Loofa in charge.
Photo: YouTube
Mistress Isabelle Brooks knows how to be on television. The queen, who is currently competing on RuPaul’s Drag Race All-Stars, is near-singlehandedly turning the All-Stars franchise from a sleepy series to a must-watch by playing the game strategically, and having fun doing it. In this week’s episode “Rappin Roast,” the last week’s bottom four queens (Mistress, Jorgeous, Nicole Paige Brooks, and Kerri Colby) are tasked with distributing points among themselves. Mistress convinces Nicole and Kerri that they’ll all trade points, so each queen will earn at least one. But instead, Nicole gives her point to Mistress and Kerri gives hers to Jorgeous, who swaps with Mistress. That leaves her and Jorgeous two points apiece, while Nicole and Kerri have none. It’s a dastardly move, but oh, so fun.
This tournament-style season of All-Stars has gone through its first bracket of queens. Each week, two winners receive two points each with an extra point given out to the winner of the lip sync. At the end of three weeks, the top three queens move on to the next heat. But nobody in the first group – Bosco, Olivia Luxx, Irene the Alien, Aja, Deja Sky, and Phoenix – had the tenacity to do what Mistress Isabelle Brooks did.
The audacious gameplay brings out the best in the other queens, too. The Queen of Shade, Nicole Paige Brooks, is so gagged that she spends the rest of the episode shooting daggers at Mistress with her eyes and throwing shade any chance she gets, whether it’s in her notebook or in the challenge. Jorgeous, meanwhile, is delightful as Mistress’s enthusiastic sidekick. “That was a sickening idea!” she says with a smile in confessional, as she and Mistress fall on top of each other cackling. Even Kerri is at her all-time best, ealizing that she has to be conniving and strategizing to get Lydia to grant her a better slot in the roast lineup later in the episode. She gets shady in the confessionals, too (her quip that “Mistress knows she’s big, Jorgeous knows she’s tiny, lookin’ like someone’s child, Lydia knows that she’s awkward-skinny and brand new, Nicole knows that she’s old as fuck and is struggling to keep up, and Tina Burner knows that she is and forever always will be a complete man in a wig” is an all-timer). Conflict brings out character, and Mistress provides.
By contrast, the drama-less previous season, All-Stars 9, shirked eliminations entirely in favor of playing for charity. All-Stars 8 was a snoozefest because there was never a moment that it didn’t seem like Jimbo would win. Even the much-beloved All-Stars 7, which featured only past winners, was an elimination-less talent show lacking tension. In two episodes, Mistress has caused a more entertaining stir than any queen in the past three All-Stars. Then, she backed it all up when she and Jorgeous ultimately win the episode, and tie in the lip sync, putting them a full 1.5 points ahead of any other queens in their group. It’ll require a lot of work for the others to catch up and knock them out of the top three by the end of the bracket. Everybody’s mad at Mistress Isabelle Brooks, and she’s laughing her way through it all.
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