HOW? How are we still seeing the exact same story play out, the exact same mistakes being made, nearly two decades into this bitch? Hello, and welcome back to another edition of What The Fuck Is Up With These Drag Queens.
Look, we’ve spent a little bit of time (seventeen years) writing a few words (three million) about the art of drag, but we have never tried to claim we know how to do this gig better than the queens who are actually doing it. We’re just the observers and critics over here, but it seems to us, if any queen has a goal to land her padded ass on Drag Race, literally one of the very first things she should nail down and work on is her Snatch Game entry.
And look, improv isn’t easy even for talented actors and there’s no shortcut to rehearsing it. It takes a long time to foster those skills. But Ru and the judges have made it so easy for these bitches over the years; reiterating again and again that you don’t need to have a perfect impersonation or a binder full of jokes. You need to have your character down cold. You need to know everything they’d say in any given situation. That’s the kind of work you can hash out for weeks ahead of time. You really can’t wing something like that.
The sort-of good news is that most of the queens acquitted themselves well enough, to the point where there were several possible front-runners for the win, which is not always the case with the Snatch Game challenge.
Ru pushed Athena to do something Greek, which was a bit of advice that seemed designed to send her spiraling. The Charlie Chaplin idea she came with didn’t seem terrible on the face of it, but Ru shot it down hard. Athena’s too polished to spiral and asking her to do something Greek is putting the difficulty setting low for her, so she managed, but it was meh. Frankly, we thought Jane’s Lainie Kazan line was a bit of a burn, because at the very least, Athena could have tried to come up with a less generic character.
Hilarious and really well observed. Our one complaint, which we admit is an odd one for Drag Race, is that the makeup is too heavy. It just looks off to us.
Nothing. No ideas at all. Not a single line or bit or any evidence at all that she had a character in mind. Even the look was generic. Ru was absolutely right to shoot her Big Ang idea down. Talk about tired. After the challenge, she seems a little blasé about how badly she did and we got the impression she figured she would save herself in the lip sync.
We weren’t seeing it, but she landed some good jokes and clearly had it all worked out in her head before she stepped out on that set.
Enh. It was just okay. There’s potentially a lot of hilarity to playing Mrs. Claus like a New York Jewish woman but she never really figured the character out.
Just about the best possible example of a queen getting the look down but doing no other work for the challenge. In terms of physical impersonation (which is honestly not much of a criterion for this challenge anymore, if it ever was) this might be one of the best to ever appear on the show, but if you can’t land a single line, the resemblance isn’t going to see you through.
Another one who nailed it because she figured out who the character was ahead of time and never deviated from it.
This was very strange to us because JoJo Siwa is so easy to get right and if you showed us this look without telling us who it was supposed to be, we’re not sure we’d get it instantly. We give her credit for being committed to the bit. It never went anywhere, but she didn’t fall flat on her face.
The prosthetic work was a little freaky and no part of this costume accurately reflected what the pope tends to look like in this century, but she was surprisingly funny and committed to the character. She was pissed that she was safe and we don’t blame her.
Zane Phillips once told us he’d been reading us since he was a kid and we instantly aged like Matt Damon at the end of Saving Private Ryan when we heard it. Anyway, these guys were hot and game, but there was no real direction for them and like we said, improv is hard even for trained actors. Having said that, we actually didn’t mind this twist on the format. The Snatch Game of Love never really set us on fire, but this felt like an of-the-moment update. They should try a Love Is Blind version some time.
The category was Ru’s favorite kind, full of references from his youth. Still, we don’t think it’s out of line to ask a drag queen to put together an ’80s lady look and Athena’s was easily the best of this lot.
This was cute and well done, if a little expected.
Well executed and it felt like a personal appeal for Michelle to save her ass.
The judges went nuts for this, which surprised us a little because we thought it missed the point of Cyndi’s classic look, which is that it was very downtown and un-pretty.
Well done, but very expected and not really much of a challenge for her.
We can’t do better than Michelle’s critique which is that she took a classic diva look and made it more basic. This is kind of Kenya’s whole deal. There’s a lot of bluster and bombast, but at the end of the day, the drag is just not on a high enough level.
This was really cute and unexpected. We kind of agreed with Michelle on the shoes. Drag that shit up.
This was a pure stunner. She’s lucky that two bitches did worse than her in the challenge, but this might have saved her from the bottom anyway.
We would have never predicted that Discord would go for a Reba look but she nailed it.
Condragulations to Nini but we thought the win should’ve gone to Jane, who seems to be stuck in the “She’s always good so we don’t have to give it to her” category with the judges.
We think it’s very clear that these two are very good stage performers and it would stand to reason that any lip sync would be an epic one, but instead, they got handed an absolutely terrible song for a lip sync. We realize that ’80s ladies was the theme, but “Head Over Heels” does not lend itself to the kind of choreo these queens are likely to rely on. They were both struggling their way through this one. When a killer dancer like Mia is resorting to playing a pretend piano up there, you know she’s got nothing to work with.
It’s a shock to see her go, because we really figured she was one of the finalists. On the other hand, it’s probably a good thing to break up the Florida mafia and she absolutely deserved it for such a bad performance.
Girl, if you ever thought we were going to stop plugging our book, you weren’t paying attention: 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 (like at this link)! It’s also available in Italian and Spanish language editions, darlings! Because we’re fabulous on an INTERNATIONAL level.
[Still Credit: MTV]
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