My name is Michelle Visage, and I am probably the greatest detective in the world.

From not being able to eliminate anyone because they were all too good to not being able to choose who to eliminate because everyone was so incredibly bad. It is the season that shall never end.

Better 8 Than Never

Of course nobody went home last week and while everyone is fully ready to congratulate Bosco on her win, commiserate with Deja on her near-win and commend Jorgeous and Jasmine for turning it out in the Lipsync, Daya Betty wastes no time in resuming her role as Archnemesis To Anyone Willing To Listen

I love that Daya has bizarrely chosen Jasmine to feud with and Jasmine is just not taking the bait – she’s had her on-camera fight with Maddy, she’s fine. Daya can find someone else. Daya will not find someone else, the only way this ends is with a lipsync between the two of them, which is seemingly increasingly likely.

The Bubble Bursts

For this week’s mini challenge, the queens had to create an outfit out of bubble wrap and duct tape. This type of mini challenge is always my favourite, mostly because quite often it results in some of the queens making better outfits than they managed to make in an Unconventional Materials Maxi Challenge, or if you’re Jorgeous you just make the same outfit

she wasn’t the only one to revisit one of their previous looks as Daya Betty continued to lay claim to dressing up as a horrifying adult-sized toddler

who do you think you could beat in a fight: 1 Daya Betty-sized toddler or 10 toddler-sized Daya Bettys?

I was however overjoyed by the return of the tiny little ponytail wiglette

it is one of the most fascinating things a drag queen has ever brought onto the show, one day I will know all of its secrets.

And yes, Bosco did somehow manage to turn this challenge into an opportunity to wear something that was lingerie adjacent, while also clearly making a nod to Aquaria’s entrance look

it’s a pretty impressive outfit to be fair, and she did win the challenge pretty fair and square but clearly she had completely forgone makeup, whereas I think Willow maybe prioritised her makeup look over her bubblewrap hobble dress

it’s very Lady Gaga during her Born This Way era.

Angeria also had a full on gown that I think a fair few queens would’ve been happy to walk down the runway in a design challenge

I did also quite like Deja’s

I think it’s mostly because of the little gloves that make it look like someone skipped out from their prom in the 80s to go and burgle a museum of its priceless gem collection.

And lastly we have Jasmine Kennedie whose contribution to the challenge was mostly having her wig fall off as she tried her best to be sexy while wrapped in bubble wrap

I’m sure it did something for someone.

Snatch Game

Oh boy… So it was Snatch Game this week and with this cast performing really well in comedic and acting challenges so far, the expectations were quite high and then… well, in the words of Willow Pill several episodes ago

the thing is, there have been bad, even AWFUL, Snatch Games in the past but this Snatch Game was a whole new brand of bad. When I saw people on Twitter saying this was the worst Snatch Game they’d ever seen, I had assumed it would be incredibly hard to watch, in the same way that Jiggly screaming “SNOOKI WANTS SMUSH SMUSH!” and PhiPhi O’Hara doing… this was

or the cataclysmically awful choice on Asia’s behalf to play Beyonce as a strangely abusive mother while The Vixen played Blue Ivy… But this was just bad in that nobody really told any jokes? Willow seemed to forget this was Snatch Game and just started legitimately playing an unparodied episode of Match Game as Drew Barrymore

to be honest, I don’t think Drew was a very good choice for Snatch Game and I think Willow could have done a really funny Jessica Simpson – there’s just not much of an angle with Drew Barrymore outside of the fact she’s basically Gwyneth-Lite, and that wasn’t exactly going to work because Bosco was playing Gwyneth but with the voice of a movie announcer

I’ve wanted someone to do Gwyneth Paltrow on this show FOR YEARS and by all means, this should have been a home run for Bosco but then, much like Willow, she just sort of forgot that her answers should have in some way related to Gwyneth so that her follow up joke made sense, instead she’d just give a very straightforward answer and then really roughly lead into a joke about a new “Droop” product, including her weirdly censored bottle of Kombucha, if I were part of this Snatch Game against my will I’d want my identity protected too

I did love her introduction when she had to explain that they couldn’t say “Goop” without getting sued, but it still wasn’t enough for me to quite forgive the truly sickly looking milkiness of her kombucha – WHAT WAS IN THAT BOTTLE? Wait, was the the joke that the bottle was spelled “Cumbucha” and that’s why they censored the first three letters as well as absolutely butchered her joke about it? Because clearly she said something between revealing it and filling Deja’s pimp cup with it? Truly, we’ll never know, not that I think it would’ve made the bit any funnier.
Part of the problem with doing Gwyneth is also the fact if you’ve listened to even 5 minutes of RuPaul’s podcast, you know he HEAVILY buys into the Goopery of it all and so making fun of Gwyneth, probably did feel like a personal attack on himself.

I’m not sure if perhaps Bosco’s very subpar performance was at least somewhat exacerbated by the fact she was next to Daya Betty who was doing an alarmingly good Ozzy Osbourne impression and making the strange decision to copy Bosco’s answers

much like Gwyneth, Ozzy should have been a pretty easy character to get some laughs with – literally all Daya had to do was bite the head off of a stuffed animal, or at the very least find a dragonfly she could chow down on again

and yet her Ozzy mostly relied on the fact her transformation was incredibly strong – although as unfunny as her Ozzy was, it was at least the catalyst for my favourite parts of the whole segment which were Raven’s looks to camera, with an honourable mention to Bosco after the third copied answer

I still think Daya should have just given in to the whole Daya Betty Torture Experiment and just done Crystal Methyd as her Snatch Game character because apparently other RuGirls aren’t banned anymore as Angeria was what we shall charitably acknowledge as Tammie Brown and not Wanda Sykes as an 80s newsreader on a cocaine diet

this was just a baffling choice and really highlighted the issue of doing other Queens in Snatch Game because you do just end up recycling their quotes which isn’t particularly funny, and she didn’t even do the best ones! Not a single Teletubby joke and she had to just about be held at gunpoint to make a joke about walking the children in nature! She had however fallen into that trap of making Ru laugh in her pre-Snatch Game walkabout with her strange arm movements, so she just did that the WHOLE time

and Lady Camden suffered a similar fate and RuPaul is almost entirely to blame for her performance after encouraging her to play William Shakespeare as a weird wine-drunk Joanna Lumley

when quite clearly she should have just gone really META with the whole thing and referenced the infamously awful ShakesQueer acting challenge from season 7 and played William Shakespeare as either royally pissed off Violet Chachki as Lady MacBitch

or Max’s very camp Juliet Capulet

but the whole thing should have probably been a red flag when Lady Camden said that she wasn’t a big fan of Shakespeare and when she quite clearly forgot how to spell “Shakespeare” and had to squeeze that first “e” onto her name card

I love a historical figure in Snatch Game, it gives queen a lot of creative license and really all Lady Camden had to do was go the full Upstart Crow and she would have been fine – steal David Mitchell’s jokes, RuPaul will never know and if someone does call you out, you always have this as an excuse

I don’t quite know why they decided to put Lady Camden in the hot seat, when based on Ru’s walkabout alone, it was pretty obvious that DeJa was going to be a favourite of Ru’s

the thing with DeJa’s Lil Jon is that it was only as funny as everyone thought it was because she was the only one on that set with ANY energy – her answers didn’t make much sense but good lord if I didn’t find the way she said “YEAAAAAH!” to be a source of light in the dim murkiness of everything else. On any other season, DeJa would’ve been a solid safe, I do however think she would have been funnier if even one of the other queens gave her something to bounce off of though.

While Deja was by far and away the best performance, I think Jasmine was somehow the second best, which is mostly a complete damnation of everyone else to be honest. I really don’t think Jasmine was *that* bad – her answers could have been much more streamlined but I think she still did a pretty good job of making fun of Betsy DeVos, who somehow looked younger than Jasmine did in the DragCon Panel Challenge last week

the answer about not having an answer and promising to get back to them in two weeks? I thought that was GOLD! The biggest mistake she made was fumbling her introduction when Ru asked her if she thought reading was important, which was quite clearly setting her up for some sort of a Paris Is Burning reference. Reading is FUNDAMENTAL..ist Christianity.

And lastly we have Jorgeous who was playing as Ilona Glazer

I still can’t believe that RuPaul made Lady Camden play William Shakespeare as Patsy Stone and somehow didn’t bully Jorgeous into being Selena for the evening – although given how it went, Jorgeous was probably best not doing Selena lest she become a pariah within her community. I have to commend Jorgeous for at least attempting jokes. Were they funny? No, not all, but they were an attempt at humour which is a lot more than I can say for most of the bottom row. I’m not particularly familiar with Ilona Glazer so I can’t really critique her on that side of it, but I also felt like I came away from this very much not having the first idea who Ilona Glazer is or what makes her famous beyond being on Broad City.

Holy Moly!

I would be very interested to know what the original prompt the queens were given for this runway was when they were having to get their looks together for the show because it really couldn’t have been “Holy Couture” and must have been something more along the lines of “The Church of ____: A look inspired by something you worship” and while most of the queens got the implication that they were meant to go the full Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination at the MET Gala, Lady Camden just did the Spice Girls cosplay

I do think this was at least significantly more elevated than most of the Spice Girls costumes we saw on Drag Race UK this last season though – a cape will do that for you! And she did at least of a fun little Girl Power nod

the issue was that while everyone else very much leant into the church aspect of the runway, Lady Camden completely vetoed it which made her *really* stick out on the runway.

Willow always has a unique and interesting twist on the category, I was worried about how she was going to fit psychadelic mushrooms into the category and even more worried when she said she was explicitly dressing up as a mushroom when we’ve already had one backfired fungus look this season

but I was very relieved when she came out in this Eda Birthing outfit – the less said about Ru’s weirdly dismissive inquiry into the designer of the outfit the better

it is very much a Flower Fairies take on the bleeding tooth fungus, which she does look ALARMINGLY like

Cicely Mary Barker could never!

I think what saves Willow’s from looking as far removed from the general theme of the runway as Camden did, was the shape of the headpiece, which does at least somewhat look like a Bishop’s mitre, even if it was just a mushroom cap.

The most MET Gala inspired of the lot was quite clearly Deja’s who was clearly going for the Zendaya as Joan of Arc look

not that anyone mentioned it because if they had, they would’ve had to mention that Deja’s look was… mostly just kind of fine, why she went for the Florence Welch as the Wendy’s mascot hair I DON’T KNOW

it’s a look that just didn’t quite come together for me – Deja usually fits her clothes so well and this just kind of swamped her, I think the skirt needed a little more detailing because it just looked very stiff and cumbersome.

Jorgeous also went with something of a MET Gala inspired look, mostly in that she was papal looking and shiny, as Rihanna was

I think the show was hoping for a lot more kind of edgy, vaguely ~heretical~ looks to get tongues wagging and somehow the only person to deliver on that was Jorgeous as The Weed Pope – and I do love this look and the details are great – the deep red contacts and slight touch of red liner she added to her waterline are the sort of details I’ve been missing in a few of Jorgeous’s previous looks

it was a great runway for her, I think the mitre could’ve been a little more decorative, just to differentiate it a little more from her outfit and add an extra dimension but it was still a strong look and by far and away my favourite of Jorgeous’s runways so far.

While Jorgeous somewhat halted her attempts to get a Savage X Fenty sponsorship, Bosco continued to do her thing and showed up in what honestly at this point might just be the same lingerie set

I’m glad she at least had the twist that she was wearing the silly goat hoof shoes that I wish we saw more of on the runway

Where is my Night of 1000 Mr Tumnuses runway theme?

Given that Bosco markets herself as “The Demon Queen of Seattle”, she could have pushed this look a lot further, even if the reveal had been a little more played up, merely unfurling a cape (which is not a nun’s habit) that you wrapped around yourself doesn’t really count

especially when we’ve seen you do a reveal on the runway already!

Jasmine also had a reveal, starting off in an outfit inspired by astrology, featuring a sun and moon applique

I think they could have read as more sun-y and moon-y and I’m 90% sure the moon aplique is applied the wrong way but it doesn’t really matter because she ripped it off anyway

and in doing so did try to invoke Iris Van Herpen

which… I mean sure, but it does feel more like a knock-off of Bimini’s Iris Van Herpen knock off

but it’s at least more Iris van Herpen-y than Jujubee’s beige attempt and it did move well! I think her headpiece still stole the show though

and I also loved her makeup, the stars along the not-quite-brows are really cute!

Angeria had the tamest of all the looks, going for a very traditional church outfit, which on paper might sound simple but the look was gorgeous

but I think I was just mostly glad that after Kerri Colby’s reign of millinery terror, we did get a fully intact church hat on the runway

Praise the lord!

Lastly we have Daya Betty who was taking her inspiration from Lady Gaga’s music video for Judas

it’s not the look I personally would have chosen from Judas, but I did admire her dedication to said look

that’s what you get for wearing black tights with perspex pleasers.

I think Daya made the best of a bad situation, and I actually think her look was pretty cool, sure the length was a bit dodgy but I like that she had at least embellished the dress and somewhat elevated it beyond just being Lady Gaga cosplay.

An Unofficial Holy Couture Runway Ranking

1. The Weed Pope
2. Angeria’s Intact Church Hat
3. Willow Pill as R/Popping’s New Mascot
4. Rising Gemini
5. Falling Bride
6. Zen-Deja Skye
7. Mel Blessed and Mel Christ
8. Bosco’s Bad Lingerie Habit

The judging of this episode was phenomenal! Michelle conducting the entire thing like she was Poirot trying to solve a murder should’ve meant she won the entire episode. I also love that they didn’t give the queens any alcohol during Untucked because EVERYONE was going to be fully sober for this war tribunal. I honestly think it would’ve been even funnier if for absolutely no reason, they brought in Raven to help judge – just to really lean into the whole Michelle Visage Investigates a Murder schtick a little more, but at least Dove Cameron was on hand to be a witness, and was a surprisingly good guest judge, we can invite her back!

Deja very obviously got the win, there was no question about it, the only suspense lay in how they would pick a bottom 2 – and with runways apparently not counting for anything anymore, because if they did I think it would’ve been a Lady Camden vs Daya Betty bottom 2 – the titans of falling down. But, we don’t get a bottom 2, instead there is a bottom 7 but thankfully they did not revive the 6-way lipsync of season 11 that still haunts my nightmare – the visual of Honey Davenport writhing around in the shadows of the studio like a tormented seal will never be expunged from my brain. Instead, next week will be a Lipsync Smackdown, so that’s Jorgeous and Jasmine safe for another week then and most likely Daya Betty getting the chop – I can’t see them eliminating Willow, Bosco or Angeria with 54 episodes left to go, and Lady Camden should win a lipsync. But we’ll see how the pairings go and which songs they all get.

And as usual, Daya Betty shall get the final words…

No Daya, I think technically you might have been worse.

And so, STILL 8 queens remain

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