Drag Race Belgique Season 1

Drag Race Belgique Season 1, Episode 8 – Grand Finale “Eleganza Extravanganza” runway Review and Power Rankings

April 9, 2023 by krisis

Welcome to my review, recap, and power rankings of the eighth and final episode of Drag Race Belgique Season 1! The Drag Race Belgique Grand Finale and its “Eleganza Extravaganza” theme that brought bought all ten queens of the season for a final walk down the runway!

SPOILERS AHEAD for the winner of Drag Race Belgique! Consider yourself warned!

This final episode stuck to the familiar Drag Race finale format. The queens had to pen a verse to a song, though it was an original called “Fierce” rather than an anonymous RuPaul remix. They all had out-of-drag sit-downs with Rita Baga, who was charming-as-always in her out of drag appearances.

And the queens had to deliver an elegant final runway and make some commentary to their younger selves (a cringe-inducing import from the US show that I hoped Rita would jettison as Canada’s Drag Race has done).

The format turned out to be a terrific showcase for the final three, even if it also confirmed that two of them had already already fully ceded their chances of winning to the third.

Susan was crisp and powerful in her choreography, showing off a muscular quality to her drag we hadn’t had the chance to see since the Talent Show. Athena regained a steely, fierce quality that had been eroded over the course of the season, delivering the most-convincing fierce drag performance of the trio.

Yet, there was no denying that this episode, and this entire season, belonged to Drag Couenne. We have rarely seen a queen represent herself and her runway package so meticulously and with such confidence across all of the many Drag Race franchises. I place Couenne’s powerful full-season performance alongside the greats like Bob The Drag Queen, Envy Peru, and Carmen Farala.

I think it is incredibly exciting that Rita Baga and the rest of the judging panel rewarded Drag Couenne’s singular take on drag with a Drag Race crown. I feel like on many franchises that a queen as weird as Couenne would be patronized and cut just short of the finale. That the judges gave Couenne the space to show of the fullness of her powers speaks to their taste in consistency in judging this entire season.

I loved Drag Race Belgique Season 1 from beginning to end. Even if I thought Rita Baga’s drag fashions were often forgettable and Lufy’s judging was often wrong-headed, this was a tremendously talented cast who were all treated fairly by the show.

This week’s final placements shook out exactly as I ranked them last week after the “Discour de Reine” challenge. What’s left to power rank? I’m not going to be ranking the queen’s final “Eleganza Extravaganza” runways, which were universally lovely. Instead, this final ranking is a retrospective of each queen’s placement, and how that compares to my pre-season predictions.

(Want to watch Drag Race Belgique outside of Belgium? For most of the world, it’s available as part with a Wow Presents Plus subscription as soon as the episode is done airing.)

Lecteurs, start your engines. Et, que la meilleure Drag Queen gagne!

Drag Race Belgique Season 1, Episode 7 – “Discour de Reine” public speaking challenge Review and Power Ranking

April 2, 2023 by krisis

Welcome to my review, recap, and power rankings of the seventh episode of Drag Race Belgique Season 1 – Discour de Reine, or “Queen’s Speech.” Each of the Top 4 had to deliver their own coronation speech as Belgium’s queen for a day, and then walk the runway wearing “Glamour à Knokke-le-Zoute.“

A “public speaking but make it funny” challenge is one of those late-season episodes where the judging can be very subjective.

Here I felt that the opposite happened – the judging seemed the most level-headed it had been all season.

Part of that is that the queens easily self-selected into the perfect four roles for a semi-final episode: the overconfident queen who goes over time, the brainy queen finally hitting her mark, the queen who plays it to safe one too many times, and the anxious queen struggling to make herself heard.

The judges had to go by the stratification of the challenge itself, because the runway wasn’t much help. Everyone looked good, but the bigger problem was the judges themselves couldn’t seem to agree on what the theme meant! Glamour à Knokke-le-Zoute is a seaside resort town, and the judges seemed to be split on if they were looking for the actual glamour of the region (which they felt was something more chic than eleganza) or just something glamourous that suggested the region with a nautical theme.

It seemed like that made the queens somewhat immune to hearing the tough runway critiques they’ve encountered earlier in the season, with Susan especially benefiting from the indecision. Ultimately that yielded an unsurprising lip sync, a fair result, and a Top 3 I’ve been rooting for since the pre-season. That means there is zero shake-up from last week’s makeover rankings as we head into the finale next week.

(Want to watch Drag Race Belgique outside of Belgium? For most of the world, it’s available as part with a Wow Presents Plus subscription as soon as the episode is done airing.)

Lecteurs, start your engines. Et, que la meilleure Drag Queen gagne!

Drag Race Belgique Season 1, Episode 6 – “A deux c’est mieu!” makeover challenge Review and Power Ranking

March 26, 2023 by krisis

Welcome to my review, recap, and power rankings of the sixth episode of Drag Race Belgique Season 1 – A deux c’est mieu! That translates as “Two is better [than one].” That’s the perfect title for Belgium’s first makeover challenge as the queens partnered with five presenters from Radio-télévision belge de la Communauté française – or RTBF (Belgium’s version of NPR & PBS).

If you follow my RuPaul’s Drag Race coverage, you’ve just read my thoughts on the mercurial nature of makeover challenges from yesterday’s “Teacher Makeovers.” Makeovers give production carte blanche to make any placement decisions they please, but sometimes that involves less interference and more going with the flow of the narrative.

That’s exactly what happened in A deux c’est mieu, with each queen producing the exact result you’d expect. The excellent queens delivered excellence, the contentious queen delivered contested results, and the low-key queens had nowhere left to hide from the judge’s critiques in such a slim field free of anyone making a mess of things.

That resulted in a satisfying episode, even if it highlighted the particular deficiencies of Lufy as a judge.

In her workroom walkthrough it was obvious that Lufy was playing the Michelle Visage role of giving pushy, counter-intuitive advice that could easily backfire. However, Michelle backs that up with the utter conviction of being right all the time. If her advice turned out to lead a queen astray, she simply doubles down that if what she said was done correctly things would’ve turned out fine.

Lufy is a much less experienced media personality. She couldn’t deliver on the much-needed judging punchline when one queen one faltered because of her advice and another succeeded despite it.

Even if the judging this season feels inexperienced, Drag Race Belgique more than makes up for it with a stellar cast of professional, entertaining, personable queens. We had two queens exchange rankings compared to last week’s Snatch Game line-up, but we’re heading into the semi-final with the three queens I predicted for the Top 3 in the pre-season and a fourth who I was most hoping to see succeed.

(Want to watch Drag Race Belgique outside of Belgium? For most of the world, it’s available as part with a Wow Presents Plus subscription as soon as the episode is done airing.)

Lecteurs, start your engines. Et, que la meilleure Drag Queen gagne!

Drag Race Belgique Season 1, Episode 5 – Snatch Game & Night of 1001 Audrey Hepburns Runway

March 19, 2023 by krisis

Welcome to my review, recap, and power rankings of the fifth episode of Drag Race Belgique Season 1 – the first Snatch Game in Belgium, plus a Night of 1001 Audrey Hepburns runway!

I felt that this Snatch Game and accompanying iconic runway said a lot about the drag culture of Belgium.

Snatch Game was low on rude and uproarious jokes and heavy on studied character work. Even the worst queens of this panel presented better character illusions than the best queens of a typical Snatch Game in the United States!

Similarly, while queens on other franchises might take this runway theme as an opportunity to show off a “high glam” version of Audrey Hepburn, here five out of six queens presented near-exact replicas of some of her iconic looks. None of them were draggy for drag’s sake, and none amplified Hepburn’s petite frame with drag staples like exaggerated shoulder pads or giant hair.

As we have the chance to see Drag Race adapted to countries all around the globe, we must remember that the aesthetics of US Drag Race is heavily influenced by the pageant system. Critiques about proportions and “dragging things up” do not always apply equally in other drag subcultures.

From this season thus far I get the sense that Belgian drag values a much less exaggerated sense of femininity from its drag artists, which has been reflected both in the runways and the judging. It seems to be a season where smaller, more-thoughtful performances can thrive.

Snatch Game shook up my power rankings compared to last week’s acting challenge everywhere but the very top. While we maintained the same front-runner, spreading the wins around and putting a new queen in the bottom definitely shuffled the odds of who might wind up in the finale.

(Want to watch Drag Race Belgique outside of Belgium? For most of the world, it’s available as part with a Wow Presents Plus subscription as soon as the episode is done airing.)

Lecteurs, start your engines. Et, que la meilleure Drag Queen gagne!

Drag Race Belgique Season 1, Episode 4 – “L’émission qui vous déshabille” acting challenge & “Ceci n’est pas un look!” runway Review & Power Ranking

March 12, 2023 by krisis

Welcome to my review, recap, and power rankings of the fourth episode of Drag Race Belgique Season 1 – “L’émission qui vous déshabille,” a scripted acting challenge spoofing real-life documentary Ni juge, ni soumise. It was paired with a “Ceci n’est pas un look!” runway celebrating surrealist painter René Magritte – plus, the library was open for a reading challenge.

If that sounds like a brainy episode, it was! But, it also showed how prepared the top group of queens remaining on this season are when it comes to surmounting any challenge thrown their way… except, perhaps, a reading challenge.

These Belgian queens seemed to be literally shaking in their boots when Rita Baga opened the library for the reading mini-challenge. Several of them seemed to be too nervous to even hold their prop glasses up to their eyes.

That made me wonder to what extent reading is baked into the culture of Belgian drag. Of course, there is a certain playful cattiness to most drag queens and drag scenes, and we’ve seen that on display in the workroom and in confessionals. Yet, reading tends to be a very direct, confrontational version of that cattiness. I get the sense that doesn’t come as naturally in Belgium as it does for queens other countries – like, for instance, New Zealand.

That stands in contrast to the acting challenge and the runway, which both seemed to capitalize on the cerebral qualities of the queens and Belgium’s appreciation for the arts. I wasn’t expecting much from a spoof of a documentary or a modern art runway theme, but this cast of queens came ready to impress.

My French is not good enough to have perfectly understood the acting scenes without subtitles and translations, but I got the impression that two of them went off without a hitch and were thoroughly amusing. The script relied on the broad humor of badly-behaved citizens facing off against a dour but impulsive magistrate, which means the queens all had genuine characters to act rather than simply spouting catchlines or delivering physical humor.

The same is true for the Magritte-inspired “Ceci n’est pas un look!” runway theme. On other franchises I’d expect perhaps one or two queens who really understood the assignment of capturing the thematic qualities of a surrealist painter in their fashions. Here, no one missed the mark entirely. The same was true on their bande dessinée runway on episode two.

It seems clear that the average drag queen in Belgium is expected to know her cultural references and appreciate the country’s artistic heroes. I find it refreshing to be watching a version of Drag Race where the queen’s references are not simply drag, reality TV, and fashion. I don’t think any other franchise has seemed so enamored with connecting drag to the fine arts.

What does this cerebral episode mean for my Power Rankings compared to last week’s “Festival Realness” design challenge? One queen descended precipitously due to some factors out of her control, while a pair of winless queens jostled to secure a spot of runner-up to our clear front-runner.

(Want to watch Drag Race Belgique outside of Belgium? For most of the world, it’s available as part with a Wow Presents Plus subscription as soon as the episode is done airing.)

Lecteurs, start your engines. Et, que la meilleure Drag Queen gagne!