Unlike most popular latter-day reality shows, RuPaul’s Drag Race features no public vote, and instead the final decision about who stays and who goes, as she never tires of telling us, is RuPaul’s to make.
Admittedly, we’d never usually be ones to contest any choice made by drag royalty, but it has to be said there’ve been a few moments when we and other fans have been left asking, in the words of the great prophet Coco Montrese: “Really, Ru?”.
With the new series of the reality show underway, here is a selection of the most instances when we felt the wrong queen was told to “sashay away”, starting with one of the most shocking eliminations ever...
1. Alyssa Edwards (All Stars 2)
During the course of All Stars 2, Roxxxy Andrews was saved over Alyssa Edwards not once but twice, and while we have nothing against Roxxxy… she’s lucky she had her pals to bail her out during that season, let’s just say that.
Alyssa’s second elimination, which came when a tearful Detox won a Lip Sync For Her Legacy against Katya, was so shocking that even RuPaul visibly gasped at the desk, but fortunately the fan-favourite took it all in her stride, joking on her way out: “Now, I’m a lovely… fourth runner-up.”
One thing we can say is that had Alyssa made it through to the final, we wouldn’t have had Roxxy’s iconic Read U, Wrote U verse, proving every cloud really does have a silver lining.
2. Shannel (Season 1)
Throwing it back to the show’s heavily-filtered first season, this was the last lip sync before the final, with Rebecca Glasscock being saved over Shannel.
Honestly, watching it back more than a decade later, we can’t imagine either of these performances cutting the mustard against the more recent crop of queens, but we still think Shannel just inched it, even if Ru clearly wouldn’t agree with us.
3. Trixie Mattel (Season 7)
This was arguably the most divisive lip sync in Drag Race herstory. Neither Trixie nor Pearl have the acrobatic or dance abilities of a Shangela or a Laganja Estranja, so this performance relied solely on their very different styles of lip sync.
Pearl put up a good fight, but her version of Blondie’s Dreaming (which even Debbie Harry has said she still can’t make her mind up over) was pretty one-note, compared to Trixie’s more dynamic performance.
Although she was briefly brought back during season seven, Trixie didn’t really start to shine until long after her season, first on the web series UNHhhh and later as the winner of All Stars 3.
4. Thorgy Thor (All Stars 3)
Yeah, let’s talk about All Stars 3 for a minute, shall we? Quite a few of the placements in that season felt a little bit iffy, including during the VH1 Divas Live challenge, when Thorgy’s Stevie Nicks received probably more criticism than it deserved.
True, it wasn’t the most electrifying performance, but it was more true to Stevie than other queens on the night, who weren’t even put in the bottom two (we don’t mean to point fingers, but what exactly did Milk singing into her show have to do with Celine Dion, anyway?) and she did the best with what she was given.
Of course, the greatest injustice of All Stars 3 has to be...
5. Shangela (All Stars 3)
OK, let’s go there.
To shake things up in the final of All Stars 3, RuPaul brought back all of the eliminated queens to help whittle the last four contestants down to just two, through a voting system that allowed them all to allocate points to their chosen top duo.
What ended up happening, as we’re sure you recall, is that the returning queens voted for their friends and queens they felt would “most benefit” from the win, rather than those who’d performed the best during the competition.
In other words, Shangela got bumped off at the final hurdle, not even getting to perform in the last lip sync (despite apparently hiding a piñata under her dress for a final show-stopper).
The decision caused shockwaves among Drag Race fans, and the jury vote was noticeably absent when All Stars came back the following year.
6. Laila McQueen (Season 8)
RuPaul declared that neither Laila McQueen nor Dax Exclamationpoint had done justice to I Will Survive, and sent them both sashaying away near the beginning of season 8.
While we’ll admit that Laila’s performance didn’t quite measure up to Gloria Gaynor’s iconic gay classic, we do think Ru was a little harsh in sending her away, given that she did do a better job than her opponent, and had showed off some amazing moves a week earlier with her Applause routine.
7. Vivacious (Season 6)
This is no disrespect to April Carrión. She was probably the worthy winner of the lip sync, delivering the performance most loyal to Selena Gomez’s Shake It Up.
But therein lies the problem, the two queens are such different performers that April was always going to be at an advantage. Had the lip sync routine been to a track a bit closer to the middle of their abilities, we could easily imagine this having gone a different way.
8. Tatianna (All Stars 2)
So first off, Katya probably should have won this lip sync (Alaska did a good job but we’re not a fan of queens getting in their competitors’ spaces during a lip sync, let alone licking their opponents), but that’s not what we’re here to discuss.
What we are here to discuss is the fact that Tatianna – like the aforementioned Alyssa Edwards – was sent packing over Roxxxy Andrews, by a member of Rolaskatox on two separate occasions.
Admittedly, her Ariana Grande impression on Snatch Game probably made her a deserving candidate to be sent home, but she was also one of the funniest in the Drag Fish Tank challenge, so to see her go at this stage of the competition, when she’d made so much progress, was a real shame.
Flooding Alaska’s Twitter mentions with snake emojis was probably still a bit much though, people...
9. Cheryl Hole (Drag Race UK)
Towards the end of Drag Race UK, it was obvious the top three needed to be Baga Chipz, The Vivienne and Divina De Campo. Cheryl Hole, after all, hadn’t won a single challenge, unlike her fellow semi-finalists, who had all won multiple by the end of the series.
And while we’re not saying Baga shouldn’t have won the lip sync, we don’t actually think Cheryl should have been in the bottom two in first place, as her make-over look was probably more cohesive than both The Vivienne and Divina’s.
It’s a tricky one, because we wouldn’t have wanted any of the top three to miss out on their place, but we think it’s a shame that of all the challenges Cheryl was sent home on, it ended up being one she actually performed well in.
10. Phoenix (Season 3)
Yeah, remember Phoenix? Us neither, really. Another queen from the show’s early seasons, she was the second to leave after winding up in the bottom two with Delta Work.
We’re not suggesting that Phoenix was ever going to cut it against season 3’s strongest competitors such as Manila Luzon, Raja or even Shangela, but at the same time, Delta’s stiff and rather muted take on Bad Romance should probably have been enough to have her sashaying away in this instance.
11. Kennedy Davenport (Season 7)
The group lip syncs in the more recent season finales have always perplexed us a bit, as the busy stage means that contestants who’d usually slay a lip sync for their life with minimal effort wind up getting lost in a crowd.
This is what happened to Kennedy when she eventually found herself left out in the cold right before the season seven final. Seriously, how is any Drag Race fan expected to believe that Kennedy was out-lip synced, particularly by the series seven finalists?
Incidentally, this group performance is not on YouTube, so instead we’ve featured the video of Kennedy showing everything she’s capable of from the week prior, when she sent fan-favourite Katya packing.
RuPaul’s Drag Race is now streaming on Netflix, with new episodes every Saturday.