About That Drag Race Episode…
RuPaul’s Drag Race
Season 16, Episode 4 “RDR Live!”
Original Air Date: January 26, 2024
As Geneva Karr and Mirage began to lip sync for their lives during the latest episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race, I felt sad for Geneva. Since vrooming into the top two during her half of the split premiere, she’d slipped harder than Nymphia Wind on a banana peel, and after a performance in the RDR Live! Maxi Challenge so awful it (almost) made the Drag Race writers look good, she was taking her second consecutive trip to the bottom two. Only this time, her opponent wasn’t Hershii LiqCour-Jeté method lip syncing as an everyday, church-going woman in a pair of pants she didn’t make – Now, Geneva was up against Mirage, the heel-clacking sensation with the stage presence, dance ability, and athleticism of an about-to-be assassin. As the music faded in, I felt fully sure of something I was already mostly sure of: Geneva’s elimination was imminent…
I was wrong. After 16 seasons – 24 if you count All Stars – of U.S. Drag Race, and with production’s Master Hand (not to mention a hostile fanbase) always looming larger, the show doesn’t generate as many unpredictable moments as it did a decade ago. But Mirage not knowing a single word of Cher’s “Dark Lady” after the first verse was devastatingly, excruciatingly, heart-palpitatingly shocking. She didn’t know the lyrics so thoroughly that even I (someone who’s rarely able to spot when queens don’t know their words) could tell she was blowing it before interviews from other contestants or close-ups of RuPaul looking annoyed confirmed it throughout the rest of the performance.
Despite some impressive choreography that occasionally paired with lyrics a half-second too late, at the end of the number, Mirage is tangled in her costume post-cartwheel and the music stops so abruptly, I think RuPaul may’ve cut it short…? She also doesn’t take a patented reality TV pause before announcing the lip sync’s results. Mirage is eliminated like Ru was late for an appointment.
As the episode finished airing, I did the only thing I could to cope: immediately rewatch it. (I even sat through RDR Live! again.) Armed with knowing the ending, I saw what an expertly edited episode it was. Mirage quietly experiences the steps of a traditional Drag Race downfall while Geneva does the same thing but with more screen time. The queens’ storylines are nearly parallel, but Geneva’s prominence made much of the episode seem like her send-off more than Mirage’s – That turns out to be an editing trap, and if you fell for it (like I did), then the Lip Out-of-Sync for Your Life might’ve been the most unexpected Drag Race moment since Sasha Velour rained roses. But after a rewatch, I realized how many subtle beats foreshadow the ending and how effectively Geneva is used as a red herring (not just because of her runway outfit either)…
It all begins, like most Drag Race storylines, in the Werk Room. RuPaul introduces the RDR Live! Maxi Challenge, then leaves the queens to passive aggressively fight over parts. On his way out, Ru reminds the cast that the point of an SNL parody challenge is to “create a breakout character.”
Cut to Mirage several minutes later explaining that she wants to host the show because “It’s not a character.” All she’d need to do is memorize the opening monologue, then deliver it as herself. Basically, her goal is to get through the performance doing as little acting as possible – the literal opposite of what RuPaul said he’d be looking for…
Still, two contestants are initially interested in hosting: Mirage and Sapphira Cristál, but Sapphira decides she’d rather work in a group. The moment Mirage gets the part, officially, she regrets it. She’s psyched out by Sapphira’s eagerness to switch roles and suddenly aware that, as the lone host, there won’t be any scene partners to blame if she bombs.
Meanwhile, Geneva ends up playing Lindsey Graham in the cold open. It’s obviously intended to be one of the “breakout characters” with challenge-winning potential, but Geneva squanders the opportunity by having no clue who Senator Graham is. The episode’s only editing failure is that we don’t see how Geneva gets the part in the first place – Did she volunteer to portray someone she’s never heard of? Did the other queens push her into it? Why didn’t she ask any of them (or Google) who he is? Did she even know he’s a real person?
Things get worse when RuPaul stops by again for the Werk Room walkthroughs. When no one in the cold open has any sketch comedy experience, Ru is worried, and he’s not reassured by Geneva’s belief that she’ll be good at memorizing lines because, as a grocery store cashier, she had to learn a lot of produce codes. The exchange is mostly played for laughs at Geneva’s expense, but knowing how important her ability to remember lyrics is at the end of the episode, the moment took on new, significant meaning.
Since Mirage briefly appears in the cold open before her host’s monologue, I expected her to get feedback alongside those girls, but instead, she’s suspiciously paired with Sapphira’s group, a singing trio of Barbra Streisand impersonators who don’t perform until the end of the show… While they’re talking to Ru, he conspicuously asks if the queens got into any part-picking drama… Mirage has a chance to defend herself in a funny way or confidently take ownership of the host role after acting so flazéda about it earlier… She does neither and shrinks even further – At least Geneva sort of made Ru laugh!
But as the queens get Mainstage-ready the next day, I remained certain of Miss Karr’s impending elimination when she filled the episode’s “Trauma Mirror” timeslot with the story of her emigration from Mexico and her DACA status. Xunami Muse is also a Dreamer, but the scene is decisively Geneva’s.
Earlier in the segment, Mirage shares her background too, when she’s candidly-and-not-at-all-producer-motivatedly asked about her work showcasing Indigenous drag in Las Vegas. In my rewatch, I realized that each mirror moment is followed by an interview, but where Mirage’s is upbeat & cheerful, Geneva’s is downtrodden & tearful.
Both queens are featured in the same way, but because Geneva’s portion is sad and set to melancholy music, it feels like a goodbye, especially according to the modern Drag Race editing formula. Mirage’s portion has a brighter soundtrack, so it seems like we’re simply getting to know her.
I wish I could forget the RDR Live! performance, but after watching it twice, I fear it’s burned into my brain forever… Is this the worst script a cast has ever been given? It wasn’t funny. It wasn’t so bad it became good again. It was just boring, which is the last thing you want to hear about a comedy show. I felt sorry for the participating queens. There’s a political cold open, Mirage’s hosting spiel, another iteration of the Cecily Strong / Vanessa Bayer / sometimes Tina Fey porn star sketch we already saw during All Stars 8’s RDR challenge, a Weekend Update featuring the first brick thrown at Stonewall (à la Bowen Yang as the iceberg that sunk the Titanic), the trio of singing Streisand impersonators, and a visit to RuPaul’s Golden Hoedown – because I guess Ru realized that the only thing missing from All Stars 8’s RDR Live! was a musical guest, and what better performer to hire for the show within your show than yourself…
Luckily, a few memorable moments manage to emerge from the forgettable challenge: Eventual winner Plasma gives a good performance as the Barbra on the left. The way she enunciated that last “g” was the only joke that landed! By winning, she also completed one of my favorite recurring Drag Race storylines: a queen loses out on a role she wants and ends up with one she hates, only to win the challenge later.
Plasma’s desire to branch out from her Broadway roots via a “Seth & Amy moment” in the Weekend Update is thwarted by Amanda Tori Meating, Dawn, and Q, a cliquish trio who want to perform in the same sketch together. Plasma is sidelined into the Streisand number because the trio insists “it’s written for [her,]” and then she performs the role like it was. After her incessant “underdog” talk throughout her first two episodes (and RuPaul’s well-documented disdain for most musical theater queens), I thought Plasma was sure to be Jan’d, but getting any amount of praise prior to an All Stars appearance takes her out of the running…
Fortunately for us (and unfortunately for her), Q performs well in the third of three challenges without winning any of them, so at least someone is taking up Jan’s mantle… She plays the Stonewall Brick, an obvious “breakout character” like Lindsey Graham, and still loses!
The third top-placing queen is Plane Jane as “Candy Long” in the porn star retread. I don’t understand why the writers parodied the same SNL sketch in both RDR Lives! that currently exist, but in doing so, they’ve accidentally contributed to the popular fan theory that Plane is copying All Stars 8 champ Jimbo, who won the first RDR by playing a nearly identical character. Even though both queens are replicating the same SNL performances and even though All Stars 8 aired after season 16 filmed, if someone doesn’t know either of those things, it’d be easy to assume that Plane is biting off Jimbo (again). I think it’s the funniest thing to come out of this challenge…
Needless to say, by the end of the night no one surfaces as the season’s comedy queen, but the script was so so SO bad, you can’t blame most of them. You can blame Geneva though, for never finding out who Lindsey Graham was and wearing that as a result. Truthfully, the entire cold open crew was so underwhelming, I half-expected them to four-way lip sync for their lives. Morphine Love Dion & Xunami didn’t deliver comedy, confidence, or costumes that made sense as Brandy Cohen & Branderson Cooper in an NYE-style countdown to the apocalypse. (Morphine also repeatedly pronounced Senator Graham’s name as “Lindsey Gray-ham,” which made me wonder if she didn’t know who he was either…)
The sketch’s field reporter, played by Mhi’ya Iman LePaige, was barely on-screen… and why did she have a yard drink? Mirage flubs the end of her host’s monologue after the cold open, but I didn’t think she was any worse than Mhi’ya, Morphine, or Xunami, and none of them came close to achieving Geneva’s level of failure. As the show closed, I thought it was a toss-up which of the four would lip sync against her, but the runway presentations clear that up real quick…
The theme is “Everything, Every Cher All at Once,” (a.k.a “Night of 1,000 Chers”). Morphine and Xunami dazzle in detailed recreations of classic Cher looks.
Meanwhile, Mhi’ya’s costume is so far from the one it’s meant to mimic, it’s closer to a completely different Cher outfit! Worse, the look she was copying to begin with was just black capris and a jacket! When Geneva turns the corner next in an unflattering interpretation of a ringmaster costume Cher once wore to the circus, I’m convinced the bottom two are locked in.
(As we already know) I was wrong about that, but who could predict that during her critique, Mhi’ya would unveil a Cher impression the exact right type of terrible to send RuPaul into a screaming fit like we haven’t seen since the coffee enema episode? Ru thought Mhi’ya’s Cher-by-way-of-Kermit was so funny, I legitimately think she might be able to win Snatch Game with it if she survives that long! Ru also tells her that the moment will be “a meme that lives forever” (which is how you know it won’t be)…
AND WHO COULD PREDICT that Mirage would commit what’s turned out to be a cardinal Drag Race sin: wearing a specific hairstyle that RuPaul considers to be from the 60’s with an outfit from the 70’s… As many pointed out online, it’s the same hairstyle Aja got in trouble for wearing in the same context on All Stars 3. It ended up being her elimination episode, too…
With Mhi’ya saved by her impersa-no-tion and her attempt at “breakout character creation” in the Maxi Challenge, Mirage’s 40-inch hair weighs her down to the bottom two to lip sync for her life against Geneva. The performance is surreal. Even though Geneva doesn’t move around the stage much, even though she deploys the same jump-split we already saw in her other two lip syncs, she knew the lyrics – And this time, that was enough.
Mirage’s departure is painful. She sobs and shakes onstage, then leaves without uttering an exit line. The outro music begins to play as the other queens strut & dance & twirl “Slay the vote!” signs through tears. Season 16, episode 4 is a strange, dark-sided entry in the Drag Race catalog, but an unexpected ending made even more shocking by clever editing will ensure its place in the pantheon of herstory – also Mirage’s place on All Stars 10…
