‘RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars’ Crowns Predictable Winner — And Honestly? Gagged
RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars 8 is finally over. We have a new queen in the Drag Race Hall of Fame and — SPOILER ALERT — we… well, we all saw it coming. After dominating the season with four challenge wins, the bejeweled scepter and increased booking fee goes to Canadian clown princess Jimbo. Wow, what a… perfectly logical end to one overly wacky season!
I’m not going to complain about All Stars 8 not giving us a last-minute upset from Kandy Muse — even though I do think Kandy won the finale, even if Jimbo won the season. Instead of calling the finale predictable, I want to praise the winner, the cast, and the entire season for being anything but predictable.
More than a few of those surprises ranged from bad to downright depressing. Heidi N Closet’s sudden departure and ensuing social media fallout with Kahanna Montrese? That wasn’t predictable, but it was also not cute. But for every moment that bummed us out, like Monica Beverly Hillz crying onstage or Alexis Michelle’s constant need to prove how horny she is, All Stars 8 gave us some legitimately bonkers surprises that make this season way more memorable than a lot of haters thought it would be.
For example, I will die happy if I never ever hear Alexis Michelle call herself “Miss Manpig” again, but she absolutely gets the Glow-Up of the Season award for all of those exquisite lewks she turned. I loved seeing an early-out queen like Kahanna create a legacy for herself independent of her drag mother. Jaymes Mansfield, who was eliminated first on Season 9 after a bizarre cheerleading challenge, got to show her comedy skills as Jennifer Coolidge on “Snatch Game.” Mrs. Kasha Davis turned it out in “RDR Live!” as Barb, a wiggling, macho queen in Palm Springs aerobics gear. Monica Beverly Hillz even managed to snag a viral moment in the season’s penultimate episode with her single “Not a Soul Can Clock.” All Stars 8 was giving social media the goods up until the very end! This season proved that how you perform on Drag Race has no correlation to your real world talent, and that comes as a surprise to a lot of viewers who only know of drag from Drag Race.
Where All Stars 8 really stood out, though, and where it’s legacy truly lies, is with its challenges. This season gave us so many moments that were crowned as Canon the instant they aired. All Stars 8 had a stretch in the middle of the season — Episodes 5-7, “Snatch Game of Love,” “JOAN: The Unauthorized Rusical!,” and “Forensic Queens” — that honestly rival the best three-episode stretch of the best seasons. Those three episodes gave us enough wow moments to fill any season of All Stars. Kandy turning out the notes and choreo with a giant wire hanger? LaLa Ri’s syncopated slaps to “Let’s Go Joan” and her freewheeling improv triumph? Jessica Wild serving deadpan comedy brilliance and turning taco Tuesday into a viral moment? Jimbo’s unhinged Shirley Temple?! What more did we want?
I’ve seen some claim that the season had a shortage of drama, even though RuPaul herself had to intervene and stop contestants from quitting, and the lip syncs were overall mid-level (but that’s more the fault of the format than the queens). Whatever we lost was more than made up for where it counts: the talent. And our winner, the predicted winner whose entrance line suggested she was going to cruise through the season, definitely kept us on our toes. That Net Gala look that looked like an evil spider queen in Hackers drag who got lost in the Matrix?
The Trixie Mattel-inspired eleganza, complete with facekini and haunting pearl smiley face? That masterclass Joan Rivers roast? Even when Jimbo was repeating gags, like doing Joan Rivers or becoming the Baloney Ghost or riffing on her Canada’s Drag Race entrance look, she still managed to completely grab and hold our attention. Yeah, we all knew that bologna would fall out of Jimbo’s pouch the instant we saw that sagging white vinyl jumpsuit, but who could have predicted that Jimbo would view the ol’ Baloney Ghost routine as the key to finally winning a lip sync? Who even knew that Jimbo would pack that damn thing?! Can you even wash the smell of old bologna out of a PVC bodysuit?
That’s our winner, though! Jimbo is a queen who’s competed on three seasons in three years in three countries, an unprecedented and unparalleled Drag Race career that resulted… in a crowning we all saw coming 12 episodes ago. So… ? Did we see this coming three years ago when she first walked into a Werk Room up north?
Absolutely not. There’s the surprise!
The way Jimbo won the crown was still uniquely Jimbo (thank you, Hall of Famer, for introducing all of us to butt boobs this season), and the rest of the queens pulled out all the stops all season long. Instead of capping off the RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars 8 with a mind-blowing twist, the season gave us tinier, weirder surprises in nearly every other episode. It turns out that the biggest gag of the season was all of the surprises we clocked along the way.
