Review: Rupaul’s All Stars Drag Race—”All Stars Snatch Game”

We take a close look at the second episode of Rupaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 2. It’s the first all-star snatch game!

Welcome to the second episode of Rupaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 2, the second reunion season of the best reality show on television. Or if that’s too general, welcome to an episode of television where men who dress up like women for a living dress up like famous women for the honor of getting to lip sync to Chic’s “Le Freak.” What a great show.

Even by its own lofty standards, Drag Race is knocking it out of the park this year. In this episode, we were treated to the eighth edition of Snatch Game, always a fan favorite. What celebrities will the queens choose to impersonate? Who will soar? Who will bomb? There are so many ways to do well in the Snatch Game, and so many ways to fail miserably, that it never fails to thrill. And because all of the girls on All Stars have been on the show before, they come ready with their best stuff…mostly.

But before we get to that, let’s talk about the other big event of the episode, drama division. For the first time in the show’s history, a queen voluntarily left the show. Adore Delano, despondent over the beating she took on the main stage last week, decided she’d had enough.

With a pair of popular albums under her belt (popular being a relative term), Adore Delano is one of the—if not the—most successful queen to come out of Rupaul’s Drag Race. That may be why she seems less able to take criticism of the kind that the other queens absorb or ignore. She’s found a style that works for her outside the reality show bubble, so why should she need to stay inside it?

Then again, nothing that happened to her was out of sync with her experience on Season 6. It’s hard to have too much sympathy for her after she “tapped out” after only one episode. She’s old enough to have realized what she was getting back into.

But then again…again…at 25, Adore is the youngest of the queens on offer. She’s been a wild ride over the past few years, going from scrappy drag queen to reality show contestant to legitimate musician back to reality show contestant. She may need a few more years before she’s as secure with herself as someone like Alaska.

It’s a shame that Adore won’t be around for the rest of the year (her choice of Jan Crouch in the Snatch Game had definite potential), but Drag Race doesn’t let the audience dwell on it for too long. There’s a Snatch Game to judge.

Every year, some of the performances on Snatch Game are terrific, some are middling, and some are garbage. That stays true this time, although I don’t think there were any disasters. Roxxxy Andrews’ impersonation of Alaska (the first time a queen has impersonated someone on the panel with them) was dire, but at least she got the look right.

But it was Alaska herself who stole the show. Mae West is a towering gay icon, and it’s hard to believe that no one chose her before now. (See also Judy Garland.) Alaska has the voice down—that’s the easy part—but her quick wit takes the impersonation into the stratosphere. She effortlessly played with West’s trademark double entendres (“When I’m good, I’m good. But when I’m bad I get a serious venereal disease.”) and had Ru rolling. It was perfect.

Katya was right on her heels with her impersonation of Björk. Again, this was a wonderful marriage of drag queen and celebrity. Katya specializes in random, nonsensical humor, and few fit that bill better than Björk. “How many bones do I win?” she asked after getting a match. Not missing a beat, Alaska-as-Mae-West shot back: “How many bones do you want?” These two dominated.

Alaska and Katya actually have a lot in common. At their core, they’re both work horses who wrap their considerable intellects in several layers of artifice and quirk. They deserved to be in the top this week, and I see one of them—probably Alaska—taking the contest in the end. If anyone still has doubts about this season’s big twist (the top two queens lip sync against each other, with the winning queen sending one of the bottom three home), seeing Alaska and Katya getting playful and interactive during their performance of “Le Freak” should put them to rest. The best two queens will lip sync every week. This is a good thing.

In the end, Alaska won the lip sync and sent home Tatiana for her tepid impersonation of Ariana Grande. Honestly, I thought Roxxxy was worse. Tatiana at least tried to crack some jokes—she even earned a laugh when she revealed that what Ariana Grande loved most about America was the nouns. Roxxxy had a look and a couple of catch-phrases, and it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Alaska spared Roxxxy because of their friendship. Of course, this kind of gamesmanship is probably exactly what the producers intended when they came up with this twist.

Next: Book review: If I Only Had a Duke

Odds and Ends

• Alaska to Adore: “I don’t want you to give in to giving up.” Is Alaska coming for RuPaul’s catch phrase crown?
• I don’t have a problem with the tough love approach Michelle employed with Adore during their talk, but maybe she could have taken the sunglasses off and looked her in the eye? Might have been nice?
• Do people really change? According to RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 2, no. No they don’t. Phi Phi O’Hara has been making noise about rehabilitating the reputation she earned as a bitch in Season 4, but here she was again, manipulating Roxxxy into changing her character and trying to undermine Alyssa. Maybe it’s a compulsive thing?
• Alaska as Mae West: “Why don’t you come on up and f**k me in the ass sometime?”
• Alyssa Edwards’ impersonation of Joan Crawford amounted to shouting random lines from Mommie Dearest for absolutely no reason. RuPaul summed her performance up best: “Well, that don’t make no kind of sense, but it sure is entertaining.”
• Katya is still the queen of the confessional cutaway. Here she is describing Roxxxy’s sorry impersonation of Alaska: “It’s like little league softball, and she has no arms. Or legs. It’s sad.” She also makes random Game of Thrones references. It’s impossible not to love her.
• The runway looks return this week. Theme is: rubber. Detox’s impersonation of Nancy Grace may have been so-so, but her red rubber outfit was easily the most striking of the night.
• Like Coco Montrese last week, Tatiana got a video message from RuPaul hinting that she might come back for “revenge.” Are we heading for a makeover episode with past queens, a la Season 7? I’m there.
• If Rupaul knows anything, it’s how to turn a catch phrase. Tatiana may have left this episode, but Rupaul still got in several mentions of “seeing with them hands.” If Tatiana does end up coming back, I give him three minutes before he says it again.