Season 17 shakes up the format just a little once again, and we are vindicated after years of bitching and moaning that it needs to. The result was a super-entertaining episode. Imagine that.
Drag Race’s format has been so locked in for so long that even minor changes to it feel seismic. We suspect half of you reading this are wondering what we’re even talking about. But we think a photo shoot, video, interview, and choreographed number make for a particularly grueling semi-finals and we were happy to see them fool around with it a little, shaking some things up and bringing some things back that were desperately needed.
It was a brilliant idea to bring Latrice in to do the exit interviews. With Ru and Michelle conducting them (aka, the people most responsible for the interviewee’s fate), they had become meaningless pageant interviews full of platitudes but completely lacking in anything illuminating or interesting.
Latrice has two great qualities for an interviewer: she’s mildly confrontational (when she smells bullshit or fear) and she’s extremely warm and able to sling platitudes with the best of them. She actually pulled something out of some of the queens that Ru and Michelle never would have been able to.
Drag Race as a franchise has such a massive roster of talent at its disposal and we’d like to see them used a little bit more aggressively. Instead of having Raven come in and give pep talks, have her come in and do a makeup session with the girls. Have Trixie coach them on a roast. Have Bob the Drag Queen direct them through a sketch challenge. Have Alyssa train them on choreo. Having said that, we were thrilled to see Ru come in to direct the queens for their photo shoots, giving them actual workable advice, while being shot by a world-class photographer. It was just nice to see them spend the time and money on a challenge.
More good news: they gave the queens a fairly decent song this time around. Whenever they have to lip sync some latter day Ru track, we tend to feel sorry for them, but this one was cute and fun.
Merch sales after this performance ⬆️ #DragRace pic.twitter.com/dYjCJYkFpN
— RuPaul’s Drag Race (@RuPaulsDragRace) April 5, 2025
Kind of strange that we saw not one second of rehearsal footage for this number. We feel like we really can’t complain about that because the choreo rehearsal segments had gone stale years back. If there’s nothing new to be found in those moments, we fully support the show cutting them in favor of whatever does work.
It looked like a pretty fun number, but the editing was so aggressive that, coupled with the lack of rehearsals, it makes us wonder if they had to edit the hell out of it to make it look good. Back when Drag Race was more of an actual competition, the show used to allow itself to present a bad number, but in recent years, you rarely see the queens fail spectacularly and come in for one of Mama Ru’s diatribes.
The clear winner of the week, who had everything the challenge called for: charm, self-reflection, an ability to take direction and pose well.
And she understood the assignment in terms of the aesthetic. Not everyone did.
We’re starting to think Lexi might be the actual frontrunner; not because she’s the best at what she does, but because she’s so charming when she does it. Between her harrowing backstory, her vulnerability, and her genuinely hilarious way of responding to everything, it’s clear that the judges have fallen in love.
Her video was meh and it took a lot to get a good picture out of her, but when she’s able to calm down that inner saboteur, she really shines.
It’s interesting to us how Onya did a great job on all fronts this week, but she might have been tripped up by some questionable costume choices. She takes a great picture.
And her video was legitimately funny, but this doesn’t really feel like the right kind of look for Las Vegas drag and we kind of agreed with Tracie that her Atlanta Real Housewife look for the interview was distracting. Still, she was smooth and profesh, as she always is. She might even have won it if Jewels hadn’t been so perfectly suited for the challenge.
You have to admit, she’s one aptly named queen. She’s got mega-wattage star power.
So much so, that it almost made up for her rather awkward video. It seems strange that she wound up in the bottom, but we’re in the endgame, which means minor deficiencies are all it takes.
This, however, was not a minor issue. It was the culmination of one. We thought the writing was on the wall the second she showed up in this look, completely dismissing any concerns that it doesn’t evoke Vegas at all. She’s so sold on her particular aesthetic, and she’s been so obsessed with making the judges understand it, instead of listening to them and correcting course, that we honestly don’t feel all that bad about how it shook out for her.
When Ru asked her if being in a Vegas show was a dream of hers and she immediately (and cluelessly) responded with a “No,” well. Girl, if you refuse to play the game, you can’t cry when the players move on without you. Drag Race has been around a long enough time that every single queen cast on the show knows exactly how to play it. She simply kept refusing to play it, while at the same time, expressing a relentless desire to win it. It just doesn’t work that way. It may not be a legitimate competition in most ways, but there are people who tell you directly to your face every week what you need to do to keep going and she rarely ever took their critiques to heart.
Category Is: Opulent Outerwear! Which lewk is giving money, honey? ✨ #DragRace pic.twitter.com/XeFip0EkIk
— RuPaul’s Drag Race (@RuPaulsDragRace) April 5, 2025
The drag was as high end as we’d expect it to be at this point in the competition, with one notable exception.
Loved Jewels’ whole elevated showgirl look. Her wig is gorgeous. While we think Lexi serves body a little too often on the runway, we can’t deny that the results are usually pretty spectacular. The coat makes the look. Onya’s is definitely unmissable and unforgettable, but we think it’s too much of a muchness, although we LOVE the earrings.
Sam’s look is yet another stunner in a long line of stunners. It was kind of nice to hear the judges finally make the one critique we have of Sam’s drag: it’s aging. Granted, the art of drag has a long history of turning 20-year-old boys into 40-year-old divas, but we’d like to see her go for a more contemporary form of drag glamour. AND SPEAKING OF WHICH… Suzie was just a victim of her own ego and poor instincts. There’s nothing wrong with being a flapper drag queen, but if you consistently show an inability to get away from that limiting aesthetic, the judges just aren’t gonna love it. The other problem with Suzie’s drag is that it just isn’t up to the level of some of the other queens and this picture is a great illustration of that. The coat is gorgeous. The shoes are terrible, the head piece looks cheap, and the makeup and wig are bad.
There could be no other. She completely aced it this week. We had to laugh when Ru said that she had won the opportunity to “join the cast f RuPaul’s Drag Race Live on stage.” Could that be any more vague? Is she getting a gig? Is she doing a number? Or are they just going to bring her out to wave at the crowd once?
All things considered, it was a pretty fun lip sync as a 1920s queen and a 1990s queen worked a 1960s song to the delight of the original singer’s daughter, who was practically brought to tears by it. Incidentally, Tracie Ellis Ross was a spectacular judge, but that’s not all that surprising. Anyway, we figure this could have gone either way, but we weren’t surprised that the judges picked the queen who embodies the kind of drag they like to see.
There seems to be an awful lot of anger among the fandom about this elimination, and we hate to be put in the position of defending the rather limited view of drag this show tends to reward, but the very first rule of Drag Race, if you’re there to actually win the crown and not just to increase your booking fee, is to give the judges what they want to see. While she probably couldn’t have completely erased her flapper aesthetic in order to please them, we were less frustrated with her aesthetic than we were with her details. The makeup was always awful, never had much to do with actual makeup styles of the 1920s, and she just kept returning to it, over and over again, long after it was clear that the judges weren’t feeling it. No matter what kind of drag you want to do on Drag Race, they have always consistently rewarded the most glamorous girls or the ones who course-corrected, and if you refuse to compromise on your drag, the outcome is on you. One final warning to any theater queens who are thinking of trying out for Drag Race: “BROADWAY DOESN’T GO FOR BOOZE AND DOPE AND RUPAUL DOESN’T GO FOR BROADWAY QUEEN DRAG.” She’s into club kids, clowns and glamour queens because that’s the drag she always did. Please make a note of it, bitches.
Legendary Children: The First Decade of RuPaul’s Drag Race and the Last Century of Queer Life, a New York Times “New and Notable” pick, praised by The Washington Post “because the world needs authenticity in its stories,” and chosen as one of the Best Books of The Year by NPR is on sale wherever fine books are sold! It’s also available in Italian and Spanish language editions, darlings! Because we’re fabulous on an INTERNATIONAL level.
[Photo Credit: MTV via Tom and Lorenzo]
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