The British were indeed a mistake.

Welcome to The Lipsync LaLaPaRuZa! Where you can decide if the loser was actually the bottom 7 or DeJa who had to get in full drag to sit in the Werk Rom for several hours.

Lipsync-a-Thon

Well… this was certainly an episode. I don’t think it quite played out as The Gag of the Season that they wanted it be – they were clearly chasing the hype of Silky’s One Woman Show in All Stars 6 except this wasn’t really set up in a way that allowed for that to happen – try as Bosco might to pull a Reverse Silky. My biggest issue with it all was the fact it didn’t really allow the queens to give *good* lipsyncs because they had, what? 24 hours to prepare for 6 potential lipsyncs? Which inevitably resulted in a lot of performances that were mostly just walking around waiting for the 7 word chorus and just hitting that. Most, if not all, of the fun came from the everything that happened in The Werk Room, mostly with DeJa trying to psych everyone out

quite why that idea of a twist worried everyone so much considering they’ve sent them all home, I don’t know. And by “they’ve sent them all home”, I do mean “Jorgeous and Jasmine have sent them all home”. The only eliminated queen that might benefit from that would be Alyssa Hunter unless she brings back another prop for production to sabotage. Shout out to all the Alyssa Hunter truthers out there.

And while Deja revelled in her moment of sweet serenity, of course Daya Betty was spiralling out because she vehemently believed that the bottom 2 should’ve just been Jasmine and Jorgeous because of their mediocre track records. I AM BEGGING HER TO PUT DOWN BENDELACREME’S ALL STAR ABACUS. Good lord, she’s going to be a nightmare on her inevitable All Stars run.

Jasmine however was finally deciding to lean into Daya’s mostly one-sided feud as she found herself picked first from the VH1 Studio Prop Department Bingo Cage and chose Daya Betty as her lipsync opponent. Little did she know that Daya would get to choose one of the 5 songs

and knowing that Kenya Michaels has taught us that One Shall Never Buck and Kick to Aretha, she chose Respect, despite the fact she was dressed like a MySpace era scene girl

and after having Michelle tell her last week to use her height to her advantage, she certainly did that by acting as a human eclipse and casting Jasmine into shadow every time she pulled a stunt

I did think this lipsync would get a little messier considering that it’s been brewing for WEEKS now, but they resisted the urge to turn it into a soulful Mortal Kombat battle, and Daya did pretty deservedly win it considering she wasn’t doing the splits to an Aretha song, the doors Kenya Michaels should never have opened. And so, Jasmine had to learn the hard way that getting to choose the song is quite a big advantage

there’s murder in those eyes.

And so Daya got to go backstage to sit with Deja and continue her insectivore diet

someone get these queens a hotel with a decent inclusive breakfast, PLEASE. Daya is one bad breakfast away from eating Jorgeous whole.

Willow knew her best chance of avoiding having to lipsync more than once was somehow managing to get herself that Luther Vandross song, which is why she looked like she was staring into the abyss when her name was the next to be called

but don’t worry, much like Shangela playing 3D chess with Carmen Carrera in order to ge herself the country song in Season 3, Willow played Bosco like a master puppeteer, choosing her and Bosco, despite warning herself against going up against Willow in anything even slightly campy, went straight for Never Too Much

I have to say though, this lipsync did absolutely nothing for me, as I much as I do think Willow gave the better performance and certainly had a much better connection with the judges

and she managed to hit the beat really well on times, I still found it to be a little too small and awkward. But at least what she was doing made some kind of sense meanwhile Bosco just… kind of choked and spent most of the time wandering around the stage like a corseted deer in the headlights – you could tell she was panicking and just deep in her own head – her first two lipsync were actually quite uncomfortable to watch because she basically did the same thing for both of them. And sure enough, Willow wins.

Which did mean we were down to three queens, all of whom are quite good and dynamic lipsyncers and performers – as much as Angeria wanted to sell herself as a “parker and barker”, we all saw that talent show performance. I think all of them were done a bit of a disservice by having to have three of them performing at the same time, Jorgeous and Angeria did start playing bumper cars at some point

the biggest twist of the whole thing was the fact Jorgeous didn’t immediately choose the Jennifer Lopez song, instead going for Beyonce’s Radio

although it wasn’t too much of a surprise given that she was decked out in gold, which is pretty much a patented Beyonce stage outfit at this point

I do love that she was wearing the cookie-cutter earrings she made in the design challenge, and a very fetching pair of Marigold gloves, just in case they make her do the washing up later.

It was a pretty good performance from everyone, it’s hard to ignore how much of a good stage presence Jorgeous and I’m mostly just wondering how mad the producers were that Lady Camden chickened out of doing the dip and giving us the full hattrick after Jorgeous and Angeria started their domino shablams

Lady Camden, please learn to feed the producers.

It was a pretty unsurprising win for Jorgeous, I did *gasp* when she said “Are we surprised though?” because I thought she had said it while she was on stage, but it was just in her confessional – I honestly wish Jorgeous would just be a little brattier, go the full entitled Violet Chachki – you might as well really lean in to being Ru’s very own personal Drag Messiah, she would’ve *eaten* it up.

So the bottom 4 comes down to being between Lady Camden, Flopsco, Angeria and Jasmine with the only remaining songs to choose from being Love Don’t Cost a Thing and Don’t Let Go. Lady Camden gets to choose her opponent next and without hesitation goes for Bosco because at this point it was painfully obvious that Bosco was suffering from a serious case of The Drag Race Yips. Given Bosco’s predilection for all things vaguely burlesque, she was never going to go for the JLo song, so opted for En Vogue, which made Lady Camden *very* sad because, in her own words, “how am I meant to do this soulful song while dressed as Sonic The Hedgehog’s bitch girlfriend?” and, she’s not wrong…

it took 5 minutes to find a usable screenshot of Amy Rose, I have seen things I never wanted to see.

Fortunately for her though, Bosco had no idea what to do with the song and pretty much copy-pasted her Luther Vandross performance from 5 minutes ago like she was Daya Betty playing Snatch Game and it worked out much the same. With Bosco losing and Lady Camden winning by a 100 mile stretch, or at least coming second because the clear winner of this lipsync was whoever was operating the focus pull

get them some sort of industry award.

And so it was either Angeria or Jasmine that was going to join Bosco in the bottom 2, and Jasmine was not taking the fact she was going to be lipsyncing against Angeria very well

and of course Daya was *very* irritated by her crying

a sentiment that didn’t last long because apparently Daya is just very into a chiropractic nightmare

and suddenly Daya was just so overcome by horniness that she completely forgot she was meant to be feuding with Jasmine and championed her for the win. She’s basically writing her own enemies-to-lovers fanfic – fuck AO3’s drag, right?

Now, allow me to don my conspiracy theory hat for a moment, I don’t think Angeria did particularly well in this lipsync – she didn’t do badly but I do think Jasmine outsold her, but I think this episode was very much a forgone conclusion that Jasmine would be getting eliminated. Her storyline with Daya ended with that Respect lipsync and with the future challenges being The Rusical, some sort of comedy roast challenge and potentially another girl group or design challenge – she wasn’t exactly going to be excelling if past experiences are anything to go by. So Angeria wins, and it all comes down to being between Jasmine and Bosco with their final lipsync song being “Swept Away” by Diana Ross which was such a lob for Bosco and I imagine it was designed to save Willow or Bosco from being eliminated because they’d both eat this song for breakfast and Bosco was very much feeling her sexed up burlesque fantasy

and pulling out every stripper move imaginable she could

my personal favourite bit though was how the lighting worked with Bosco in the final moments, it was just looked like a very high production number

She really ate this performance and it just wasn’t a song that gave Jasmine the chance to really let loose so she kind of just muddled around a little bit doing small campy bits with no opportunity to do anything particularly memorable and so, as a kindness, Jasmine is eliminated clutching her plastic chocolate bar before they could make her lipsync for a seventh time this season

and Bosco gets to go backstage where because Jorgeous never got any opportunity to punch ghosts lest she accidentally punch a mild mannered British drag queen or a mild mannered southern belle in the face, they all do The Jorgeous in celebration

I love the dynamic between the queens this year, I could watch just an entire episode of their Werk Room antics.

And so, we’re finally on track with some eliminations and still living in fear of that damned Golden Chocolate Bar

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