Even if do enjoy the self-help angle, I do agree with all of this. The concept of this episode was iffy and the way they decided to edit the whole thing didn't help.
I don't really mind the self-help thing itself - maybe it helps someone, or is entertaining - but it's odd to ask a group of people who demonstrably, as a group, are known to carry with them significant emotional baggage, and let them figure out a way to make that tv-friendly.
I think my fundamental problem is the asking for something real, when the actual real is not what is asked for, but rather a playful, highly sanitized version of real, that is only allowed to dip a toe into real mess.
The show's identity/mechanics doesn't truly allow for this is any genuine way, so it's odd to ask for it. I have to assume that it is mostly a result of Ru Pauls approach to life, which isn't as resonant and universal as he might think. There's a fundamental "surface-level" think to every (televised) "heart-to-heart" between Ru and a contestant that is so odd for me to see.
He's obviously capable of actual realness, but it's dolled out very sparingly.
I guess it just feels glib to talk about your inner saboteur, in the way that this episode did, when this season has already directly dealt organically with both race, economic disparity and sexual assault.
Maybe it was primarily the editing that really pushed me over the edge of being annoyed. These are inherently interesting people, and the task is open to be as dark as possible depending on your interpretation, and yet the whole thing is needlessly belabored by "split-screen" filming of the good/evil characters as if they couldn't just talk about the topic earnestly.
All I could think of was how they filmed this; what the time-line between the two looks were, and how they got the reaction shots to dialogue that ostensibly happened in real-time.
It was an odd episode, but most of its oddness was due to needless artifice through editing and shooting choices. I wish drag race was more comfortable with leaning into the organic moments, that often are rich and genuinely interesting, and it's just odd to see them flail around substance when you have a rich vein of substance if you just relax and let people talk with each other.
//This post is probably a bit belabored itself; I'm not really invested in the topic, and have no actual problem with the episode itself. It's clunky, and that's about it. As all things, it will pass. I just think that we, as queer people, and drag race as a product, would more readily lean into the sore spots of queer life. It doesn't take anything away from the positives; if anything, it magnifies it by contrast. Cheers/love.
