Review: Canada's Drag Race, S2 E9 The Reunion

Each week Toronto based comedian Chris Middleton will review the latest episode of Canada’s Drag Race. Season two premiered October 14 on Crave.

Okay, I have a lot of feelings about this episode, and I’m going to break it into parts. In short, it included my least favourite things that Drag Race loves doing; basically trying to recreate the magic of the season nine final two episodes.

Listen, I’m a toxic little gremlin, so I love a reunion a la Drag Race season nine where all the queens just call each other out on their bullshit. But I understand the fan base at large sucks at distinguishing between real life and TV, so they’ve ruined it for everyone. 

I will say, an in-season reunion is a weird kind of hell to watch, because these queens haven’t seen themselves within the context of the show. They don’t know how they’re going to be edited, they haven’t developed their relationships enough to really dig into each other. It left the reunion a little boring, because it’s a bunch of people who just met just being nice. 

Do you think these queens would’ve been this pleasant if they had a chance to watch the confessionals that were aired? I doubt it. I love that these girls feel like sisters, don’t get me wrong. But do I need a whole episode where they all play nice and force only Stephanie Price to read people? Absolutely not.

The reunion was one thing, but the worst thing to have happened this episode was a lip sync battle for the top three. Ugh.

The lip sync for the crown success in Drag Race season nine is a lot like Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight; amazing when it first came out, but ultimately ruined the culture. CC: Zack Snyder’s bleak ass DCEU.

Forcing queens to do lip syncs, especially when they’re not “lip sync queens,” is one of the worst conceits this show forces down our throats. I think all these queens performed well, but it’s hard to enjoy the show when it already feels like the show has chosen the winners.

Like, I’m sorry, you’re going to come on to my TV and force me to believe Miss Gia Metric didn’t trounce these lip syncs? Not even the editing could hide the fact that she had better moves than Kendall and Pythia.

But the problem with these lip syncs is that production has already chosen who’s going home. The lip syncs are just a shiny distraction so these queens can “earn their spot.” It’s not giving what you think it’s giving, and it’s honestly embarrassing the show still thinks it’s giving anything at all.

This absolutely doesn’t discount Gia’s phenomenal run on the show, but out of the queens that were left, she was not going to the top 3 — which sucks. I think she did so well, and was even snubbed of a few wins, but production just didn’t want her there. If the producers wanted to start drama on this episode, they should’ve had Kendall lip sync Gia — her best friend — for the final spot in the top three. That would’ve been stellar television.

Season nine’s final two episodes worked so well because of the queens that were on that season. Trying to force that over and over has made the final episodes of the show boring and predictable, and it sucks that Canada's Drag Race felt they needed to adopt these tired tropes. 

We do not need these queens bopping around to songs by someone who couldn’t even bother to judge the closest country’s Drag Race to pad out this season, especially when we already know the outcome of the episode. This is probably penance for Brooke Lynn Hytes inserting her song for the “RuMix” the queens have to do in the finale.