‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ Season 10 Finale: Bang Bang, There Goes the Season
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It feels appropriate to end Drag Race Rewind with the season 10 finale. Though it’s an episode I have a lot of problems with, it was also the first episode of Drag Race I ever went to a taping of. It features one of the most notorious incidents in series herstory — oh yes, we will be discussing the butterflies — and also reunites the cast of season 1. It feels like a celebration of Drag Race, including and especially its mess.
My relationship to RuPaul’s Drag Race has changed a lot, as you might expect. What was once something I casually enjoyed and had kind of bad opinions about (I used to think season 5 was the worst, what was wrong with me?) turned into an intense obsession — and later, of course, a professional exploit. I’m not exaggerating when I say recapping Drag Race has literally kept me fed for the last several years of my life. That has been amazing in so many ways: I get to share my (hopefully now less bad!) opinions about my favorite show for a living.
But it’s also made things complicated. Being literally invested in the show makes opining on it feel like a bigger deal than it is. And by very nature of the show being fairly formulaic — similar challenges every season, queens receiving archetypal edits — there comes a fear that I’ll eventually run out of things to say. In essence: How does my long-term relationship with Drag Race affect my relationship with Drag Race?
In watching this finale again, though, it feels remarkably comfortable. There’s things I love and things I hate. There are obvious missteps, but some genuine shining moments. At the end of the day, it’s a show that’s meant to be fun — and the best way to approach it is with that in mind. We’re all born naked, and the rest is drag.
The episode begins with eight of the nine season 1 queens (just missing a traveling Tammie Brown) appearing in gold to open the show. Though we’ve seen some of these queens more recently than not — Bebe Zahara Benet had just been in All Stars 3, for instance — it’s still a true gag to see them all collected together for the first time in a decade. Like, there’s Akashia in HD! The biggest gag of all might be to see Rebecca Glasscock, who serves face just as hard as she did as the villain way back when.
Most of the best parts of this episode involve them, including and especially the lip sync smackdown between them and the season 10 girls. It’s such a fun, celebratory moment to see these legends paired with one of the most likable casts ever. Victoria Porkchop Parker and Vanessa Vanjie Mateo, two first-out queens known most by their nicknames, make for a delightful pairing, as do high-energy dance queens Jade Sotomayor and Monique Heart. We even get an All Stars 5 pre-union with Blair St. Clair and Ongina!
Because the reunion focused more on the greater cast of season 10, they’re mostly in the background during this finale. Other than these lip syncs, we really only see them during the opening runway (which Yuhua Hamasaki and The Vixen in particular really look gorgeous during) and when Monét X Change is crowned the first-ever queen-voted Miss Congeniality.
Otherwise, this is the top four’s show, as they each get interview segments with Ru, all of which were substantially edited down from how long they went IRL (which was not true of season 11’s finale). Aquaria does okay, though in the full interview she was a lot more stilted. Eureka’s emotional plea to stop the bullying from the fanbase also gets edited out — yikes — while Kameron comes across as confident. The biggest headline from these interviews is that Asia O’Hara is clearly being built up as the girl to beat in this finale.
Of course, in the first round of lip syncs, she is in fact the only girl beaten. She and Kameron lip-sync to Janet Jackson’s “Nasty,” a repeat song from Jujubee and Manila Luzon’s All Stars 1 showdown. In the shadow of Sasha Velour’s rose petal reveal, Asia prepares a reveal of live butterflies on stage from her outfit. However, as is remembered in infamy (perhaps even “etched in sorrow”?), Asia’s butterflies tired out in the heat of the stage lights. They fail to fly, and instead just land on the ground — the same ground that Kameron is currently doing flips on.
Perhaps because the truth would be too grisly, Drag Race kinda edits around what really happens on stage. Asia’s butterflies don’t all die; some could be seen flying near the exit of the Ace Hotel theater after the taping. But enough die that a stage hand has to come on after and sweep up the corpses before Ru returns to make his decision. Monique and Vanjie’s shocked reaction really does say it all. Kameron is shown looking down at live butterflies, but in real life…
There’s absolutely no excusing how bad this is. It’s an awful idea from conception to execution, and the fact that Asia couldn’t take a step back and realize that is damning of her perspective. She apologized afterward, and got lit into by PETA for the choice, but I actually think it’s become too much of a punchline to really grasp the gravity of how bad it is. A butterfly slaughter happened on the RuPaul’s Drag Race finale stage. Wild! Absolutely insane.
As a result of Asia’s elimination — because duh — Aquaria and Eureka’s battle to “If” takes on high stakes. A Eureka/Kameron final two would potentially be the worst thing that could happen to the show; Aquaria needed to win. So, of course, her and Eureka put on an absolute mess of a lip sync. First of all, I will truly never forgive Aquaria for that Jiffy Pop-ass reveal shield. It’s not even part of her outfit! It’s literally just there to hide some weird fleshy spikes that add nothing to her performance. Meanwhile, Eureka’s look and wig both just scream “REVEAL!”, and they reveal both while doing their signature donkey kicks. The whole lip sync is stripping and tripping, and it’s a mess.
Honestly, the double shantay is dubious as hell, but it needs to happen. Aquaria is the only potential winner left standing who the fanbase wouldn’t positively riot over, and if they have to gloss over her rough lip sync to make it happen, then that’s what they’ve gotta do.
Luckily, when it comes to the final performance (to Jessie J, Ariana Grande, and Nicki Minaj’s “Bang Bang”), there’s little doubt as to who will win. Eureka and Kameron both repeatedly fuck up the words, and rely on the same moves we’ve always seen from them. Aquaria, on the other hand, moves wildly and energetically, literally lighting up from the word go with use of a sparkler. By the time she perfectly times two different confetti cannons, and blows one like a smoking gun at performance’s end, there’s no question who the victor is. Aquaria becomes the series’ 10th champion.
This is a mess of a finale, but it’s an entertaining one! The Massacre of the Butterflies is absolutely gonzo, while the “Bang Bang” performance is a ton of fun thanks to Aquaria. She’s not my favorite winner, and this rewatch has actually brought me down a bit on her actual show performance. But you can’t deny that Aquaria “figured out” Drag Race in a compelling way. She knew she wouldn’t be able to excel at everything, so she found ways through certain challenges, and thrived even at some unexpected times (like Snatch Game). I’ve been critical in the past of her subsequent reign, especially in the wake of Sasha’s prominently activistic time with the crown. But all in all, Aquaria seems like a good one — and I give her all the credit in the world for being the most prominent voice calling out Drag Race Down Under’s bullshit.
Season 10 is unfortunately just not a great season. It has one of the best front halves of a season ever, but none of it goes anywhere, and in fact the show repeatedly cuts the queens who made that first half so compelling. I’d put it somewhere in the range of season 8: there’s good stuff, but it never quite comes together.
And that is a wrap on the Drag Race Rewind project! Thank you all so much for reading. More on this in the final thoughts — for one final time.
The Truly Final Thoughts:
- There was a conspiracy at the time that because “Bang Bang” is a song with three artists, there would always need to be three queens in the final number. This… puzzles me. They had to lip sync to all three parts anyway, it’s not like they split up the song. And anyway, as I reported from the taping at the time, they literally had to re-choreograph where the queens would stand for the final number on the fly. They did not prepare for it.
- The Sally Jesse Raphael recap of Drag Race’s herstory is really one of the more deranged things the show has ever put together. “In 2015, love won, and so did Violet Chachki.”
- Sasha Velour looks great in her serpent crowning look, but as will always be true of these looks, it can’t help but pale in comparison to Violet Chachki’s from season 8.
- Notably, this is chronologically Ru’s first bit of filming for Drag Race in the wake of his wildly controversial comments to The Guardian earlier that year. To see him say “There ain’t no walls here to divide us — there’s only love” (in an ostensible statement to the Trump White House) is of dubious effect, considering he’d made statements to divide queens just months before. But hey, that’s Ru for you.
- Landing Oprah and Judi Dench for video messages in this finale is a pretty big get. It’s funny, even though the show continues to draw high-caliber talent for appearances (Anne Hathaway, Angela Bassett, etc.), it does feel like the days of this kind of über-icon appearance have faded.
- Eureka’s mom being in the crowd for this is lovely, and yet a real heartbreaker. She’s passed on in the years since, and Eureka did a tribute to her in the All Stars 6 premiere. It’s nice that she got to be part of this moment for her child before she passed.
- Out of all of Kameron’s Q&A, the fact that they kept in her saying the key to winning a lip sync is to “KNOW. YOUR. WORDS.”, only for her to utterly butcher the words to “Bang Bang” later? Camp.
- Speaking of Kameron: Your guess is as good as mine as to what’s going on with her after her All Stars 6 appearance. As a couple of friends have texted me: “That’s a lot of emotion for winning.”
- We’ve still got a power ranking coming tomorrow for those at that subscription tier, but this is, of course, the final recap I’ll write for Drag Race Rewind. I considered maybe taking on some of the international seasons to keep this going, but after 2.5 years of writing at least one, usually two (and sometimes even three) Drag Race recaps every single week, I’m ready for a break. My plan is to get something together where you’ll be able to find all these recaps easily, but I’ll wait to divulge too many more details about that.
- For now, I just want to give you all a very hearty thanks for supporting this project, and for helping me achieve something that seemed impossible: recaps of every single episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race. It has been one hell of a journey, but I’m glad we went on it together. Until next time, just remember: shantay means stay.
Drag Race Rewind may be complete, but my coverage of Drag Race continues on! You can check out my recaps of All Stars 6 on Xtra every Thursday evening, and power rankings every Friday morning. Thank you all again for all of your support!
