Don’t be alarmed by the sounds of “Ave Satani” on the wind, it’s just Snatch Game week. Ah, yes, that most important of all RuPaul’s Drag Race challenges that separates the contenders from the also-rans, the culturally literate from the basics. “Just make RuPaul laugh,” the witches chant in unison as they smear an insecure baby drag queen’s brow with goat’s blood. Always this sense of momentous occasion for a challenge with diminishing returns and our perpetual disappointment? Indifferent to our suffering, Snatch Game will continue until morale improves.
If this edition of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars’s Snatch Game is among the mildest, it at least comes at the exact right moment to make the queens sweat. The brackets are over and we’re back to OG Drag Race rules. We get a refresh of confessional looks, hair lengths, and body journeys! There’s a lot of readjustment to get used to right from the jump — for better or worse, this season has perpetually been a moving target.
It’s also disorienting to be this far along in the season and pivot to nine queens facing off. It feels like we’re starting the season from the very beginning. As the queens reenter the workroom, it’s unclear how the drama is going to unfold. The Bracket 2 queens immediately debrief together in the corner, looking like the three horny town maidens from Beauty and the Beast (which, honestly, works). Otherwise, it doesn’t look like there will be much allegiance drawn from bracket battle lines, but there’s only so much an alliance can do without The Points That Shall Not Be Named.
With the queens sniffing out a front-runner, thankfully, we have some return to normalcy, and by that I mean Mistress Isabelle Brooks promptly grabs her ladle and stirs that Ginger pot. If the judges aren’t going to critique Ginger with a whiff of the heightened scrutiny given to her fellow competitors, at least someone is making her sweat. Ginger is also sweating her reputation, terrified over all the talk of her two previous SG wins. Broadly, the queens seem eager to shut down Mistress’s wicked playfulness this time, but Ginger also acts ready to burst at the slightest prodding. Roasted Ginger? Mmm, this one has a little sweetness to it.
Generally, there has been a real vibe shift among most of the queens in the interim between filming their brackets and the semifinals. On top of Ginger feeling the walls close in around her, Aja’s burst of confidence we saw in her bracket has deflated, Mistress is more emotionally open and vulnerable than ever, and Bosco is getting back in her head. Add it to the stockpile of gay grievances and complaints about the bracket format: It breaks up the queens’ momentum and they have to start over, basically from scratch.
Anyway, this Snatch Game is middle of the road — not particularly memorable but certainly better than some of the nadirs of recent seasons. Call M. Night Shyamalan, because it also has to set some kind of record for the most Snatch Game characters who are dead (five). As the guests, Raja and Raven are about as funny as most of the contestants, which shouldn’t even be a thing that’s possible.
The only queen who outright belly flops is Cynthia Lee Fontaine. Cucu makes a solid choice as Dracula for the reason that these types of less definable Snatch Game characters (see Jewels Sparkles’s Bigfoot, Trinity the Tuck’s Satan, etc.) are also divisive: You can kind of do anything. But on top of Cynthia never really making a distinct choice for her Dracula (DraCucula!), she unravels spectacularly, complete with mass confusion and dental avulsion. In bombing so hard it’s funny; she maybe does for Snatch Game what Utica did for roasts.
One of the clear bests of this round is Jorgeous as Mr. Worldwide himself, Pitbull. Jorgeous has carved a comedy corner for herself by playing masculine characters after her bro-y roast was one of the rare bright spots of All Stars 9. After flubbing Snatch Game twice, she really had no reason to show up to this one as confidently as she does — and yet she smashed it. Jorgeous’s newfound self-conviction is starting to come into focus, and in a season struggling to find narratives for the queens, it’s beginning to justify her rapid return to the show.
As Reba McEntire, Ginger has the benefit of playing a character who is gay royalty that shockingly hasn’t been played on Snatch Game yet. She is maybe not the toughest to impersonate passably, though the preeminent Reba impersonator — the late, great Coti Collins — achieved Reba’s mannerisms to an eerily accurate degree. Reba is like Liza and Cher — every gay guy you know thinks they can nail the impersonation, but the distance between a B- version and an A+ version is much harder to scale. We’ll call Ginger’s Reba a B+, nailing Reba’s unique cadence and racking up a lot of laughs.
It’s always great to see a queen reaching into drag history that might fly over the heads of more casual drag fans, but Bosco using Kenny Kerr’s repertoire of impersonations is a gamble that doesn’t quite pay off. Plenty of queens have done character changes mid-stream, yet Bosco doesn’t manage to tie it all back to Kerr in a catchy way. A Snatch Game impersonation with layers (like Gottmik’s on-camera-off-camera Paris Hilton) is smart. Trying to do Inception-esque layers of impersonation in one character needs more precision to really land. She probably is the unnamed third-place queen, but it’s no surprise that Ginger’s and Jorgeous’ straightforward characterizations outmatch her.
The rest of the queens skate through but don’t make much of a mark. Irene has clearly done her research on Zsa Zsa Gabor and manages her first Snatch Game nicely, though she doesn’t go big enough (no jokes about cop slapping, Irene?). Lydia is unfairly given a bottom placement for not being as taboo invoking as Pete Burns was, but the laughs she did land should have been enough for safe placement. Daya sticks to one note of lesbian jokes as Jane Lynch. In choosing Cookie Tookie, Aja doesn’t set herself up to win — viral personalities rarely make for strong Snatch Game choices — but doesn’t crumble as much as she thinks she did. Mistress Isabelle Brooks stays consistent in her characterization and interacts with the other queens, but simply struggles to weave Natalie Nunn’s catchphrases into a punch line.
On the Tirami-suit runway (Tear-a Me Suit? “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage Tara MeS-[crowd violently revolts, justifiably]”), the queens serve suit tearaways into dresses. Best in show, Jorgeous takes the red-velvet cake, acing both looks in baggy crimson butchness and devil-worship divinity. Also sickening is Aja, transforming from cocoon to butterfly — unfortunately, Jasmine Masters will see her in court. Mistress makes a clever twist on the theme with a swim/fat suit, while Irene reveals a gorgeous, biblically accurate angel. Poor Cynthia flubs her reveal with an unfinished, color-palette-literal look.
Ginger is declared the winner, her most notable win of the season. She is now the first three-time winner of the challenge, although one could argue (I would!) that those bragging rights come with the qualifier of having to play Snatch Game that many times in the first place. Cynthia expectedly and graciously accepts her lip-syncing fate. Mistress joins her in the bottom two, even if she hit more Snatch Game criteria than one or two of the queens. Facing off will be the queen with the fewest bracket points and the one who advanced without winning a challenge. In a season that’s felt very preordained and engineered, should we be surprised?
The lip sync to Aretha Franklin’s “Who’s Zoomin’ Who?” is one of those that is won in the first ten seconds. MIB delivers what’s safely one of the season’s top lip syncs, looking stunning in white and maximizing her jerky lip-sync style. From challenge to runway to lip sync, it’s a decisive, inarguable loss all around for the perpetually upbeat Cynthia, and I’m a little sad to say “Toodle-oo, Cucu.”
While I take no joy in Cynthia’s worst-in-show performance this week — the Cucu Apologist stays clocked in! — I am taking her ousting as a tide shift of sorts for the termite-infested institution that is Snatch Game. Mere months after Lexi Love’s performance as Gilbert Gottfried earned so-disastrous-its-funny praise and enthusiastic hand-wringing, Ru’s Laugh-o-Meter appears to no longer be the challenge’s compass. Make no mistake, Ru laughed the hardest at Cynthia. Call it restored balance, but there’s more to it than just getting a laugh. Snatch Game, ever the cruel underwhelming temptress, may live to dismay another day. But finally, the old adage of “just make RuPaul laugh” may be really, most sincerely dead!
Extra Two Pieces and a Biscuit
• The queens are so locked in on Ginger that no one even blinks at one of the season’s headlines so far: Irene the Alien and her three challenge wins. It’s probably best for her chances to stay an underdog as long as possible, but she has earned ruffling more feathers!
• It wasn’t one of the strongest looks overall, but credit to Daya Betty for bringing under-boob sweat to the runway and making it fashionable.
• Did anyone else catch Sarah Michelle Gellar’s sewing solution for Cynthia’s unfinished hem? SMG secret sewing queen! Put her in a design challenge!
• The queens being more psyched to meet Gellar for Scooby-Doo than Buffy?! Oh dear, the world has gotten so terribly, terribly young.
• A favorite among the confessional look refreshes: Lydia in biker fetish gear straight out of Cruising. Give her a wig reveal, and what does that make her? A single dom who works two bobs — she’s a survivor.
Is this the end of the “just make RuPaul laugh” era of Snatch Game?
