I am willing give an X-men film in which Eureka plays trans pride Cyclops a go.
Before the Game Within a Game Within a Game Within an Enigma Within an Inevitable 19 Lipsyncs gets underway, we have to find out who’s going to be the final queen to fall before the faux-final.
Boxxed Up
It’s a rather uneventful post-elimination session because it was such a glaringly obvious decision to eliminate Pandora that I’m genuinely a little surprised that Pandora didn’t put her own lipstick in the box like makeup seppuku.
Of course with the reality of the Top 5 setting in the queens naturally begin noticing the front runners and with Ginger steamrolling ahead with a £50,000 pay-out it’s hard not to realise that she’s likely the inevitable winner (I think we all knew this was the Ginger Minj, We Apologise For All Stars 2 Tour the moment the cast was announced) and if not she’s at least now earned herself the title of Bona Fide Lipsync Assassin with three successful lipsyncs if we count her Season 7 run in the mix.
Obviously Trinity and Ra’Jah both have some wins and stellar performances under their belts but I do get the impression that production didn’t really expect these two to come as hard as they have, especially Ra’Jah and I think it’s making the race a lot more fun. And as much as I’m loving Eureka and adore Kylie, it’s hard to see either of them taking the crown – one for more obvious reasons than the other as we’ll get to.
Class Is In Session
At Last! A Mini Challenge! It’s only been 8 episode since the first one! Does it require any skill? Absolutely not. Does it cause unnecessary drama? Barely. Was it still one of the most enjoyable parts of the season? I’m going to go ahead and say that yes it was, these queens just have such good chemistry with one another and I’m sad we haven’t been given more opportunities to see them just goofing around in silly mini challenges.
For the mini challenge all the queens had to do was vote who they thought best suited the superlatives that RuPaul gave them – the biggest thing that we learn is that Eureka is apparently an absolute nightmare to live with as she’s voted The Gassiest, Messiest, Shadiest and Bossiest queen in a series of landslide votes that even Elmo Roper would have been able to call.
The greatest moment of the whole thing being Ra’Jah and Kylie unapologetically voting for themselves as the prettiest queen
and Kylie just using the entire exercise to practice her signature <3
Eureka narrowly missed out on also having Moodiest tossed into her list of apparent character faults but after Trinity throwing a strop when nobody spent 3 minutes congratulating her for a win, it was always going to be her and she was the only person taken by surprise
and what I love the most is that this offended her and then she just gamely voted for herself as the next person to be eliminated
this being another category that Eureka won, so you know… at least she’s winning something?
The Drag Tots Advertisement Power Hour
For this week’s Maxi Challenge the queens have to take part in a rather arduous advertisement for the second series of Drag Tots that was announced after the show has languished dead and dormant in the back catalogue of WOW Presents+ for 3 whole years and I’m sure all seven people who watched it are thrilled to bits.
As part of the challenge the queens have to create a character that would fit within the world of Drag Tots and given that everyone’s aesthetics and humour were so wildly different, I’m going to hazard a guess that none of these queens had seen the show, so we’re all on the same footing here! I apologise to Drag Tots, I really shouldn’t be this mean to it.
This does all of course mean that it is once again a design challenge and so the pressure was on Ra’Jah a little bit after her win during The Blue Ball and so her head was already in a bit of a weird place and RuPaul having a manic episode over the words “Mexicatessen” and “Queen Seeme” really weren’t helping her
I don’t think a queen has ever looked so prepared for the floor to just engulf her while in the presence of RuPaul?
She did end up dropping Queen Seeme for the slightly better Iseeya Queen. Her concept was simple, a superhero disco queen who for some reason has the plucked googly eyes of every Thomas The Tank Engine character glued to her hands for some SURPRISE TRYPOPHOBIA!
Probably my favourite part about the whole thing was that Ru said to Ra’Jah “Throughout this season you’ve been the purple queen” and so even in Drag Race Elimination Limbo, Jan can still be a target
Poor Purple Rosé </3
Ra’Jah does of course look phenomenal – the fabrics are really cool and add a lot of life to the whole performance and I think her voiceover was by far and away the funniest and if there’s one thing we know well on Drag Race it’s that RuPaul loves 2 things: snappy wellness bon mots and jokes about copyright infringement and Ra’Jah had both!
Trinity also got a little sandtrapped by Ru as once again Trinity was accused of being too preachy and trying to insert a well meaning message into the challenge. Morality? In a children’s cartoon? How preposterous! The solution to this conundrum? As is the answer to many of life’s greatest mysteries: Cats cosplay
I will always be a fan of the $50-to-make-a-fursuit-for-FurrFest-2015 aesthetic, nothing delights me more than a furry on a budget and I think Trinity really turned this out and deserves Hell of a lot of credit for managing to make this in like a day and work out how to paint a cat face in a matter of hours and still look less cursed than that time Monet X Change dressed as the Pink Panther and looked more like a gimpy pig
nothing has ever come closer to corporealizing my sleep paralysis demon.
I’m glad that Trinity didn’t allow herself to get too bogged down the post-vote melodrama because she threatened to get VERY hung up over the fact everyone thought she was moody and in turn kind of proving their point… Also, how dare she be mad that Kylie voted her as the most likely to go home next WHEN SHE VOTED FOR HERSELF? I think I just need to accept that I’ll never fully understand drag queen logic.
Eureka had her own way of dealing with the result of the mini-challenge and after being mercilessly fart-shamed she decided to incorporate it all into her character – it wasn’t wildly successful or funny, in fact as a useful metric I believe this might have been the only time that RuPaul hasn’t laughed at 5 fart jokes in a row. Apparently we’re not lowballing children’s programming anymore. We have transcended farts.
She had made the decision to play a villain and of course RuPaul was worried about how she was going to make her likeable which… Does that matter? pre-Jolie Maleficent was absolutely not meant to be likeable in any way shape or form and yet all of us queers love her? In this essay I will explain why she is a trans icon…
As for Eureka’s outfit, she wanted to bring all of the drama she could and I think she did at least achieve that much
it’s very Olenna Tyrell goes to the discotheque, which is a win in my books. I do have to ponder how she managed to make the process of making this outfit seem so arduous and painful though considering it is essentially just a gown version of the dress Ra’Jah made in 1 minute
Points for the crown though, I thought that was pretty neat and there wasn’t a raw hem in sight!
Ginger did what Ginger does best, create comedic southern character while looking alarmingly like a child in an MGM musical from the 1950s
which in no uncertain terms was kind of the challenge, so well done on having the chips fall perfectly in what should be the semi-final but wont because we’re doing Shenanigans™ next week.
The outfit is very sweet and perfectly made, it does however pale in comparison to her artistic efforts
I would buy merch with that drawing on it.
While Ginger leaned in to her usual wheelhouse, Kylie was taking cautious steps out of hers as she developed her character: Miss Behave, which she helpfully explains is a play on words as though none of us would have picked up on it. Stan Kylie. Get her to host Countdown. HELL, GIVE HER JEOPARDY!
The edit around Kylie was particularly weird as the show spent a significant amount of time dedicated to her emotionally abusing a sewing machine and making her look like she had sewed but a single strip of black fabric
which in all honesty would probably constitute a genuine outfit for Kylie, and then she walked down the runway and she had made a full black hoop skirt dress, a hat, a prop book and a broom
just a thoroughly weird episode narrative around her, especially as the judges then went on to rave about absolutely everything she did – most especially the bow at the back! Who amongst us doesn’t love a butt bow though? I am slightly confused about why the top does look so much like a wetsuit but I suppose even witches might like the occasional scuba holiday.
My personal favourite part of the whole thing was the makeup, it just felt very different for Kylie which is what I’ve been wanting for a couple of weeks now
of all of them, I think this character was the most successfully cartoonish.
A Drag Tots Character Creation Ranking
- Kylie’s Very Good, Excellent and Clever Play On Words
- Ra’Jah’s Googly Eye Budget
- Trinity K Bonet in Cats 2: Feline Boogaloo
- Ginger Minj Is Southern Again
- Eureka’s Gassy Disco Villain
It wasn’t a particularly bad round for anyone, all of the outfits were properly made, as long as you don’t look at Kylie’s sleeves for too long – I SAID DON’T! HOW DARE YOU SCROLL BACK UP! The only real bit of criticism going is lobbed at Eureka for generally being less funny than everyone else as the show really plays fast and loose with how many times a fart joke is allowed to be funny. The winner though is Ra’Jah for putting everyone in a really good mood and giving RuPaul at least another 4 pseudo-psychology phrases he can hurl out on the podcast whenever Michelle Visage starts talking about the healing powers of spinach again. And because there’s only 5 queens left, it does mean everyone else is in the bottom and up for elimination. So if you’re going to Manila someone, DO IT NOW. Although let’s be honest, they can all smell the shenanigans are afoot, mostly because I imagine the eliminated queens are still hanging around the hotel and Serena Cha Cha has been making the most of the buffet breakfasts for several filming days now.
Boom! Crap!
So we were all super excited to have Charli XCX as a guest judge because it almost certainly meant they’d do one of her songs for the lipsync and then we got thoroughly Monkey’s Paw’d and the chosen song was Boom Clap when Vroom Vroom IS RIGHT THERE? Even Break The Rules would have been at least not as repetitive and vague. And when you’ve got Ra’Jah who has proven herself as a very fun lipsyncer it’s doubly disappointing.
As for the assassin this episode, it was Kameron Michaels in an outfit that looked slightly like Cinderella if Disney ever decided to make a Tekken game
And why isn’t Disney Princess Tekken a thing yet?
And we are of course reminded that Kameron Michaels lipsynced 4 times over the course of her season 10 run: once (incorrectly) surviving due to a double save, absolutely wiping the floor with Cracker who became victim to her own hairpiece, winning by default because Asia O’Hara mass murdered some butterflies and then getting thoroughly lost in a 3-way lipsync between dynamic twink Aquaria and 4-part reveal Season 10 Eureka. It’s a dubious history but here we are and I’m not sure we should really chalk this one up as much of a win considering most of what she did was… waft the laundry around?
the only good part of the lipsync were the first two seconds and it was mostly because Charli was so excited by the whole thing
and then we never get there again and all we have is Ra’Jah aimlessly wandering the stage and Kameron giving off some severe Kate Bush vibes and occasionally just squatting
I think both of them are capable of significantly better lipsyncs given a better song but as is, Ra’Jah misses out on her $10,000 and the win is given to Kameron “Pop a Squat” Michaels and the eliminated queen is Eureka
it’s the most logical decision and given that the Game Within a Game is absolutely just going to be a series of lipsyncs (most likely to RuPaul songs) I would hazard a guess that Eureka will probably do quite well and rejoin the competition, I just worry for Ra’Jah if Eureka gets to choose who to eliminate. It’s such a strong Top 5, I could honestly just take them all to the finale, SCREW IT, WHO CARES?
And so, we have our top 4… for now.
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