RuPaul All Stars season 3 Episode 6 RuView/review: Bye bye Ben De La Creme as she prioritises happiness over $100k

Fans worldwide in need of a Drag Race support group after this week’s utter shocker

There’s a moment in Buffy the Vampire Slayer where, after taking the darkest turn possible and becoming the “Big Bad” in a previous season, Willow channels the power of an ancient Pagan scythe and turns everyone who could be a slayer into a slayer, and finally, through said power channelling, Willow achieves her truth: becoming none other than a Goddess.

Well, remove the scythe and add a lipstick and some Tipp-Ex and replace potential slayers with potential Drag Race All Star 3 winners and that’s exactly what happened to Ben De La Creme in this, perhaps the most extreme, episode of All Stars to date: upon winning the week, she sacrificed herself to give another queen the chance to win, stood in her truth, and became a Goddess. Not a winner, not a competitor, but a Goddess.

Gasp!, truly, after Ben’s literal kebabing of the competition week on week, slaying every other queen on her sharp, witty, intelligent drag skewer, rendering each other queen a mere roasted pepper, a simple charred mushroom, a basic singed onion, while she barbecued them all to a cinder.

“The title means more to these queens than it does to me,” De La smiled as she picked up her trophy at the end of this monumental episode, heading home as “her kind of winner.” While part of it, surely, is about ensnaring fans — De La often chasing the congenial position over the dramatic — when faced with the idea of bringing a queen back and sending one of the top five packing the deep worry on her face set in and it felt like, by giving herself the chop, she had liberated herself and her evidently growing anxieties by using her winning power to take herself out of the equation.

The other queens, Ru, Michelle — the lot — were in a deep sense of shock, with fans left wondering who will bring the highest bar after the exit of the Ben De La Brilliant. While assuming the powerful position, it was also quite a radically critical position: a position which undercut the rules and the power of Mama Ru, as she raised her eyebrows in dismay.

But Ben’s exit delivered an important message for us viewers. In the world of Drag Race we can oft forget that there’s more to drag than the savage hoops and brutal critiques that a show like Ru bombards its queens with, week in week out. The show, while utterly brilliant, is built on a rabidly capitalist framework: win money, win prizes, send your beloved sisters home, and, ultimately, get famous.

Yes, this American Dream story makes for truly brilliant watching, but Ben De La’s Goddess move spoke truth to power in another way, a way that speaks to an entirely different tradition of drag. And that tradition is to make your own rules, make your own success. Already as drag queens we’ve stepped out of conventional ways of being — seen behind the curtain, perhaps, and found a way to make our own successes in a world that is often still hostile to people like Queens — so Ben’s shock choice to exit as she looked set to win her place in the Drag Race Hall of Fame is a truly RuPaul kind of move.

“If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?” are the words which come from Ru’s mouth at the end of every single episode of Drag Race, and this week that’s what Ben did: loved herself.

Beyond Ben’s shocking leave, a move which might inspire a whole new wave of thinking perhaps entitled ‘The Queer Art of Success’ (copyright me), the rest of the episode had us biting off our stick on nails. The Tea was spilled left, right, centre, north, east, south, west after the five previously eliminated Queens re-entered the competition, upon which they took their time to confront every queen for sending them home. Thorgy misunderstood Shangela, Morgan made Kennedy cry, and Milk sobbed as she was called out for being disingenuous. It was all pretty direct — these wonderful queens proving yet again that the antidote to bitterness, defeat and fracture might, in fact, be honesty, apology and moving on. In the end, they all forgave and forgot — a redemption story x10 that only a show featuring drag queens can pull off in an hour and two minutes.

The eliminated queens and the remaining queens each formed a girl band — The Kitty Girls — and performances were at peak level of talent for this season, although there’s still no-one quite shining through as a clear, all-round talent. Morgan, in the end, was granted a second chance by Ben allowing everything to come full circle, and Ben to put her pains to bed.

It’s currently anyone’s race, especially now Ben De La has pulled her car into the pit stop for good. Gone, but the opposite of forgotten, Ben De La’s exit reminds us that drag is more than money and fame, drag is about being true to yourself. And while a winner is yet to emerge, it’s sure that, for a lot of us, Ben De La Goddess is the winner of our hearts.

RuPaul’s Drag Race: All Stars season 3 airs in the UK on Comedy Central on Saturday nights at 10pm.