Last week on RuPaul’s Drag Race, another surprising choice was made when RuPaul opted to save Kenya Pleaser. Again.
Usually, a contestant’s third appearance in the bottom is their death knell. Only a handful of Drag Race queens have ever been able to evade this curse: Drag Race alumni Jujubee, Coco Montrese, and Jorgeous are among the few. Now Kenya has officially joined the club, but next to such legendary names, it doesn’t seem quite like she fits in there. Lots of people were shocked when Mia Starr was asked to sashay away. Many felt that Mia was robbed, just saying.
Meanwhile, we’ve been over here in our Edgic circlejerk, high-fiving over the fact that our paranoid, baseless assumptions about what Mia’s edit might be foreshadowing turned out to be true. Maybe this is all happening because Survivor 50 also kicked off earlier this week, stoking the intense fires within our reality-TV-loving hearts. Survivor is, after all, “straight content for queer people.”
Tonight, the queens will be faced with performing musical theatre on the Main Stage. This season’s Rusical is “Fannie,” a parody of the musical Annie. There’s another rhyming word RuPaul could have used for the title of a drag queen parody of Annie.
That’s right… “Grannie!” Get your minds out of the gutter, kids.
Oh wow. RuPaul, we’re begging you. Just put the girlies out of their misery now, while they’re still ahead. Forcing an octet of 30-something drag queens to dress up as and act like orphaned little girls for a play seems a little sketchy, to say the least. Please don’t let them all start belting out songs about the dick they’re gonna get “Tomorrow.” Or working the “Easy Street” corner? Wouldn’t be shocking if they turn Warbucks into a full-on sugar daddy.
Anyway, by the end of Episode 9, eight contestants will have become seven. Half of the Season 18 cast will be gone. Things do appear to be a little up in the air, in terms of front-runners at this point in time, so it’s a little harder to get a pulse on where each queen is at. Regardless of that, and even while not looking forward to watching the girls perform in “Fannie” tonight, we are powering through these Power Rankings to bring you our weekly predictions on each contestant’s current standing in the competition. These are only our opinions, assumptions, and projections, as well as commentary on the queens and Season 18 as a whole. And of course, as always, if we’re wrong… well, sue us.
8. Kenya Pleaser
Kenya is certainly living on borrowed time in terms of her Season 18 run, and lots of Racers were absolutely shocked last week when she was chosen to continue in the competition over Mia Starr, whom many in the fandom felt had outperformed Kenya in last week’s lipsync. The bitch didn’t even know the words, again! For the third time, and everyone is buzzing about how Mia was eliminated over Kenya, despite the latter visibly losing track of the lyrics.
Tonight in “Fannie,” it probably goes without saying that Kenya will be in hot water if she doesn’t memorize her lyrics. If Kenya somehow makes it through tonight’s episode without sashaying away, we will be shocked. Absolutely shocked. The only foreseeable workaround for Kenya to survive tonight’s challenge, and subsequent elimination, might be to obscure her mouth in some way.
But that won’t work. We already know she doesn’t know the words. It won’t quite be like a certain gag-worthy moment, whose ramifications still ripple through the Drag Race meta almost a decade later, when someone didn’t know her words:
This is not Season 9, bitch. You are not Valentina. This is not your “Greedy” moment, Kenya! Not only do you need to be perfect and beautiful like Linda Evangelista if you want to survive, you desperately need to do one thing:
Learn. The. Words. LEARN THE WORDS! Tonight, we don’t want to see any more “watermelon tuna” mishaps from Kenya, but we already know we will. Hence Kenya’s second placement dead-last in a row in the Power Rankings… In the words of the lovely Bianca Del Rio… “Need help packing?”
7. Discord Addams
First of all, that was a devastating robbery last week. Discord’s amazing, hilarious Snatch Game as The Pope didn’t even place in the top last week. Um, hello? Were RuPaul and I watching the same show, because for us, Discord deserved at least to have her successful performance acknowledged by the judging panel.
Anyway, Discord can’t even walk down the runway, so how is she planning to perform musical theatre numbers? Well, actually, come to think of it, she did execute a pretty decent cartwheel in her talent show performance. She didn’t move badly then, so what the fuck is it that makes her walk like that? This is supposed to be a fashion show, sweetie. Shoulders back, head forward, POSE!!!
Anyway, Discord probably hates musical theatre, just like she hates rainbows. That would definitely track for this Floridian punker. We can only hope she’ll be able to hang on for dear life in “Fannie,” and that by the end of tonight, Discord won’t be asked to sashay away.
6. Darlene Mitchell
It pains us a lot to be ranking Darlene low going into tonight. We’ve been fond of her quirky fashion and laidback demeanor since the beginning of the season, but Darlene isn’t exactly the loudest voice in the room, as we’ve pointed out.
She’s a little introverted, from what we can tell. Maybe she doesn’t have “theater kid” energy, which seems like it might be helpful to have to perform well in “Fannie.” Darlene’s performances in the girl group and in the talent show were serviceable, but they weren’t outrageously entertaining or memorable like musical theatre needs to be.
Admittedly, we’re biting our nails just a little bit for Darlene tonight, but all hope is not yet lost for this country queen. She could surprise us, which we would love!
5. Jane Don’t
Jane is starting to bore us. A lot. Last week, she earned some brownie points with RuPaul’s prehistoric ass by playing Truman Capote in the Snatch Game. How salacious! But outside of the outfit, having a lisp, and talking a lot about cum, we’re not sure Capote was truly served by Jane’s impression.
But, even though it sucked, Jane was in the top last week. As much as we wish it did, us ranking her violently low isn’t going to make her get eliminated faster. Believe us, we’ve been trying to do that for weeks now with Athena and Juicy’s rankings throughout the season so far. With only eight girlies left, and slimming down to a mere seven contestants after tonight, there’s starting to be nowhere to hide.
Which means, of course, that mediocrity is going to become less and less able to hide behind the truly awful train wrecks. As the number of queens remaining decreases, the scrutiny placed on each one increases.
So while Jane could continue to inexplicably wow the judges every week with her “just okay” performances, she just might not start looking so good compared to the likes of her competitors. Plus if Jane goes up against someone like Juicy in the bottom two, it could very easily play out similarly to Season 16’s “Body” lipsync.
4. Athena Dion
Overall, Athena seems to be landing solidly within the confines of the middle of the pack with her Season 18 run. She hasn’t done anything horrifically bad yet, except for that one completely hideous runway outfit she made, which we are still drinking to forget about, a month later.
But while Athena isn’t entirely flopping, she hasn’t impressed us very much. Everything we can recall about Athena seems to be pretty Werk Room-based. AKA, while she’s not performing. That doesn’t seem like a good indication of Athena’s ability to snatch attention and keep the audience’s eyes on her. Yes, she did win that one top two lipsync. To be fair though, that was up against Jane, who was giving nothing.
And now that her drag relative Mia Starr is out of the running, Athena has replaced Mia in the role of the one we think needs to do something really crazy to secure her place in the season finale, which is indeed right around the corner. So which will it be, Athena? The Swiffer, or the ping pong balls?
3. Juicy Love Dion
This one’s probably going to be a lock in the role of Fannie herself tonight. She’s far and away the best dancer in the group, and she’s short, so she can play a convincing orphaned little girl. Well… as convincing as a drag queen could be in that role, that is.
We’re getting kinda sick of this bitch, though. She’s a bit of an unsympathetic character. Kinda vapid, kinda shallow. She kicks ass in a lipsync, though, so she still probably won’t be going home even if she does face the bottom two again. We can only hope, though, that perhaps as the pickings get slimmer and the criteria for praise becomes even more demanding, maybe Juicy will land in the bottom enough times to sour her chances of taking the crown this season.
It makes us feel kinda nasty to be praying on her downfall like this, but hey. This is the entertainment industry, honey, it’s cutthroat! One day you’re in, the next, you’re out.
2. Myki Meeks
If Juicy doesn’t play Fannie, it might be Myki. She is also short and maybe a little orphan-like. Don’t ask us what we mean by that. But she has shown off some fabulous comedy acting skills throughout the season so far, most memorably last week when Willow Pill’s Drew Barrymore was entirely retconned from our collective memory and rapidly replaced with Myki’s hilarious and spot on impression of the OG Scream queen. Myki’s probably not going anywhere this week, and things are certainly looking up for this fun-sized queen.
1. Nini Coco
Last week when Nini played David Attenborough in the Snatch Game, she killed and clinched the challenge win. It’s so easy to root for our Mile High sister when she’s been doing so well! We have high hopes for Nini going into tonight. Her abilities will most likely lend themselves well to the challenge tonight, and even if the script is a cheesy, derivative nightmare to slog through, Nini’s overall careful attention to detail should serve her well.
Oh, and one last thing. We hope she does another one of those backflip cartwheel things tonight. When she did that in the talent show, it was so cool!
Photos courtesy of MTV
