RuPaul's All Star Drag Race season 3 episode 3 review/RuView: The dairy separates as Milk curdles and Ben De La proves she’s the Creme of the crop

How do you solve a problem like parodying femininity? Well, if this week’s episode of 'The Bitchelor' — the clunkily named maxi-challenge which took aim at that deeply cringeworthy show The Bachelor — is anything to go by, perhaps RuPaul doesn’t have the answer.

While it sounds like the opposite of a drag — an improv comedy which sees each Queen absorbing into an American Girl reality TV parody to try and snag the smug hunk over various dates including lotion-filled massages, snorkelling in the hot-tub, and Ben De La Creme mashing a banana between her four-inch her fingernails — it was more oh no she better don’t, with many of the Queens performing their different type of ‘woman’ with little care and lots of stereotype.

There was Milk as ‘the stalker’ who just quivered and talked over everyone, there was Aja as ‘the needy one’ who just wept into a stuffed dog, there was the disempowered ChiChi as the lesbian on the back-foot in a polyamorous relationship with the Bette Porter-esque Shangela. It was a challenge which tottered between the extremes of misogynist media portrayals of women and riotously funny quick witted parodies of characters so far out you could feel the Charisma, Uniqueness, Nerve… etc.

And while none of this is ever discussed on the show — many of the queens still bandying about terms like “fish” — those who rose to the top were, thankfully, the most characterful, unrealistic of the portrayals. Kennedy in her jealousy of my booty buck-tooth big-assed role as the party girl who kept excavating shot glasses and litres of vodka from her padding, eventually tearing off her wig — usually a no no on Drag Race — while raucously yelping “I’m a man” landed on the top spot; as did Ben De La, the season’s current Creme of the crop, in her hard boobed, tuck-flashing version of ‘the Cougar’ — winning everyone over with her “have you ever removed a catheter?” pick-up lines.

On the runway, it was all about the wigs, on wigs, on wigs. Kennedy revealed what appeared to be… a… a… mullet (?!) beneath a gigantic afro, and Trixie went from Lady Bunny beehive to a teeny tiny bowl cut — perhaps the funniest wig reveal in Drag Race herstory.

While the anxious tension which pierced the first few episodes more deafeningly than Gia Gunn’s slurry moans seems to have lifted after the exit of the still Bobsessed Thorgy Thor, ChiChi Devayne and Milk suffered this week, for different reasons: the former lacking hugely in confidence, questioning her level of drag in comparison to this roster of seasoned Queens — something which goes back to her working class roots, a facet of drag we rarely talk about — the latter fading fast into delusion believing her efforts are superior to the rest.

And the weirdness continued into the lip-synch — to Lorde’s 'Green Light' — where nothing really happened bar Kennedy fluffing a wig while Ben De La showed off her off-colour tights while frantically pulling hair strands out of her lip-gloss. In the end, Kennedy snatched the 10k after shedding a single tear at the close of the song. An earlier set-to at the beginning of the episode — in which Milk had savagely said she would send Kennedy home, because her drag is apparently not groundbreaking — sent Milk, who had curdled way back in episode one anyway, packing to the frustration of… nobody, really, except Milk.

Indeed drag is about performing certain traits of femininity, but it can get super-uncomfortable when no questions are asked, when the butt of the joke is the woman and not stupid societal portrayals of femininity. When the jokes landed this week they were literally a laugh a minute, but when they flopped we didn’t even need the infamous cricket sound to amp up the awkward.

As the season goes full-throttle, it’s still unclear who is the rising star and who will become untucked. While Ben De La’s Creme rose to the top yet again, there’s no-one quite yet who makes you want to screech the way, say, an Alyssa, a Katya, or a Pork Chop did.