rupauls drag race

With RuPaul’s Drag Race bringing back their Rate-a-Queen system for season 17, Billboard decided to rate each of the new queens every week based on their performance. Below, we take a look at this season’s Rusical to see which queens brought Broadway to the main stage. Spoilers ahead for episode 8. As Jewels Sparkles aptly […]

With RuPaul’s Drag Race bringing back their Rate-a-Queen system for season 17, Billboard decided to rate each of the new queens every week based on their performance. Below, we take a look at the iconic Snatch Game to see which queens nailed their celebrity impressions. Spoilers ahead for episode 7.

Even in a time when chaos reigns, some things are constants: the sky is blue; the grass is green; and the queens on RuPaul’s Drag Race will have to perform in the Snatch Game.

On Friday’s episode (aired Feb. 14) of Drag Race, the iconic challenge finally arrived as the 11 remaining queens were asked to deliver their best celebrity impersonations in the Match Game riff. Some queens — namely Suzie Toot — were confident in their abilities to deliver on the task at hand. Others rightly feared the expectations of the show’s longest-standing challenge.

Before we go any further, let’s make one thing clear — of all the Drag Race challenges, Snatch Game is famously the hardest. Not only do you need to create a semi-accurate recreation of a beloved star, but you also need to stay in that character for an extended period of time, with no script, making RuPaul laugh while there is no audience there to let you know how you’re doing. As Jinkx Monsoon, a two-time Snatch Game winner, told Billboard after season 14’s disastrous iteration of the challenge: “It’s one of situations where two things can be true at once – yes, Snatch Game happens every season, but also it’s either in your skill set or it’s not, and I don’t think it should really be held against queens for whom this is not their thing.”

With that being said … this was not a successful Snatch Game. While a few queens managed to get their laughs here (more on them later), most of the contestants were either forgettable or catastrophically bad. The two worst performers of the bunch, Crystal Envy and Lana Ja’Rae, wound up in the bottom — but with a lot of these performances, any number of the other girls could have easily wound up in their shoes.

Yet when it came time for a lip sync to Selena Gomez’s “Hands to Myself,” both Crystal and Lana turned it back on, delivering one of the most high-octane face-offs of the season. Ultimately, the judges decided to give Lana another shot in the competition, sending former frontrunner Crystal Envy home.

Below, Billboard takes a look back at episode 7 and ranks where our remaining contestants lie based on this episode and the season as a whole:

ELIMINATED: Crystal Envy

Image Credit: Courtesy of MTV

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