What You Missed: RuPaul’s Drag Race, Season 4, Ep. 1

So was the season premiere of RuPaul’s Drag Race as good for you as it was for me? For anyone confused about the post-apocalyptic/horror angle, Logo is launching a new series of Thursday night programming called Fearce. They’re playing a horror film every Thursday and they used RuPaul’s hit reality show to promote it.

This season, thirteen drag queens will be competing for a bevy of prizes. These include a lifetime supply of NYX cosmetics, the headlining slot on Logo’s Drag Race Tour, and $100,000.

The first thing you missed was the introduction of my favorite contestant this season, Sharon Needles. She is a horror drag queen from Pittsburgh who describes her persona as “beautiful, spooky, and stupid.” The other contestants read her the entire episode because they do not understand her horror style and think she’s completely out of her league.

Taking inspiration from the judges last season, RuPaul brings back Shangela to mess with the contestants. She gets to pop out of a box again and everything. The destruction of Shangela becomes a running gag and it works.

The theme of the week is the RuPocalypse. First, the girls do a photoshoot with Mark Mike Ruiz in a toxic wasteland. The Pit Crew spray them down with neon paint as they pose on a rotating platform.

Since so few girls keep their balance, I’ll pay tribute to the three with the most spectacular falls. Latrice Royale should have won the challenge for making a big fall off the platform work to her advantage as she kept posing while laying on the floor. Willam spends a good ten seconds falling before catching herself at the last moment and staying on her feet. Jiggly Caliente wins the photoshoot even though she falls off fast and struggles to get back up by herself.

Coincidentally, these three are my other queens to watch this season. I’m convinced that Latrice, Jiggly, Willam, or Sharon will win Season 4. They’re experienced, they have well-developed personas, and they aren’t afraid to fight for their spot on the show.

The main challenge is started in an eerie sepia wasteland. The queens are challenged to steal the clothes off of zombies’ backs to make a post apocalyptic couture design for the runway. Poor Shangela, dumped out the back door by RuPaul, doesn’t even have a chance of surviving the attack from zombified past contestants like Shannel, Pandora Boxx, and Akasha.

On the runway, the contestants all managed to pull together post apocalyptic outfits. Whether or not they were good is another matter all together. Sharon Needles wins the competition with a zombie look, complete with a mouth full of blood dripping out on the runway. Phi Phi O’Hara presents a metallic vision of Mad Max proportions that should have landed her in the top 3. The Princess is in the Top 3 because Mark Ruiz loved her Waterworld vision. So did I.

On the flip side, Kenya Michaels doesn’t actually do a post apocalyptic look. Jiggly Caliente looks like a wannabe Harajuku girl at a bad fan convention. Alisa Summers is sent home for…whatever that’s supposed to be.

I can’t disagree with the elimination, either. I didn’t even know there was a contestant named Alisa until she landed in the bottom 3.

The best line of the episode goes to Michelle Visage for critiquing Madame LaQueer’s cannibalistic runway, “The entree of the evening: Filet of Sole.” Brilliant.

I think the season is off to a great start. Even the non-sewing queens came up with outfits that looked like they tried to pull something together. The queens are already fighting in Untucked and the competition is on.

Thoughts? Love to hear them.

Tags: reality tv, recap

This entry was posted on 31 January 2012 at 10:36 AM and is filed under Column 2, TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.