RuPaul’s Drag Race Season-Finale Recap: Winning Time

RuPaul’s Drag Race
Grand Finale
Season 18 Episode 16
Editor’s Rating ★★★
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And so RuPaul’s Drag Race season 18 ends. How will we remember this season? It seems likely that most people I know will remember Jane going home, Juicy’s lip-syncs, and Darlene Mitchell’s rise. None of those people are in the top two, ultimately. Is the fact that the top-two queens of the season are not among the marquee contestants a fault of the season? Potentially. On the other hand, it’s been nice to see a season that was legitimately unpredictable.

One of the best things about the top three is that none of them ever felt like completely assured contenders. If you’d told me after, say, week four that this was the top three, I would have looked at you like you were crazy and moved right along with my life. (For the record, I predicted that Nini would be in the top four that week but called her the weakest of the group, with Jane, Juicy, and Vita all ahead of her. Nobody ever hired me for my omnipotence.) 

The surprising success of all three girls results in the most confusing finale in a long time. Heading into the point where Ru was narrowing the three down to two girls, I honestly had no idea what was going to happen. Then, when the winner was about to be crowned, I was also questioning the result. That’s fun on some level, but I can’t claim the confusion was due to universal excellence. All three girls had very different strengths, and that’s good. But none felt like breakouts, which meant the crowning was always going to be odd. 

The episode begins with all the girls returning to stomp the runway. They look pretty universally great in their final looks. I’m partial to Darlene’s ridiculous campfest and Discord’s stunning safety-pin look. All the early out girls managed glow-ups, too. This is definitely the best Mia, in particular, has ever looked on the show. I was not obsessed with Vita’s cape thing, but the rest of the dress was stunning. Myki’s dress is good — very Myki. It looked like her promo look. I liked Nini’s head, and I liked the bottom of Nini’s dress. In the middle, things got wonky. 

The first girl up in the finale is Darlene. Darlene bills herself as a girl who found herself over the course of the show, particularly in the roast, and as a lovely loose cannon. Her number (they all wrote signature songs with Leland) is very cute. She knows exactly who she is. The trashy-fabulous look has never been better. She is, however, in an unfortunate situation: She cannot dance a lick. The choreo is just very dumbed down for her. Plus her best quality is her off-the-cuff charm, and the rigidity of a choreographed lip-sync number could never highlight that. On one level, I thought this was a bit of an unfair final challenge for her, since she’s so unsuited to it. Then I remembered that they never had a ball and the final challenge was an interview hosting challenge and I said: “Well, sometimes they gotta test if you can slay.” Overall, the number is really cute, but it just wasn’t Darlene’s chance to shine. In her interview with Ru, however, she is very charming, and I loved getting to meet the fiancé (now husband!) and see more photos of Trash. 

Next up is Myki. Over the course of a ten-minute span, she says that she entered the competition as an ingénue and is leaving a leading lady approximately 300 times. It became a bit, shall we say, tiring. Still, I buy what she’s selling, mostly. We really did see Myki grow in the competition. She got four wins, and I think she literally could have won seven of the last eight challenges (you could reasonably add Snatch Game, Rusical, and the Roast to her résumé). Her number is a big, musical-theater-style one infused with a lot of sluttiness. It’s hard! The choreography is tough, it’s vocally demanding, and she faces it all with aplomb. Overall, her biggest strength is that she is simply the only girl left in the competition who can sing. She sounds great. In the final interview, she is charming and sweet but sometimes has the problem of seeming a bit overly rehearsed. You can tell which lines she wrote beforehand. 

Finally, it’s Nini Coco. She has the biggest uphill battle and knows it. On the other hand, she is the best-suited to the challenge. She finally leans hard into the “scientific brain” thing that Ru loves and comes out looking like a queen with, for the first time, a point of view. Her performance destroys the other girls’. It’s not even close. She does an office-set number called “Stimulate,” and it is, pardon my French, so fucking sick. First of all, something that becomes very clear is that when you’re collaborating with the guy who co-writes Troye Sivan’s songs, asking him for a pop banger will get you the best results. “Stimulate” is legit good. Nini hits the sharp choreo like an expert. It’s such a clear vision. One note: not obsessed with her bodysuit. Either way, it’s the strongest number of the night by a healthy margin, and it reflects her heavily polished performance abilities. In the interview, I found Nini completely charming. Her mom was lovely, and her boyfriend is adorable. Also, I recently attended Titaníque and my boyfriend thought Nini Coco was in the audience, but it was actually a different 29-year-old twunk with that exact haircut. No critique there, just a fun fact.

The show then devotes time to celebrating Miley Cyrus. No complaints here, she’s been a longtime lover of the show and incredibly supportive of the drag community. Good for her, she’s always a pleasure to have around. 

Miss Congeniality is Jane Don’t. Congratulations to Jane. I had forgotten that Crystal Envy won last year. I had also forgotten who Crystal Envy was. Not the most natural onstage speaker, is she? 

Finally, the top three are narrowed down to two. I was not sure how this was going to pan out. By my count: Darlene is the most popular, Myki did the best in the competition, and Nini won the episode. They end up cutting Darlene, which is a bit of a disappointment. She’s the most original girl of the season, and it would have been very fun to see her in the top two. Still, it was hard to justify keeping her in over the other two given how much higher both of their difficulty settings were in this episode. 

The lip-sync comes down to Nini and Myki. That is really not who I was expecting at literally any point in this competition. They lip-sync to Miley Cyrus’s song “Every Girl You’ve Ever Loved,” featuring Naomi Campbell. I had not heard this song before, but it’s a solid lip-sync song. The case for Nini is that she gives the more polished performance. It’s sharp, dance heavy, and strong. The reveal that her handbag is a puppet is very cute, especially since Myki did shockingly little with the spoken-word section. Girl, that’s ready to be camped up. The case for Myki is that she connects to the song better. Miley’s vocals are gritty, hard-earned, and rock-tinged. Myki just has more grit than Nini, and she’s able to give the song more edge. It didn’t feel like Nini was giving a performance that was specific to the song; she was giving a Nini performance to whatever song the show chose. Myki, the actress, channeled it. On the other hand, her hair got in her face, and she held on to the hat too much in the first verse. On the other other hand, Myki’s pirouette was the best-calibrated stunt to the song. What I’m saying is that they both had arguments for the win.

With that in mind, it makes sense that Myki ultimately won the show. She did so much better in the back half of the competition than Nini, then kept up with her in the final number. While it certainly would have been exciting to see a come-from-behind Nini win, it also wouldn’t have been “right,” necessarily. I really like Myki. I’m not sure that she makes a ton of sense to me as a winner of this show. She probably has the lowest “charisma” metric of any winner, but she outpaces a lot of the others in terms of “talent.” So … congratulations, Myki! I really am happy for her. She really did destroy the back half of the competition.