RuPaul’s Drag Race: All Stars S3E4 review: All Stars Snatch Game

A weak round of Snatch Game and a potent cocktail of drama results in the oddest episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race: All Stars yet.

The cliché about Snatch Game is that it separates the potential winners from the also-rans (or, to borrow RuPaul’s phrase, it determines “who is a contender and who is just roadkill”). I don’t think that’s true this season. We already know the potential winners. BenDeLaCreme has been tearing up the competition since episode 1, and she’s still on a roll. Her impersonation of Hollywood Squares mainstay Paul Lynde is perfection, from the look to the voice to the attitude. She has plenty of jokes (“This is the most queens I’ve been surrounded by since Charles Nelson Reilly’s pool party.”), but like Alaska doing Mae West on the last All Stars Snatch Game, they’re folded so naturally into the performance that we almost don’t clock them. We just know that we’re laughing. Hers is the only really great performance of the night.

We also know the also-rans. Before this episode, Chi Chi DeVayne had been in the bottom three times. No one — least of all Chi Chi — seems surprised when that becomes four. “Just be fair,” she tells BenDeLa during their pre-lip sync sit-down, clearly expecting to be sent home. “Just be fair.”

And Chi Chi deserved her spot. She chooses to impersonate Maya Angelou, an interesting pick that does absolutely nothing for her. (RuPaul: “Why does the caged bird sing?” Chi Chi: “I don’t know why the caged bird sings, darling.”) Her idea seems to have been to rhyme her answers, because poetry, but she can’t think on her feet fast enough to make it work.

Oh, and she misspells Maya Angelou on her place card. She misspells the name of her own character. And her character is a writer. Bye. Love you, but bye.

But the episode tries its darndest to convince us otherwise, and that’s where we see another division forming. Forget the contenders and the also-rans: this episode shows us the divide between those who know how to play the reality TV game and those who don’t. And when it comes to the former, Shangela reigns supreme.

For the Snatch Game, Shangela chooses to impersonate Black-ish star Jenifer Lewis, and it’s sassy fun. (RuPaul: “Maya Angelou, poet, activist, actress…” Shangela: “Spelling bee winner.”) But she really shines outside the challenge. Take the lip sync to Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl,” where Shangela faces off with BenDeLa…again. Both contestants do well, with Shangela making particularly good use of a box of Altoids, and Rupaul gives them a joint win, which means they both get to eliminate a girl. BenDeLa chooses Chi Chi, because she misspelled the name of her own character, but Shangela … Shangela gets creative.

“The person that I’ve chosen, I don’t want them to feel like it’s anything personal in any way,” she starts, purposefully making the audience think of a tiff she had with Trixie Mattel earlier in the episode. “This person left RuPaul’s Drag Race not winning the crown, but definitely going forward as a winner, and creating a career for themselves.”

Outside Drag Race, Trixie Mattel has had a widely-watched web series, her own show on Viceland, and a successful album, so anyone who follows this show will automatically think Shangela is referring to her. “I also chose Chi Chi,” she finishes. Oh.

BenDeLa makes no illusion of the fact that she’s going to eliminate Chi Chi, but Shangela draws it out, and I think she does that because she knows it’ll make for good TV. It makes me wonder about that tiff earlier in the episode, when Shangela spots an insulting note Thorgy left for Trixie and takes personal offense, or seems to. Trixie: “How did Thorgy’s feelings about Shangela make Shangela mad at me now?”

Maybe Shangela really was offended. Or maybe she saw the opportunity for some feud-fueled screentime and grabbed it. Either way, we were entertained.

Trixie, on the other hand, seems to be cracking under the strain. She came into the competition a favorite but has been stuck in the middle of the pack all season. And in the Snatch Game, her RuPaul impersonation seemed a little “out of place,” to borrow Shangela’s phrase. “Y’all told her on the Internet it was funny. I blame y’all.”

I don’t want to go too deep down the conspiracy hole here, but I didn’t think Trixie’s performance was as bad as RuPaul and the ominous Drag Race soundtrack were making it seem. I laughed at a couple of her bad puns, like when she read Bebe Zahara Benet for her impersonation of Grace Jones. “You Miss Jones was not graceful.” It’s not gonna win the Mark Twain Prize for Humor, but it’s a dad joke after RuPaul’s own heart, and it deserves a chuckle.

The problem is that, like last week, Trixie’s brand of humor is a little too small for the room. It works well when it’s just her and a camera, but on Snatch Game, attitude is almost more important than the jokes themselves, and her insulated take on RuPaul didn’t fill the room like it needed to. Even Aja, impersonating legendary New York drag queen Crystal LaBeija, got more laughs than Trixie, and all she did was repeat Crystal’s lines from the 1967 documentary The Queen. But she repeated them with feeling.

This all leads to Trixie having a mini-breakdown on the main stage, admitting to the judges, the girls, God and America that the pressure is getting to her. In the end, Chi Chi goes home, so Trixie will have a chance to reclaim her mojo, but at this point, maybe what we’ve learned is that Drag Race isn’t the ideal showcase for her talent.

Or maybe she’ll come back next week and slay everyone. You never can tell with this show. But at this point, it looks like we’re staring down the barrel of a BenDeLaCreme vs Shangela finale. In her own quiet way, BenDeLa seems as crafty at the reality TV game as Shangela, downplaying her non-stop victory parade with self-effacing jokes and an abundance of humility. Is it genuine, or is BenDeLa just trying to keep the other girls from targeting her? And when is this whole Handmaid’s Tale business going to pay off? And why didn’t we get a full runway? And how could Chi Chi have chosen to impersonate Maya Angelou without learning to spell her own name?

All Stars season 3 is getting me worked up. RuPaul, you’ve done it again. Shangela has nothing on you.

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Random Ruflections

Let’s talk about the runway real quick. The theme was “flower power.” It was fun but presented in abbreviated format, a casualty of switching from hour-and-a-half to hour-long episodes. Over the past few weeks, I’ve wished the episodes were shorter, and now I wish they were longer so I could take in the queens’ outfits. It just goes to show: you can never please anyone ever.

Shangela stands out for her distinctive, busy look, which includes a waist-length veil, a tri-corner headdress and a fake pregnancy. (Extra points for holding her baby bump the whole time.) Bebe goes the other way, keeping things simple with an elegant sheer dress laced with wraparound black roses. And while Chi Chi has been tanking in the challenges, she’s looked consistently polished on the runway, turning it out this week in a little white skirt, a sheer top and strategically placed lilies.

• Trixie on her Snatch Game look: “Let me guess: I’m going to be doing Patricia Arquette on the television shoe Medium?”
• About Thorgy’s note to Trixie: Part of it called Shangela shady. The other part said, “Cocktails. Also don’t forget to wipe.”
• You gotta love Chi Chi getting scandalized in the background when RuPaul is reading Shangela for her Snatch Game choice.
• Watching the show at home, guest Snatch Game contestant Kristin Chenoweth always hoped one of the queens would “do me.” Paul Lynde: “Sweetheart, none of these queens are gonna do ya.”
• Jenifer Lewis: “I don’t know why they call it menopause, there ain’t no men up in it.”
• Trixie as RuPaul: “You’ve won an uncomfortable phone call to your ex and a half-eaten hot dog from the back of my car.”
• RuPaul: “The winner of today’s Snatch Game is … the Amish, because they don’t have televisions.”
• RuPaul: “Oklahoma’s #1 Kristin Chenoweth impersonator, Kristin Chenoweth.”
• Carson Kressley on Trixie Mattel’s runway look: “I need Claritin to just look at this.” That was a compliment, by the way.
• Shangela will not stop with the Game of Thrones references, and they keep getting more complicated. “Is Trixie Jon Snow or is she Cersei Lannister? Cause I ain’t trying to be up in a Red Wedding situation.” Shangela binged the whole series on Blu-ray before she came here, didn’t she?
• Kennedy Davenport did fine in the challenge and fine in the runway. Her biggest contribution to the episode is probably the low-key shade she continues to throw around the clock. She’s my favorite.
• Next week is an Andy Warhol runway challenge. So who dresses up like a can of tomato soup? Probably Aja.