‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ Season 17, Episode 7 recap: Snatched by the nails

I have never been an “Abolish Snatch Game” person. I’ve always found the calls to retire RuPaul’s Drag Race’s signature challenge to be either reactionary, usually in response to a fan favourite’s failure to adequately perform, or short-sighted. Celebrity impersonation is a cornerstone of drag, so having some kind of challenge that celebrates it is crucial, but attempts to find replacements like Gaff-In or Snatch Game: The Rusical have fallen flat. Even small twists on the format, like Snatch Game of Love, haven’t proven successful.

Besides, it’s a pretty fair challenge all-told. Though not everyone is well-suited for Snatch Game, we’ve seen enough brilliant performances (Tatianna’s Britney Spears) and creative solutions (Aquaria’s Melania Trump) from non-comedy queens for me to believe that anyone can succeed in Snatch Game with the right strategy. It’s an obstacle for some more than others for sure, but the same can be said of the Ball, or the Rusical. Drag Race should feel like some hurdles are harder to clear than others.

After watching Season 17’s Snatch Game, however … well, I’m still not calling for Snatch Game’s demise, but I am inclined to call for its reform. Because this Snatch Game? This is a disaster. This is as bad as Season 14’s infamous Snatch Game in my book, though perhaps not as disappointing. (On average, this group of queens is rougher in the challenges than Season 14’s cast was.) While you can blame the cast for not delivering any iconic performances, I actually think the fault lies squarely on the show’s doorstep, with the judges as the primary culprits.

I actually let out a chortle when RuPaul introduced Snatch Game to the queens in this episode, telling them to pick a “celebrity” to “impersonate.” Watching any modern edition of this challenge would tell you that impersonations being important went out the window when historical figures came into play (like Lana Ja’Rae’s Rosa Parks this season), and we’re long past the Snatch Game characters being celebrities only. Hell, this season, we get not just concepts (Arrietty plays Cupid), but gender-flipped concepts (Jewels Sparkles plays “Miss Big Feet,” aka a female Bigfoot). Really the only guideline that matters is making Ru laugh—but that’s gone from simply the way to win to being the only enforced rule in the whole challenge.

All the problems become clear in this episode’s judging. Not really when it comes to the lows: Lana and Arrietty both struggle, landing Lana in the Lip Sync for Your Life for a second time, but Crystal Envy plays a real celebrity, Nicole Richie, and still has to lip sync after bombing. No, the issue lies more with the queens designated as being in the top or just safe. Forgive the more free-form recap than usual, but we need to hop around a bit to get at the heart of what’s happening here.

Lexi Love decides to play Gilbert Gottfried, and she is incompetent at Snatch Game. I don’t use that term critically, but descriptively: she is actually unable to perform in the challenge. She nopes out of every line before she’s even finished speaking, curses her performance under her breath and basically removes herself from being an active participant in the game. She is bad at Snatch Game, and she herself would agree with that assessment. There’s something funny about the way in which she flops—especially in an overall disappointing crop, it’s fun to laugh at her efforts—but there’s no denying she’s terrible.

But the judges actually place Lexi in the top this week. Michelle Visage tells her she flopped, but that it was actually so bad, it was great. “You flopped funny” are her actual words. The judges are nothing short of effusive about Lexi. It’s actually wild to watch. To draw a comparison, imagine if a queen failed to dress their partner in drag at all during the makeover, but their model walk together on the runway was so fierce that the judges didn’t care. That’s what’s happening with the praise of Lexi’s performance. I say this as a Lexi stan: it is ridiculous, and it speaks to how Snatch Game is utterly rudderless in terms of judging criteria right now.

This is further exemplified in Sam Star’s critiques. Sam is in the top this week, which the judges seem actively annoyed by. She plays pageant queen-turned-QVC star Kim Gravel, and it’s an on-point Snatch Game performance. She’s prepared with jokes, riffs on the fly and interacts the most with her fellow performers. All the things that used to be considered the hallmarks of a great Snatch Game! But the judges barely bother to praise Sam, beyond Michelle’s note that it was technically good. They’re more obsessed with telling Sam she’s too polished, and to let the rougher edges show. It is, to be blunt, one of the worst sets of critiques I’ve ever heard on the show. Imagine doing everything right in a challenge, only to be told that actually, you were too prepared—especially after hearing that your competitor was so bad she was actually good.

Jewels is actually just as prepared as Sam while playing Miss Big Feet, but she seemingly gets points for being “messy” in a way the judges like. On a pure performance level, she’s actually pretty great. She’s funny, with a deep voice and some great jokes. As much as I might take issue with the fake character, it does still take chops to make a fake character funny. (We see how that’s not a given with Arrietty’s utterly nonsensical take on Cupid.) Other than the challenge’s victor, she’s the only queen who gets purely positive critiques.

Onya Nurve is our winner, and she’s the one in the top I have absolutely no quibbles with. She plays Eddie Murphy (a man—remember when that was controversial?), with lots of Nutty Professor quotes locked and loaded, and she’s very funny. Guest judge Quinta Brunson makes the very smart observation that through her Eddie, Quinta actually got to know Onya, which is the mark of a great performance. Jinkx Monsoon’s Little Edie told us the kind of queen Jinkx is. Chad Michaels’ take on Cher was the kind of performance only someone who spent that kind of time and energy becoming her could give. Onya’s performance isn’t on that legendary level, but it gets the job done. And it’s relieving to simply see someone win for impersonating a celebrity, doing it well and still making Ru laugh.

I imagine there will be several viewers who do laugh more at Lexi’s performance than Sam’s. That’s fine! I chuckled at Lexi’s swings-and-misses, and I won’t be quoting Sam’s Kim Gravel any time soon. And despite her made-up character, I actually think Jewels is the second-best performer of the week. But this is about precedent. Snatch Game has fully derailed, and it’s now going over a cliff. It’s not a celebrity impersonation challenge anymore: it’s an episode to pick a character, any character, and just do whatever will make Ru laugh. That’s not a challenge. Challenges have criteria, ways to win and rules. The judging this week throws all that out the window more completely than we’ve ever seen before. As a result, queens giving halfway-decent performances (Kori King as Big Ang) as actual celebrities (Lydia B Kollins as David Lynch) are simply ushered to safety.

You could argue that the changes in judging criteria are simply the challenge evolving. And while it’s true that change isn’t inherently bad, I’d argue that in this case, it is. Are we really getting iconic performances out of this evolution? Think about it: the last truly legendary Snatch Game performance, which went viral a million times over and is often cited as perhaps the best of all time, was Jinkx’s Judy Garland. A queen impersonating a celebrity and doing a damn good job of it—imagine that.

In an ironic twist, this week’s eliminated queen is actually one of the few who faces the challenge head-on: Crystal. The writing is seemingly on the wall for Crystal during Ru’s walk-through, as Ru declares her a queen who takes herself too seriously. Credit to the Jersey girl: she really tries with her Nicole, picking a ditzy blonde who isn’t far from Crystal’s own drag character, and transforming her face for the performance. (Although what the hell was that makeup? It was scary!) She’s just not quick on her feet, fails to properly volley with Ru and her werewolf runway isn’t enough to save her from the bottom two. 

She faces off against Lana, whose Rosa Parks is DOA when she misses the very first bus joke, to Selena Gomez’s “Hands to Myself.” Lana just fits the song better. To be fair, this isn’t a blowout battle by any means. Crystal fights hard, but you can see her just trying a bit more and missing the target a bit farther. There’s an effortlessness to Lana’s performance that I can appreciate, although I wouldn’t mind feeling her put more effort in when it comes to the challenges. Considering the two queens’ track records so far, you’d expect Crystal to make it out of this alive. But alas, she sashays away.

I blame myself, honestly. I just wrote in last week’s edition of Wig! that this season was demonstrating why the MTV Era of Drag Race is a big improvement over the VH1 era. I should know better than to test fate. This episode isn’t terrible as a whole—I actually really like the Nailed It runway—but it’s a frustrating one. Very rarely is it fun to sit through a bad Snatch Game, and this one is indeed quite dismal. But to throw it back to Season 14, there was something satisfying to seeing Ru and the judges come down hard on the queens for failing. It feels so much worse to see incoherent judging that renders Snatch Game incomprehensible as a challenge.

So consider this my formal appeal: reform Snatch Game. Bring it back to its roots. Require characters to be actual celebrities (any gender is fine—it’s a construct, tear it apart), with public knowledge of what they sounded and acted like available so there’s a reference to compare the impersonation to. The ultimate goal can still be to make Ru laugh, but there should be a pathway for queens to follow. At the core of Snatch Game is a great challenge. It’s why it’s given us so many iconic moments and lines from legendary performers. But in this season, in this format, it is an anchor weighing down what has otherwise been a great run of episodes.

Untucking our final thoughts

Let’s talk about Suzie Toot. (In another universe, this whole recap was about Suzie this week, but I considered the fate of Snatch Game more pressing.) Suzie plays Ellen Greene, the iconic Little Shop of Horrors star, and she is incredibly impressed with herself. She thinks Little Shop fans will be enamoured with “the very small isms” she brings to the performance. Well, Suzie, I gotta tell you: I love Little Shop, and I did not appreciate any of the isms. Suzie’s performance is bad, as Kori tells her to her face, featuring mostly Suzie mumbling through punchlines. It’s Ellen Greene-esque, sure, but that doesn’t make it a good or funny Snatch Game. It’s the same joke over and over again, although you can barely understand it thanks to her delivery. Suzie resists the other queens’ feedback because she believes they simply don’t get her references, but this goes back to her clown look vs. her “male Lucille Ball” look from last week. Both are references, but one is stylish and draggy, while the other is a hat-on-a-hat. Something simply being a reference doesn’t make it good. Suzie would be wise to learn from this safe placement: her sisters may not always get her references, but they’re not always wrong about her performances.

I once again Forgot Acacia in writing this recap, and I am frankly gagged that she has made it all the way to Episode 8. But hey, she plays Trisha Paytas and isn’t as bad as Sugar was two seasons ago. In this episode, among these performances, that’s enough to be called safe.

Alyssa Edwards comes to the werk room for Ru’s walkthrough this week, and even gets to be one of the contestants in Snatch Game! It’s always good to see Alyssa, and she and Sam have a pageant queen mind-meld when they talk. I did laugh, though, at Sam’s Franken-quote confessional declaring her as the winner of Global All Stars. That season hadn’t aired yet when this episode was filmed!

Ru conducts a formal investigation into Kori’s love of netted shoes. “Are you dancing in these?” a perplexed Alyssa asks.
“She ain’t dancing,” Ru interjects. “She was just walking the runway.”

I’m actually very glad Onya still wins despite not performing as Glodean White, despite Ru’s appeals. While Ru may say following the “clues” he leaves behind is the key to success in this competition, he will almost always respect a queen who goes her own way and does it well.

“Gay I,” an Alexa-like device shaped as a pink butt plug, is the other contestant in Snatch Game. It’s all fun and games joking about AI until it takes over the planet. I’ve seen Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part 1!

As I mentioned in the recap, Abbott Elementary creator and star Quinta Brunson is our guest judge this week, and she is a true bright spot in an otherwise disappointing episode. Like Paul W. Downs a couple weeks ago, Quinta’s feedback is specific, precise and actually helpful to the queens. She correctly notes that Lana didn’t go for anything funny with her choice for Rosa Parks’ voice, knocks Crystal for failure to improv about Lionel Richie as Nicole and delivers the frankly incredible line, “This is dark, but I’d abort that baby.” In all of the Snatch Game episode, the funniest and most memorable quote comes from Quinta.

Hormona Lisa left her bob in the werk room. I’d love it if, Dahlia Sin-in-the-broccoli-suit-style, the bob started showing up every week. It has a mind and life of its own!

The next episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race will air Friday, February 21, at 8 p.m. EST on MTV in the U.S. and on Crave in Canada. Check back every Monday 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 month.