For years, I have hoped—to no avail, I must sadly add—that RuPaul’s Drag Race would bring back one specific challenge. The challenge was done exactly one time, in one season, and nothing else has even gotten close to replicating it.
That is, until now.
This week’s maxi-challenge isn’t an exact replica of Season 5’s Untucked lip syncing challenge, in which Alaska lip-synced as Phi Phi O’Hara, Coco Montrese as Lashauwn Beyond and Alyssa Edwards as Shangela, among others. That challenge asked the queens to imitate their predecessors, lip-syncing iconic arguments in the very same lounges that the fights took place in. Nowadays, the Interior Illusions Lounge and Gold Bar are lost to herstory—but the memories that we took from them remain.
The best time to do another version of this challenge would’ve been in Season 9, to offer takes on the big fights and moments from the previous four seasons—just like we saw in Season 5. You could do the “Back rolls?” fight and everyone vs. Serena ChaCha from Season 5 itself, Laganja Estranja’s big meltdown for Season 6, Kennedy Davenport’s “After a long night of hookin’ …” monologue from Season 7 and so on. But perhaps because Untucked was, at that point, a YouTube-only series, the challenge was skipped. By the time Untucked was back on TV, it was for Season 10, the first season produced specifically for VH1. (All Stars 2 and Season 9 had aired on VH1, but were produced for Logo.) There was a level to which Season 10 was a “soft reboot” of the show: queens from the past were brought on as guests, but references that might lock out newer viewers were kept to a minimum for a while.
With Drag Race now on MTV and every season available on Paramount+ to stream, references to the past are fair game again. This week’s challenge takes that to the limit, having the queens not merely imitate past iconic moments (from both Untucked and the main show), but create whole new songs out of them. It’s one of the most fun self-referential challenges Drag Race has ever done, and proves that there’s so much good material from the past for our current crop of queens to riff on and create new memories.
The premise for this challenge is that these songs are being recorded for the first two volumes of “Bitch I’m a Drag Queen!”, a riff on Now That’s What I Call Music! compilations. (Did you know we’re up to 90 of those in the United States? Wild!) They then must record short music video segments to be used as part of the commercials for the CDs. Though the queens are split into teams for the two volumes, they aren’t judged as teams—which makes sense, considering each queen or duo is responsible for the direction of their own segment. In this way, it’s reminiscent of Season 4’s “Glamazons vs. Champions” commercial challenge, another classic task that’s never been properly redone in the many, many seasons since.
Crucially, impersonation is actually not the point of the challenge this week. Much more focus is put on how the queens interpret the moments, and they’re given tracks in specific musical styles to go along with each. You could argue this does give certain queens an advantage: queens whose musical styles match well with their own drag persona don’t have to stretch as far. But at least a couple of the queens whose song is a total mismatch do surprisingly well, and in at least one instance, a queen with a song right up her alley misses the mark.
Watching the queens create their commercials (the song recording happens off camera) is a mishmash of some obvious winner contenders emerging, as well as some general confusion over what others’ commercials will look like in the final product. Overall, though, everyone comes into the werk room on Elimination Day feeling very confident … which, as Lydia B Kollins notes, means everyone should actually be nervous.
Before we see the commercials, we get a Quilted for Your Pleasure runway category, and while I usually keep most runway notes for non-design challenge episodes restricted to the power ranking, I must simply discuss one runway in particular. Joella, the Slaysian Diva of LA, comes out in what she describes as an entire quilted blanket. It looks much more like a mattress from where I’m sitting, with a face-hole cut out of it and a giant print of RuPaul’s Born Naked album cover photo. It is absurd. It is camp. It is Joella. She is truly an icon unlike any other.
Starting with the Vol. 1 commercial, we have Lana Ja’Rae and Lydia doing Morgan McMichaels and Mystique Summers’ fight from Season 2’s first-ever Untucked, but as a country song. This is cute enough, but Crystal Envy kinda steals the show as a human tumbleweed—a good lesson to not put anyone in your skit who could take focus from you! Joella’s Gospel-inspired take on Mariah Paris Balenciaga’s iconic “We Write the Stories” Untucked monologue from Season 3 is pretty off-base, unfortunately—the lip sync is loose and it’s a bit too wacky of a take for a moment that’s as sincere as this one.
Jewels Sparkles and Arrietty team up for Alyssa’s “Back rolls?” fight with Jade Jolie, and unfortunately for Arrietty, Jewels outshines her. Hormona Lisa gets a great song, a textured take on Shannel’s legendary nomination of herself to leave from Season 1’s final four episode, but to her credit, she makes it even better with her interpretation. Finally, Crystal’s own segment is a smash, a strongly directed take on Latrice Royale’s “romper room fuckery” speech after Season 4’s Snatch Game that she makes distinctly her own. It’s the strongest of Vol. 1 for certain.
As a group, Vol. 2 produces the better set of performances. Suzie Toot does a rock arrangement of Aja’s “Linda Evangelista” rant from Season 9, and it is terrific. She sells the shit out of the song, and makes the performance clip feel like a real music video. Sam Star and Acacia Forgot get a decidedly not ideal song—a tango take on Kandy Muse and Tamisha Iman’s Season 13 fight—but their teamwork truly makes the dream work. Onya Nurve is the best of the lot, though, doing a cabaret take on Laganja’s stand-up set from Season 6. She wisely directs her segment very tight on her face, with no distractions, allowing her killer lip sync to be the star. She’s not just best in show of her group, but of the whole episode.
Unfortunately, Vol. 2 ends with two bum notes. Lexi Love’s take on Jasmine Kennedie and Maddy Morphosis’ Season 14 Untucked fight offers up a strange interpretation that goes against the words. Similarly, Kori King goes too broad with her take on Kennedy’s iconic monologue from Season 7, and produces something that doesn’t really make sense. Ru does like a big swing, but especially in the latter case, it’s just too much without any real direction.
Onya, Crystal and Suzie are the tops of the week, and all three deserve their spots. I would argue Suzie has one of the best interpretations and videos using only herself, while Crystal makes the most of her whole group in her sketch. Onya, however, simply commands the camera from the second her segment begins. There’s no real argument for another winner here: Onya earns her first victory of the season, and $5,000 to boot.
Arrietty takes a tumble from nearly winning last week, getting knocked by the judges for fading next to her bestie Jewels. Michelle Visage also takes her to task for doing the same makeup every week—saying that while she doesn’t want to change her look, she can’t come out like she’s in CATS every episode. Meow, indeed! This is one of the harsher critiques we’ve heard from the panel in a while, and I’m all for it. I do think Michelle is trying to have her cake and eat it too by critiquing repetitiveness but not asking them to change what makes them special, but hey. There are a lot of runways in a single season. We gotta see something different sometime.
The bottom two are thus Joella and Kori, and Kori is not particularly worried about this situation. To her point, Joella is dressed as a blanket/mattress, and the song is the Pussycat Dolls’ “Buttons.” Being able to dance is important! It’s especially baffling that Joella keeps the outfit on for a whole verse—turning around to make the RuPaul print “lip sync” to the Snoop Dogg rap and failing spectacularly—before revealing she has a dance-friendly outfit underneath.
The end result is a TKO. Kori stays, and after pulling the wrong lever, Joella sashays away. It’s a tragic end for the delusional queen, but also an expected one. Joella brought us tremendous entertainment to start the season, and we can only hope that someone else steps up to the plate to bring even half the meme-friendly antics for the rest of Season 17.