RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 9

This week the world got flipped turned upside down in more than one way.

First, RuPaul made the unprecedented decision to go with a final four queens in the finale!

If you’ve been following my rankings, you’ll know I’m pretty pleased with the development, as I’ve been shuffling the same four queens back and fourth in the top four for weeks now.

However, the other thing that feels totally flipped tonight are the rankings themselves! I feel like we’re completely topsy turvy compared to what the queen’s average rankings from the season were telling us coming out of last week.

I got the distinct sense tonight that the queens are no longer competing against each other, but battling against themselves to turn the best version of their own take on drag. As such, I’ll be grading each queen individually in their own 50 point scale based on their original song verse, their choreography, their dance outfit, their final runway look, and their brief speeches.

No points will be awarded for the four-way lip sync because nobody cares. [Read more…] about RuPaul’s Drag Race Power Rankings, S09E12 – “Category Is”

It’s my favorite every-season episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race – the Drag Ball – and this year’s Gayest Ball Ever did not disappoint!

(How could anything be a disappointment when it involves sexy unicorns?)

Our consistent finale foursome absolutely delivered in every look without a single fail amongst them, and it made for some very interesting final jockeying in the rankings after last week and before the final elimination next week.

Because this episode was all about gag-worthy looks, I’m going to rank each of the three ball looks individually before recapping the queen’s overall power ranks! I won’t bother ranking our departed queen since she was the worst in every look.

(It’s not shady if it’s true.)

Look #1: Rainbow-She-Betta-Do

If this was any other group of queens we’d be at risk of being pounded over the head with the most rainbow-y rainbow looks that ever rainbowed, so it was a pleasant surprise to see all four of these brainy queens depart from the expected color spectrum in their own way.

1. Sasha Velour

I was living for Sasha’s deconstruction of the rainbow!

Sasha Velour’s color-blocking approach to wearing the rainbow was a genius turn, and her tailored skirt set with green leather gloves and Dorothy shoes was gorgeous. That she had a tiny rainbow house tucked beneath her red hat (wrapped with fabric from her cowgirl costume!) just sealed the deal of her outfit’s excellence.

2. Shea Couleé

Shea’s pastel graffiti rainbow dress might go down as the most controversial look of the entire season … at least, for me it will.

There’s no denying the cut and silhouette was high fashion, but was it rainbow bright? Honestly, I was getting “dirty sofa” from it way more than “rainbow,” especially from the structured top.

Yet, this is an instance where I can tell my read is a total mismatch with the judges – Shea’s desaturated take on rainbow was clearly a hit with the panel. [Read more…] about RuPaul’s Drag Race Power Rankings, S09E11 – “Gayest Ball Ever”

With only three episodes left until the finale of RuPaul’s Drag Race we’re down to the gauntlet of three major every-season challenges: a makeover this week, a ball next week, and presumably some form of RuPaul music video the week after that.

Will this trio of terrible challenges finally shake one queen out of our super-tight top four so we have a clear final three heading into the finale?

This makeover on the members of the Drag Race crew didn’t help much in that respect. We did see one queen take a minor plunge after last week’s standings, but when you see who it is you’ll understand when I say it changes nothing about who is making it to the finale.

[Read more…] about RuPaul’s Drag Race Power Rankings, S09E10 – “Makeovers: Crew Better Work”

Last night’s Ru Paul’s Drag Race brought us one of the most epic meltdowns in the history of the show, confirming some of my suspicions about a certain queen from last week.

It also sported a challenging runway where only half the queens scored a solid hit, but it also yielded some truly memorable looks.

What does that mean for the rankings? It’s another shake-up, that sees one queen in particular making a strong case for the finale while another hopes to crash the finale four party by blowing past next week’s challenge.

Before we get to that, a word on this week’s departed queen. [Read more…] about RuPaul’s Drag Race Power Rankings, S09E09 – “Your Pilot’s On Fire”

The Second Ru Paul Roast, featuring Michelle Visage, makes for a tumultuous week in the rankings for our queens.

One of the first elements of RuPaul’s Drag Race I ever saw were the “Meet The Queen” videos from Season 6. The girls talked about a lot of things I didn’t understand at all, but one theme kept popping up again and again: they were all afraid of someone named Michelle Visage.

Based on their comments, I expected Michelle to be a force of unmitigated evil and impossible to please. She’s anything but that! Michelle is critical, but she’s realistic. She has some pet peeves she’ll go after every time (e.g., the color green, in-between gown lengths, cinching, “knowing the real you”), but her input is a lot more useful than anyone else on the panel. And, I tend to agree with her.

In this week’s ranking, every queen in the top five got shuffled. That leaves us with one new queen in contention for the finale and another finding it slipping out of her grasp.

That’s a bit of a surprise, since last week was another on-script challenge about being funny. Of course, this week they scripted themselves and had to make it work live in front of an audience.

Our remaining queens are relatively well-matched – they all have at least one win a piece, and four of the seven have been to the bottom two once. (Trinity is the sole queen with a pair of solo wins. Shea has her own win plus a shared win with Sasha. That shared victory is Sasha’s only outright victory, but she just had two weeks of almost winning.)

Basically: it’s still anyone’s race, but some anyones are a little bit better positioned than others.

That makes next week’s challenge absolutely critical. Whoever wins could be solidifying their place in the finale, while if a queen with an existing bottom two placement survives the lip sync she could be dooming herself to fourth place. [Read more…] about RuPaul’s Drag Race Power Rankings, S09E08 – “RuPaul Roast” (of Michelle Visage)

This week on RuPaul’s Drag Race, the cast flashes back 27 years to parody a TV show from before some of them were born!

That’s right, it’s time for one of Drag Race‘s acting challenges.

If you aren’t familiar with them from past seasons, the scripts are “skit from your high school English class that still makes you wince whenever you think about it” realness. The challenges tend to be less about acting or memorization and more about delivering nonsense lines or surviving characters obviously meant to send a queen to the bottom two (generally, any character you’d describe as “butch”).

Yet, this group of queens is so solid that the only person who turns in a real clunker of a performance does so entirely due to her own inner saboteur – and continues her downward slide in the rankings as a result.

Meanwhile, a vague runway theme of “Big Hair” doesn’t help queens like Alexis Michelle, who do better with a little more guidance like they had on last week’s Madonna runway.

Meanwhile, it seems like the season’s top three is starting to really solidify, with a pair of queens sparring for the fourth spot in the last episode before the finals. Can all four girls hold off the competition from the other three remaining queen?

All it takes is a single misstep to sashay away.

[Read more…] about RuPaul’s Drag Race Power Rankings, S09E07 – “9021-HO”