RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 11 Ep 10: Dragacadabra
Reading Time: 3 minutes 
No Sugar for Shuga
Dragacadabra! Dragalakazam! It’s another episode specifically designed for a specific Queen to win. A worrying trend this season.
That said, it’s a refreshing new kind of challenge for Drag Race. Let’s find out.
After Plastique’s departure, it’s clear the wheat is now cut from the chaff, and seven queens remain. Let’s take a looksy at what niche they fit and where they are.
Silky Nutmeg Ganache:
The Big Queen, 2 Wins, 0 Bottoms
Brooke Lynn Hytes: The Canadian Ballerina Queen: 2 Wins, 1 Bottom
A’keria Chanel Davenport: The Pageant Queen, 2 Wins, 2 Bottoms
Nina West: The Camp Queen, 1 Win, 0 Bottoms
Yvie Oddly: The Weird Queen, 1 Win, 1 Bottom
Vanessa Vanjie Mateo: The Upstart Queen, 0 Wins, 1 Bottom
Shuga Cain: The Old Queen, 0 Wins, 2 Bottoms
Seems Silky’s currently leading, and Shuga has nowhere to fit into the competition.
Bring it to the Balls
So, it would’ve made a lot more sense to bring shady goddess Delta Work onto the Reading Challenge and Morgan McMichaels to feature where there are balls to fling about, yet that’s not the universe we live in. So, Delta turns up for no reason and the Queens place balls with the PIt Crew in barrels. Cute. Shawn is back. Very nice.
Vanessa Vanjie Mateo scores the mini-challenge win, first of the season.
Vanessa gets to put the two teams together for today’s challenge, and she picks her friends and also Yvie. Though Nina seems the obvious choice, as she didn’t want Brooke for possible distractions.
Team Da Black Magic: Vanessa, A’keria, Silky, Yvie
Team The Mighty Tucks: Nina, Shuga, Brooke
The Teams must make a magic show with help from a man in a pineapple shirt because yes, it is 1994.
Team Da Black Magic have an issue with scripting (Vanessa and Yvie) vs improv (Silky and A’keria). Team Mighty Tucks just do what Nina says.
Ongina, move your ass. I can’t there’s Magique
The routines are okay, quick and fun and a little predictable. Some old school jokes from Nina West with the infinite bottles of booze, a reverse Shangela box joke, Nina’s shoulders. What really sells it is how tidily done it is even if it’s not exactly hilarious or revolutionary. But, it’s very clean and well executed.
Things get interesting with Da Black Magic as a trainwreck of a magic show occurs. Yvie has an absolutely awful abracada-bra joke. Vanjie is particularly horrendous. Silky manages to sell something (though with suspicious padding), and A’keria is okay-ish relatively speaking. But, it’s horrendous overall.
Honey’s Revenge (Mahogany, not Davenport)
Time for caftan-tan-tan with you on the runway. No one really sells it tonight. Nina is in cheap fabric, Shuga has some horrendous reveals, A’keria’s not in a caftan. The other four are all right, but nothing blows up our billows today. But that’s okay once in a while. Not much you can do with a caftan without getting expensive. Honey did it better.
Nina deservingly takes the win this episode, but in one of the most questionable decisions of all time, Shuga Cain who by no means performed the worst falls into the bottom alongside Vanessa Vanjie Mateo (correct). Though every member of Da Black Magic performed far worse, especially Yvie Oddly. This was a real wizard-behind-the-curtain moment for Drag Race that left a sour taste in our mouths..
What’s the point if you’re going to eliminate people for doing fine while others do worse? It’s quite frankly bullshit.
Shuga Cain goes home to Vanessa to a lip sync to No More Drama by Mary J. Blige. Vanjie wins out and Shuga goes home for no reason.
Frankly, this is just bad storytelling. Shuga didn’t go home for any reason but because the predetermined storylines of the other Queens mattered more, understandably there is an aspect of meddling in reality tv but this is just too far. The hand is too firm on the dials. The producers need to chill.
2/10
This article was written by our fabulous contributing editor, James Pearbutter.
All images courtesy of VH1.