‘RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars 8’ Episode 5 recap: Snatched away

A lot of times I’ll write the RuPaul’s Drag Race power ranking before I write my recap. (There’s a point to this peek behind the curtain, I promise.) Sometimes it’s a timing thing: I have only so much time before I have to do something else, so I’ll whip through the ranking first. Sometimes I’m not really sure what I want to write about the episode, so I use the ranking to get more clarity on my thoughts.

And sometimes I just really don’t want to write about what happens in an episode. I’ll write the ranking, the final thoughts, even the tweets for my pieces before I dive into the recap. This week, folks, brings us one of those times. Because this week’s episode of All Stars 8, in which the queens play Snatch Game of Love, leaves me feeling like doing just about anything other than thinking about what happens in it.

That’s not necessarily a smack at the Snatch Game itself, although I do think it’s time that we retire the Snatch Game of Love. It was an interesting experiment, but especially seeing it return after a season off for All Stars 7 exposes just how insufficient it is as a format. Cutting the queens in half deprives them of crucial interaction opportunities, as does the focus on responding to the “Snatchelor.” It also means that, when most of the good performances are in one group, the other group is absolutely unbearable to watch. (This has happened in basically every single iteration, to varying degrees.)

But no, my issue with this episode isn’t related to the Snatch Game at all. It’s the absolutely crushing development that comes roughly halfway through: Heidi N Closet quits.

It’s not just that Heidi quits—she’s certainly been hinting at something coming online—but how it happens. It’s theoretically a culmination of the storyline we’ve seen of Heidi’s alliance with tourmates Jimbo and Kandy Muse, which took a turn last week as Heidi promised the imminent spilling of some scalding tea. At the time, we weren’t sure exactly what that was—only that it involved Kandy and something said off-camera. This episode frustratingly continues the trend of action happening off-camera, making for an unsatisfactory viewing experience.

Apparently, Heidi told Jimbo that what Kandy told her, off-camera, was that they would need to eliminate Jimbo when they had the chance. Kandy heard about this from Jimbo, and vehemently denied it, but it doesn’t spill out into the open until after Snatch Game. It’s actually another conflict that leads us there—but this one is much less aggravating. (It is, however, a bit silly.)

During the Snatch Game of Love, Heidi-as-Blackbeard the Pirate (yes, you read that right) plays alongside Jessica Wild as Iris Chacón, Jaymes Mansfield as Jennifer Coolidge, and, most crucially to this story, Kahanna Montrese as her drag mother, Coco Montrese. Kahanna’s Coco is dreadful, all jokes about looking orange and angrily reacting. It’s actually a bizarre impression for someone’s drag daughter to do of them, considering how tightly focused it is on one TV moment of Coco’s. Heidi razzes her about her poor performance, trying to get some banter going by giving her a map and telling her to find the joke.

Kahanna doesn’t take this well. She argues that Heidi is kicking her while she’s down—how is she supposed to banter when she can’t even rally with Ru? When she confronts Heidi about this in the workroom, Heidi is shocked and upset by it. She insists she didn’t mean anything harmful by it, and insists she would never try to sabotage Kahanna. I personally take Heidi’s side in this: she’s clearly just trying to get typical Snatch Game banter going, and it’s not her fault Kahanna can’t rally. Is she a bit mean-spirited about it? Maybe, but so was Monét X Change as Maya Angelou when she took a dig at Mo Heart’s Maxine Waters. Mo bit back: “Aren’t you dead?” This gave us Monét’s signature moment in the challenge: “Like dust, still I rise.”

Still, that doesn’t happen here, so Heidi tries to apologize to her sister. But it’s then that Kandy decides to jump in, and everything quickly goes to shit.

Kandy questions why Heidi told Jimbo what she did. Heidi not only stands by it, but drags Alexis Michelle in as a witness to the conversation. Alexis seems to at first confirm with a nod that Kandy did say what Heidi claims, but then says in a confessional she’s just trying to “flatline” and stay out of this dispute. Pushed by Kandy, Alexis denies hearing what Heidi is claiming, and Jimbo doesn’t know what to believe. The whole thing peters out quickly, but the air is thick with tension in the aftermath. “The room is dead silent—you could hear a rat piss on cotton,” Heidi says in a confessional.

Heidi tells the other queens to vote her out later that day, because she doesn’t like this energy. Then, she changes her mind: “We don’t even have to vote tonight.” She leaves the room, and after a couple of quick exchanges with Kandy and LaLa Ri, leaves the competition.

To call this “abrupt” is an understatement. It’s remarkably unsatisfying to watch play out, as the conflict—which is largely off-camera!—comes to a head quickly and burns out just as fast. Even Alexis collapsing into one of her melodramatic crying jags can’t make this mess entertaining. It’s just bad television, and it results in one of the only queens who felt like a real threat to win this season going out in a non-gameplay elimination. 

I don’t blame anyone for this, least of all Kandy (since it’s very possible she never said what Heidi accused her of), but I truly wish it hadn’t happened. Saying someone like Jimbo is a threat shouldn’t be the source of all this sturm und drang—hell, Alexis herself notes that she’s a target as a frontrunner with two wins during a cold-open confessional. But Heidi already was feeling ready to leave a couple of episodes ago, so it feels like it just took a slight conflict to push her out the door. The rest of the episode feels a bit like a sleepwalk as a result, which is a worrying sign. All Stars 8 has already had a tough time building momentum, and this development just cuts it off at the knees.

I suppose we should talk about the top and bottom performers in Snatch Game, although to be honest, this is also an underwhelming development. Jaymes as Jennifer Coolidge and Alexis as Bea Arthur do well, but there’s no stopping Jimbo this go-around. Her take on Shirley Temple is absolutely batshit, complete with a tap number that literally stops the show. She delivers the kind of humour that is right up both Ru’s and Drag Race’s alley, and despite fellow former Snatch Game winner Alexis’s best attempts to keep up, there’s really no argument as to who will come out on top. Jimbo’s Adam-and-Eve reveal for the Reveal Yourself runway category seals the deal, and she takes home her third maxi-challenge win.

The fact that Jimbo’s win is deserved makes it no less of a problem for the season’s momentum, though. Considering Heidi’s departure, and premiere challenge winner Kahanna’s latest trip to the bottom two alongside the only other maxi-challenge winner, Jessica, it just feels like the field is wide open for Jimbo’s run to the end. I may not be the biggest Jimbo fan, but I can’t deny that she’s dominating this competition. If only she could win a lip sync.

Speaking of which! This week’s Lip Sync Assassin who gets to beat Jimbo is Season 14’s Jasmine Kennedie. She looks fucking fantastic, and if there was any doubt she deserved the LSA title in her season after going out in the LaLaPaRuZa, she more than proves her mettle in this performance. She almost seems to be toying with Jimbo at first, starting the song slowly with a reveal out of a dramatic gown. But then she does a split, turns the dial all the way up to 11, and it’s over. Condragulations to whoever gets a chance at $30,000 next week—or $40,000 the following week, if Jimbo wins again!

While the votes were apparently there to send Kahanna home, Heidi’s quit inspires Ru to cancel the elimination this week. (“I will continue to be blonde,” Ru announces as a fake-out, in one of the episode’s truly delightful moments.) Listen, congrats to the bottom two, but I can’t help but feel this is a rule Tatianna would’ve appreciated back in All Stars 2’s Snatch Game. Incidentally, the fact that there is no elimination this week likely means there’s no returning queen challenge planned. In All Stars 2, Ru simply brought back both Tatianna and Alyssa Edwards to fill Adore Delano’s spot; the fact that they don’t simply do the same this season means there probably isn’t a chance to do so. 

Anyway, the top seven will all move on to compete in this season’s Rusical. Which is nice! But that’s about as enthused as I can get about it.

Let’s be frank: All Stars 8 is kind of a bust so far. This cast isn’t gelling on camera, and apparently are doing too much of their business off of it. The challenges are uninspired, and the Fame Games just makes every elimination muddled and muted. Even the runways aren’t delivering the way we expect on All Stars. Ah well. At least we only have… seven episodes left?! Can that possibly be right? Hoo boy, it’s gonna be a bumpy ride.

Untucking our final thoughts

✨ The Other Half of the Story, Fame Games Edition: Heidi isn’t eligible for the Fame Games, so we just get to see the four previously eliminated queens’ reveal looks this week. Naysha Lopez’s polka dot reveal look is quite cute, but my absolute favourite is Mrs. Kasha Davis’s repeated black-and-white reveals.

✨ The Other Half of the Story, Heidi Edition: Just a note that in Untucked, as she packs up her stuff, Heidi stands by her story. I’m not sure we’ll ever get to the bottom of what happened—which is what makes it all the more frustrating that the queens were handling things off-camera like this.

✨ The Other Half of the Story, Deliberations Edition: An odd thing happens in deliberations: Alexis proposes, and Kahanna agrees, that Heidi would’ve been in the bottom this week instead of Jessica. (I disagree with this, to say the least.) As a result, there’s no real debate as to who should go home: the vote is unanimous, including Jimbo’s, to send Kahanna home.

✨ Darienne Lake wrote “See you soon?” in her lipstick message, leaving Jimbo wondering if it’s about a twist. Kandy shuts that down: “She don’t know shit.”

✨ Love a good reveal—shout-out to Sasha Velour’s book The Big Reveal—but I think we can retire reveal-based runway categories for a while. There are just too many every time we do this that aren’t actually reveals. (Looking at you, Kahanna and LaLa.)

✨ Jimbo cleans LaLa’s breastplate for her. “A white person cleaning for me!” LaLa exclaims. “Change has come!”

✨ Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers, the duo behind the Las Culturistas podcast, are our guest judges this week. Fun fact: back in the day, Bowen and Matt recapped Drag Race for Vulture! So it’s very fun to see them in this capacity. I tip my cap to Bowen for a couple of particularly sharp critiques; love what he says to Kahanna about her choices for Coco making it hard for her to vary her reactions. However, I have to disagree with Matt’s declaration that Jimbo is the “best physical comedian Drag Race has ever seen.” Personally, I’d give it to Ginger Minj for her John Waters tribute alone before I’d give it to Jimbo.

✨ Jessica demonstrates exactly what to do if you get negative critiques on this show: own your failure, laugh about it and make clear you’ve learned for the next time. Ru doesn’t like to see queens beat themselves up too much, but she also doesn’t like the judges’ criticisms to be ignored.

✨ Repeat lip sync songs are destined to become more and more frequent, particularly as international seasons’ songs are brought onto the flagship American shows. Still, it’s a bit jarring to hear Dua Lipa’s “Hallucinate” not two years after Krystal Versace and Vanity Milan performed it in UK Season 3. Even if you want to stick to Dua’s discography—or even just Future Nostalgia!—there are some other options. Give us a “Cool” lip sync, Ru!

✨ Jimbo extends her loss record to six, which puts her just behind Trinity the Tuck for most losses at seven—and, as mentioned last week, she lacks Trinity’s five wins. Funny enough, I actually think this is Jimbo’s best performance yet; she just goes up against a lip sync wrecking ball in Jasmine. Had she pulled this out against Shannel last week, I think she would’ve been $10,000 richer right now.

✨ LaLa references Kandi Burruss’s viral song “Legs, Hips, Body” while entering the werk room. Where is that Lip Sync for Your Life?

✨ Kandy-as-Renee-Graziano’s nickname for LaLa-as-Sukihana? “A fucking whore.”

The next episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars will stream Friday, June 9, at 3 a.m. EDT on Paramount+ in the U.S. and on Crave in Canada. Check back every weekend after new episodes for our recaps and power rankings, and subscribe to our drag newsletter Wig! for exclusive Drag Race content delivered straight to your inbox every Tuesday afternoon.