Welcome to my review, recap, and power rankings of the fifth episode of Drag Race Sverige (AKA Drag Race Sweden) Season 1 – “The Dragodi Festival.” It’s a Girl Groups challenge in the form of a Eurovision qualifying round, with a reveals-on-reveals runway theme.
This season of RuPaul’s Drag Race featured one of the most-obvious frontrunners of all time in Sasha Colby, but it still felt competitive and fun. Even if Sasha is the obvious winner, we still got to see some other high-achieving queens do well for themselves. The show never cut Sasha any slack and made sure to bring the fiercest-of-the-fierce competition to the finale.
Don’t worry, you’re reading the right post: this is about Drag Race Sverige! However, I bring up Sasha and her winning run because production’s hand in steering a Sasha-friendly outcome could not often be felt. That’s not the case here on Sverige, which seems to be doing anything within its power to produce a result that honors the local drag legends over edgy upstarts or newer queens.
I don’t know how else to explain the totally nonsensical judging of the past few episodes. There’s making each episode count on its own, and then there’s totally ignoring the challenge and runway criteria to produce the result that favors your slightly-boring designated frontrunner.
Last episode, Imaa Queen had one of the worst three Snatch Game performances but one of the best runways, and was sent to lip sync. That makes sense – even the best runway cannot save you from a bad challenge performance! Yet, tonight the best runway saved one of the worst challenge performances, and another weak challenge performance with a weak runway was saved from lip syncing.
The chaotic judging means we’ve lost the two most-revolutionary queens in a row, leaving us with three competent but slightly-dull showgirls as front-runners and a pair of younger queens who lack the nerve (and style) to win the season. To be fair, two of those top three were my top picks at the start of the season, and the third I said could surprise us if her drag wasn’t too boring.
As it turns out, slightly-boring drag might be exactly what this season is looking for. Okay, maybe that’s a little bit cruel. What I mean is that the judging might be telling us something about Sweden’s drag culture that promo photo shoots and social media can’t. It feels like Sverige is very focused on longevity. It has paid homage to classics and idols, both in how it addresses its queens and in the way it has treated its guest judges. Perhaps as a first season in a drag season with a clear divide between traditional showgirls and punk queens there was never any way for the latter to defeat the former.
What does that mean for our Power Rankings? Who cares! Only one queen maintains her ranking compared to Snatch Game, but much like Snatch Game we’re playing a game where show where everything’s made up and the points don’t matter.
(Want to watch Drag Race Sverige outside of Sweden? For most of the world, it’s available as part with a Wow Presents Plus subscription as soon as the episode is done airing.)
Läsare, start your engines. Och må den bästa Drag Queen vinna!
