are doing a girl-group challenge, à la the Drag Race UK maxi challenge that birthed “UK Hun.” I’m thrilled, not least because I’m not really sure that AU/NZ drag has the same kind of intense self-branding ethos that leads American drag queens to actually release music, meaning that some kind of chaos is bound to ensue. If it sounds like I’m being mean, consider that I’m simply a humble recapper and lover of the arts, who only wants to see the world’s best performers thrive to the best of their ability. She describes herself later as a “powerhouse performer,” which feels like a wild reach considering that, let’s be honest, her walking-back-and-forth-across-the-stage moves were only a minimal improvement from Art’s baseline of standing still and waving her arms about. I can’t help but feel this is both in bad taste - a little like smiling through a funeral - and tempting fate. ![]() Speaking of delusional: Back in the werkroom, Coco is visibly thrilled that she was the one to knock Art out of the competition. Like much of Drag Race Down Under thus far, that seems to involve a lot of passive-aggression and ill-advised showboating, but at least this feels like purposeful, warranted showboating, as opposed to the kind of delusional antics that made last week’s Snatch Game feel so much like a nightmarish acid trip. There’s no front-runner in this race anymore, and this episode sees each queen try to step forward and assert herself as the one to beat. (She’s already made merch commemorating the incident, because this is Drag Race, and even life’s abject lows deserve branding opportunities.) Because of that, Art’s honest-to-god freakout felt like a genuine, unplanned watercooler moment. Drag Race as a whole has begun to feel more and more filtered, as queens have learned that their on-set behaviour will directly translate into online discourse and, in some cases, their ability to get work. (At the start of 2021, I had two brain cells now, I have one, and it’s just an image of Art Simone, dressed like a sea witch, looking like she’s about to go Lady Joker.) Although I’m told who leaves each week, review copies of Drag Race don’t include the final elimination scene, and when I went to check out last week’s final minutes after the fact, I was stunned. That! Means! Nothing! It’s been a week since Art Simone’s shocking and instantly iconic exit from RuPaul’s Drag Race Down Under, and her pained, irreversibly heartbroken final words are still haunting my thoughts. ![]()
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