RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars season 3 finale RuView/review: Both on and off screen, we were let down this season

Usually, the end of a season of Drag Race brings with it a satine clutch-bag stuffed full of emotions: from sadness at our return to normal programming (reruns of old seasons) to vindication because the right queen won; from excitement that we get to watch a whole new winner unfurl and, if we’re lucky, get some genius runners up too (Jasmine Masters I’m looking at you) to longing for something to talk about that doesn’t involve reactive responses to breeches of our rights as LGBTQIA+ folk.

But, as All Stars 3 draws to a close, that tightly packed clutch of mixed-emotions has turned into a canvas tote full, instead, of complicated questions.

The small: what just happened in that finale? Shangela in the bottom two, really? Despite her problematic love of outdated, offensive terminologies and a heinous fat-suit used as the butt of the joke in last week’s lip-synch, she had very much fulfilled the criterion of a show which contradictorily demands growth, perfection and authenticity all at once. What about Trixie? Did she ever do anything All Star winner worthy, really? Wasn’t Kennedy’s final lip-synch endlessly better than Trixie’s static offering?

This win, then, begs the question: was it all a fix? Yes, she’s got a ferocious set of fans but did she ever really outshine the rest of the competition? At least Bebe didn’t win — while, indeed, iconic she somehow fluked her way into a top four by repeating the words “Savage Beauty” and addressing Ru as “Mother” — although her speech about being an immigrant in the States at a time as politically violent as this was incredibly powerful.

Then the biggest question of all: what does the future hold for a show like RuPaul’s Drag Race? After the media-frenzy that was last week, on the back of RuPaul’s transphobic and misogynist comments about drag being for cis men only, so many of us are left with a bitter taste in our mouths, wondering if a show which sits at the zenith of our community’s culture can actually catch up with a culture and community which, on the ground, has perhaps surpassed RuPaul’s glossy, capitalist interpretation of drag both in terms of politics and, some might argue, talent.

Both on and off screen we were let down this season: from maxi-challenges which seemed to take the show back in time in terms of where drag really is — the painfully misogynist Bitchelor and the cheap parodies of powerful women in My Best Squirrelfriend’s Dragsmaids Wedding Trip. Under the banner of RuPaul’s disregarding of trans and cis women from the competition, so much of the show became painful to watch — many of my friends and avid fans of the show announcing their disengagement from this once lifeline that they have been so wedded to until now.

If RuPaul has given us anything it’s more of a voice than before. What she perhaps didn’t expect is that many of us might be using that voice to plunder what drag is and who it is for, and whether RuPaul’s Drag Race can really represent what this community is about, some ten years since the show’s inception.

Drag is about changing the way people see, about changing the realities people accept as definite. Perhaps, then, this season of Drag Race has given us all the chance to see that there’s definitely more to drag than Drag Race and it’s finite list of provisos for being allowed a place in the “Drag (Race) World”.

While many of us are so desperate for upcoming seasons to reflect what drag culture really should be — inclusive of all iterations of drag whatever someone’s gender — now is the time to cast our net wider. So, if you’re feeling the post-show blues at the close of this season, it’s time to expand your world beyond the limited vision of RuPaul and her Drag Race: go to your local shows, uplift queens online, seek out more than just the, albeit amazing, queens pre-approved by Ru herself.

While we wait with bated breath for an updated version of RuPaul, and salute the queens who gave it their all in this recent season (because it’s still bloody brave to put on a wig and makeup and partake in something which challenges the status quo), perhaps in our evolution as a community it’s time to expand the limits, and see Drag Race not as the be all and end all but as a single, still very important, part of a culture that is so wonderful because of its limitlessness.