Makeover Challenge

Drag Race Sverige Season 1, Episode 6 – “Dream Sisters” makeover challenge Review & Power Rankings

April 11, 2023 by krisis 1 Comment

Welcome to my review, recap, and power rankings of the sixth episode of Drag Race Sverige (AKA Drag Race Sweden) Season 1 – “Dream Sisters.” It’s the standard Drag Race makeover challenge with a substantially beefy set of sisters-to-be in the form of a pair of Swedish Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fighters and their gym buddies.

The results were by far the most-hilarious episode of Drag Race we’ve had so far in 2023. Between Admira Thunderpussy’s constant deadpan antics and Fontana’s ongoing meltdown over whether her partner will shave his bushy eyebrows, you could find yourself laughing out loud through entire swaths of this episode’s workroom antics.

Admira was on fire this episode with a literal and metaphorical straight man to play off of. When her partner tries on corsets and pads and asks her “How do you put up with this?” she dryly replies “I usually think about my invoices when I do this.”

Later, while instructing her partner on his runway walk, she strikes a pose and exclaims, “Ah! I’m the world’s most beautiful! Everyone else can die! Ha ha ha!”

Every word out of her mouth is iconic. She is like a Disney cartoon villain come to life.

In the midst of all the comedy, Fontana has a surprisingly nuanced character arc as she gets to know her makeover partner. He confesses that he used to be that straight guy – who used “gay” and “homo” as slurs, who judged queer people, and didn’t understand why there ought to be a Pride parade.

As her partner shares his journey to acceptance, Fontana goes through her own journey both live with him in the workroom and in her confessionals. This is the sort of straight man who taught her to fear straight men! She can’t help but be triggered merely by his presence, and especially by his story You can see the panic of PTSD washing over her in her wide eyes and set jaw as he tells his story. She adds in voiceover, “In the real world, I’d never dare to hang out with a guy like that. I was so scared. Guys like him are always so mean to me.”

Even as he gradually reveals how he discovered his own version of being an ally, Fontana can’t decide how she feels about it. She’s not wrong to be hesitant. Her partner’s story essentially centers his observation of queer trauma as the turning point to acceptance. It’s nice to acknowledge someone else is a human being when you see them be hurt, but it would be even better to accept their humanity without having to see them in pain.

Yet, this story does have a happy ending, with Fontana’s partner forcefully proclaiming, “I want to leave behind the person I was and grow to become someone better!” In that moment, you can see Fontana find some joy but also some steely resolve to make this partnership work – not just to win the challenge, but to show people watching the power of embracing allyship.

I don’t think her partner wasn’t trying to center himself and his feelings in the story of his journey. His whole point is that he wants to learn and transform, and in sharing his story he wants to help other people get to that place without needing to wait to be inspired by a queer person’s trauma like he was.

Fontana channels her newfound kinship into a surprising performance while Admira can’t translate her humor onto the runway, which leaves our power rankings severely shaken compared to last week’s “Dragodi Festival” Girl Groups episode. What does that mean with just one more episode before the finale? It feels like we have our winner locked in, but there might be a shocking entrant in the runner up position!

(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!

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

March 26, 2023 by krisis Leave a Comment

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!

RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 15, Episode 13 – “Teacher Makeovers” Review & Power Ranking

March 25, 2023 by krisis 2 Comments

Welcome to my review, recap, and power rankings of the thirteenth episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 15 – “Teacher Makeovers,” a makeover challenge with a quintet of local women teachers who are members of or allies to the LGBTQA* community.

Let’s be honest about Makeover Challenges on Drag Race: it’s often a “free play” week that allows the show to create whatever narrative works best for the remainder of the season.

Few queens utterly fail at the makeover (though we had one tonight!) and even when they do they can be sent to lip sync with just about anyone else in the cast to ensure the desired result. And, good makeovers tend to be similar in their strength, which means picking a winner can come down to arbitrary details. It’s rare to see a total blowout in either direction.

This has lead to many questionable Makeover episode placements over the years, from Divina winning while Cheryl went home in UK Season 1 to Trinity The Tuck not being in the top for the All Stars Season 4 make-over in favor of Monét. Heck, even Canada does it, putting Icesis in the bottom for a spectacular makeover on Season 2 just for not using matching colors on obviously similar dresses.

That’s why the makeover challenge tends to come late in the season (along with other challenges with extremely subjective measures of success). You can hand out a questionable win in a makeover to much less scrutiny from the cast and the fans than you can for Snatch Game.

That can make for a somewhat miserable episode for the queens, who are usually exhausted by this point in the season. A little bit of rigger morris goes a long long way to cracking competitors who are already on the verge of a breakdown.

The positive that comes along with this is that Makeover Challenges bring outside influences into the workroom. That can shake up tense dynamics within the cast and bring new stories to light. This episode’s makeover focused on five women teachers from around the Los Angeles area, each with their own connection to Drag Race and the LGBTQA* community. These women are already champions, from a mom of queer children to an art teacher on her own coming out journey to a kindergarten teacher who emphasizes that “love is love” to her youngsters.

All five teachers were willing to put in an A+ effort for their queens, but one queen wasn’t in the mood to match her partner’s enthusiasm for group work. That lead to an obvious bottom placement and a preordained lip sync. What it didn’t do is shake up the power rankings at all from last week’s Rusical rankings. Production has made some deliberate storytelling choices heading into next week’s semi-final. We’ll see if they all pay off.

Readers, start your engines. And, may the best drag queen win!