Accusations of cheating and stolen fabric! Arguments in the werk room! An early-season design challenge that’s not a ball! If you threw some Vaseline filter on the camera lens and squinted, you might believe that this is a Logo-era episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race. After a split premiere that proved divisive among the fandom (I wasn’t a fan, personally), this episode brings the heat in a way I was very much craving. Season 16 proved that the MTV era could combine the feistiness of Logo Drag Race with the sheen of VH1 Drag Race, but the question was whether Season 17 could keep it going. This episode is a very good sign that it can.
Monopoly is the sponsor of this week’s maxi-challenge: Monopulence! Yes, to invoke the great Mercedes Iman Diamond, you own everything, from Marvin Gardens to Park Place. In a cute bit, the queens each pull property deed cards from a Community Chest—and they win money for whatever property they pick! Joella (don’t forget the ’ella) gets us started by picking Pacific Avenue, a green property. For this, she earns $300 from Monopoly’s bank. Not bad! The name of the property doesn’t ultimately affect the design; it’s just the colour that will impact the materials each queen can work with.
We get a run of other picks without interruption: Suzie Toot gets the red Kentucky Avenue and picks up $220, while Lana Ja’Rae gets the most expensive property on the board, the blue Boardwalk, earning $400. Kori King gets Ventnor Avenue, yellow and worth $260, while Onya Nurve and Lydia B Kollins each nab one in an already-taken colour (Onya North Carolina Avenue in green for $300, Lydia Marvin Gardens in yellow for $280).
Then we see our first twist card drawn: Crystal Envy gets to steal a property from another player. She goes with Lana’s Boardwalk, pocketing her $400 in the process. Lana is stuck waiting for another turn while Hormona Lisa and Lexi Love draw our first orange properties (Tennessee Avenue for $180 and New York Avenue for $200, respectively). Sam Star picks up the other blue property, Park Place, and pockets $350. Acacia Forgot, who infamously won last week’s lip sync but still failed to send home Hormona Lisa because of the Badonkadunk twist, continues on her path of misfortune by drawing a “Go to Jail” card and missing her turn.
We don’t see Arrietty draw her actual red property card on camera (Indiana Avenue, $220), but we do see her draw the “Advance to Go” card, earning her an extra $200 for the largest overall prize total so far. The last two queens to draw who haven’t yet are Jewels Sparkles, who gets the green Pennsylvania Avenue and $320, and Lucky Starzzz, who picks up the orange St. James Place and $180.
Then Lana gets to go again, and in a bit of karma, she picks up the “Is The Railroad Still Running?” card that allows her to steal $200 from another queen. One guess as to who she picks: she pockets $200 of Crystal’s stolen Boardwalk dollars, then picks up Illinois Avenue for $240, ironically giving her the biggest total of all with $440. Acacia gets the last card, the yellow Atlantic Avenue, with $260 going into her pocket. Justice for the purple and brown properties, honestly.
Okay, now that that run of accounting is done and the queens have their properties, they are given pools of fabric to split up between all those with the same colour property cards. (Though they’re in “groups” in this way, this is not a team challenge, nor are the queens explicitly being judged directly against each other.) Like we’ve seen in many a modern season, this is not an unconventional materials challenge: the fabrics are all of nice quality, and all of the same colour. So really, this is just a monochrome challenge, although there’s the added dimension of creating an expensive-looking garment—hence the “opulent” part of the challenge name.
Lucky is thrown by the expectation that she must use “pretty fabrics.” She’s used to working with unexpected materials, and actually cannot sew. I feel for her on this, but I also have to question whether she’s caught a season of Drag Race in the last few years. These kinds of design challenges are much more common these days than unconventional materials challenges. I wish there were more of the latter! And I’m sure Lucky could tear one up! But she’s somewhat naive to think they wouldn’t have a more traditional design challenge in her season.
She’s not the only one who can’t sew, though: Joella can’t construct a garment in any way, shape or form. It’s actually kind of a gag just how unprepared Joella is for this, running on the assumption that she can just glide through the week and not experience the same problem down the line. Girl, there are multiple design challenges in almost every season! You’re gonna have the same issue down the line! Ru even tries to help her by saying Michelle Visage is gonna knock her for doing a simple bodysuit, but Joella just says she can’t actually construct anything else. Ruh roh!
In a real feat of messiness, Ru gives the queens the Rate-a-Queen results in a booklet—including how each individual queen voted. That’s more detail than last season’s queens were given, and it produces some gaggy consequences. We find out that Suzie was the top queen in the first week with Jewels as the runner-up, while Arrietty got to fourth place solely on the strength of Lana’s #1 rating boosting her. Onya gets into this with her a little bit, saying that their rankings of each other were unfair. Arrietty mostly just rolls her eyes at Onya. Overall, though, the first group’s ratings are sound and sane.
The same cannot be said for the second group, which went absolutely wild. Only Lexi and Hormona got unanimous results: Lexi got nothing but top two rankings, while Hormona was last by a significant margin. Crystal got second with four #2 rankings and three #4s—only notable because no one ranked her third, which is quirky. Seems like a lot of the other queens saved their third-place rankings to play a bit strategically, which may be how Lana somehow got #3 overall on the board. Arrietty’s #1 rating also obviously helped a ton. Sam was fourth, also boosted by Jewels’ #1 rating of her, while she’s stunned to see Lydia ranked her dead-last. Onya somehow got fifth (genuinely absurd result, she was top two-worthy), with only Joella giving her a #1 rating. Kori somehow got sixth, with not a single rating above fifth. Overall, I think these results make a fair argument as to why the queens do not rate each other every week.
But the drama doesn’t end there! On elimination day, the queens enter the werk room to tension between Lexi and Hormona. Off-camera, Lexi called out that Hormona suddenly showed up on set with a completed gown, with her own rhinestones all over it. That’s against the rules, so Hormona, now pissy with Lexi, has to spend the start of her day removing them. It feels like a pretty obvious attempt to skirt the rules on Hormona’s part, so I’m glad Lexi calls it out, and I’m glad that production holds her to the rules. (Though it’s interesting that Hormona is implying on Twitter that other queens used stones from home, too—specifically, if Lexi’s follow-up tweet is any indication, Suzie did.)
In another corner, however, we have Jewels telling Arrietty how Onya took the trim she needed to complete her garment. (This had come up the day before, but Jewels didn’t say anything to Onya then.) Onya overhears this, and confronts Jewels directly, offering an apology for not asking permission for the trim. The problem, as Jewels asserts, is that Onya did ask permission, but Jewels said no. This goes back-and-forth for a while, with Onya asserting that they all were meant to share in their assigned colour’s available fabrics, and Jewels’ look is gorgeous anyway. Jewels won’t accept Onya’s arguments, and while I do think she’s in the right, she’s a bit prickly about it. It’s a messy situation, especially considering how Jewels chooses to handle it, but they both look great on the runway at the end of the day. All’s well that ends well for now, but I wouldn’t expect either of them to forget this.
I’ll go in depth on every queen’s look in the power ranking, but I do want to mention some notable looks: Arrietty’s take on the “Real Housewives of Mexico City” is dramatic and gorgeous. Kori’s canary yellow dress is on brand for her, and well-styled, but it’s a bit short for an “opulent” look. Joella delivers a bodysuit with extra fabric glued on, as we knew she would. Onya looks rich as hell in a stunning garment, complete with the trim that, it must be said, really does bring the whole look together. Sam’s sapphire take on Mae West is a marvel of both construction and style.
Unfortunately, no one on the runway looks worse than Lucky. She chooses to not only design a simple garment, constructing it in a way that both moves and sits oddly, but she opts for a more traditional mug than she usually wears. This is, to put it bluntly, a disastrous idea. Her face looks terrible; there’s no sugarcoating it. Every subsequent cut to her face feels harsher than the last. Worse even is that it’s such an unforced error. This is not Michelle telling Dusty Ray Bottoms to not paint dots on her face, or telling Max to stop wearing gray hair. No one is expecting Lucky to go out of her comfort zone. She does it all on her own, seemingly befuddled by the “pretty fabrics” design challenge, and slaps on a lifeless orange wig to add insult to injury.
Ultimately, Sam wins out, which I think is the right call. Arrietty and Onya’s looks are great, but I would say Arrietty’s is a feat of styling the whole package, while Sam’s is both styled well and is the most impressively made garment. She’s inherited her mother’s facility with a sewing machine, it seems! Meanwhile, even though I have a level of respect for the audacity of Onya’s use of Jewels’ trim, I do think it would’ve been a bad look for her to win for it.
Kori is ultimately called safe after a needlessly close call with the bottom, which leaves Lucky and Joella fighting it out to avoid pulling a Badonkadunk Tank lever. The lip sync is to “The Way That You Love Me” by Paula Abdul—been a long time since we’ve had a Paula song on the show!—and it’s obvious when Lucky’s shoes go flying early that she’s lost this. She struggles with the words and is generally messy in the performance. Joella, for her part, is focused and compelling. It’s a fair win. Sadly, after Lucky does not pull a lever that activates the Tank, she is sent home as the Porkchop of this season.
Overall, this is a fun episode, and one that gives me more faith in this season than I had just a week ago. The looks are pretty uniformly great—I had about five or six that I think could’ve been in the top three—and there are already some sparks of real drama among the cast. If tensions continue to rise, and the queens stay confrontational with each other (not just talking shit in corners), then we could have a very fun season on our hands.