RuView: ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ Season 17 Premiere

Fourteen queens vying for the title of America’s Next Drag Superstar made a splashy entrance in the 17th season premiere of RuPaul’s Drag Race last week. But who floated to the top, and who death-dropped to the bottom of the ocean?

Squirrel Games

Opening with a skit for the first time in its 16-year run, the show begins with each contestant arriving in Hollywood and being picked up off the street in a mysterious van to partake in the “Squirrel Games.” The queens are taken to a large room and joined by a plethora of Drag Race alum, overseen by a towering Lil’ Poundcake. After once again asserting that “you’re not (her) real dad,” Poundcake announces a game of “Ru Light, Green Light.”

Queens who fail the challenge are subject to a barrage of cherry pies lobbed by the Pit Crew guards, and of course, no gory detail is spared by the close-up shots. With their eyelashes clumped by whipped cream, cherry filling rolling down their breastplates, and their makeup disheveled by the sheer velocity of catapulted pie, the likes of All Stars winners Trinity the Tuck and Angeria topple over after taking savage shots straight to the kisser. Legends die hard as the bodies of pie’d queens begin piling up, and even the herstory-making first trans winner of Drag Race, Kylie Sonique Love, takes a savage shot straight to her padded ass. 

When the dust settles, only the cast remains. They joyfully leap over the dead and are addressed by RuPaul’s disembodied voice, who ominously warns them that only “the first game is over.” With that, the audience is swept away to the Werk Room where the queens enter one by one and meet for the first time.

Meet the Queens

First to make her entrance is Lexi Love, a seasoned trans queen clad in red and white feathers who teases a talent of roller-skating in drag in her opening confessional. The next queen enters with a giant gong on her head and strikes it loudly after proclaiming “the Joella dynasty, bitch!” After Joella is the radiant Kori King, drink first, in a neon pink-and-orange-striped minidress, shaking her ice cup as she jauntily enters the room. King describes herself as a “demure, petite woman,” while the next contestant, Lydia B. Kollins, gives a quirky, more crafty vibe. “I value creativity over perfection,” she says of her DIY aesthetic. Oh, and the “B” apparently stands for butthole, according to Kollins’ opening confessional. 

Next up is Arrietty, an eccentric queen who introduces herself as “the elusive elven deity from Seattle,” with an intricate, minesweeper-shaped hairstyle and spiky red-and-black vinyl dress. After the other queens deem Arrietty “a porcupine,” a queen with the polar opposite aesthetic walks in. Jewels Sparkles is “very, very girly” and saccharine sweet in her all-pink costume. She brands herself as having “only one brain cell” and predicts the other queens will underestimate her. Lana Ja’Rae makes her entrance next and fulfills her punny name as she appears scantily clad in yellow lingerie, showing off her “little booty.” She is quickly recognized by the others as the drag daughter of Season 15’s Luxx Noir London.

Ja’Rae is not the only daughter of a past contestant, though. The first queen to participate in the show from Alabama, Sam Star, enters next and announces herself as the daughter of one of All Star 4‘s winners, Trinity the Tuck. She appears in an all-American styled gown complete with stars and stripes. She is quickly targeted as a threat by the other queens. Onya Nerve, from Cleveland, is next to arrive. She’s dressed in a fringed, purple, 70s-inspired look and describes her drag as “represent(ing) Blackness, Black people, everything Blackity, Blackity, Blackity, Black Black.” Jazzy queen Suzie Toot saunters in next, holding a newspaper with her own name on it. “I’ve always wanted my name in the papers,” she says with a glowing smile. One other queen calls her “orphan Annie” and labels her a “Broadway queen,” complete with jazz hands. 

The next contestant, a trans queen in a hot pink ensemble named Hormona Lisa, was personally picked by RuPaul to join the cast after being spotted at a book signing in Lisa’s hometown. This causes a stir in the other queens. “Hormona has been here for five minutes,” says King in a confessional, ” and she has already pissed me off.” The queens throw some light shade at Lisa before another pink, sparkly queen enters the room adorned in feathers. Crystal Envy describes herself as competitive, warning the other queens in her opening confessional of her abilities. Star, in her own confessional, reveals she previously won a pageant against Envy. The next contestant enters, the country-inspired Acacia Forgot. Forgot definitely appears to know what blush is, walking in sporting a heavily-rouged look. The last queen to enter, Lucky Starzzz, is obviously the season’s token “alternative” queen, sporting an otherworldly, genderless, larger-than-life outfit painted with every color under the sun.

The Challenge at Hand

Suddenly, the alarm sounds, and RuPaul appears around the gathered queens to announce the winner of the Squirrel Games, which was actually a surprise mini-challenge. She announces Lana Ja’Rae as the winner. Then, RuPaul reveals that for the first week’s main challenge, the queens will perform in Drag Queens Got Talent, parts one and two. The Rate-a-Queen system from last year is back, and only seven queens will perform in each of the first two episodes. The performers will be rated by the other seven queens, who will perform in the second part of the challenge next week, and vice-versa. Oh, and the queens are further gagged when RuPaul reveals that Katy Perry will be guest judging the first half of the talent show.

The cast then begin de-dragging, screaming in pain as they pull wigs off, peel off duct tape, and loosen corsets. Of course, the sizing up of their out-of-drag appearances is always a novelty. “I thought Lydia was gonna give me, like, Hot Topic,” opines King. “But it’s giving me barista. It does it for me,” she confides. Arrietty and Lucky Starzzz bond over both being “the artsy-farty queens” and the former describes Seattle as a “flirtatious city.” 

The conversation turns to who’s doing what for the talent show, and the order for part one’s set list. The competition is shown to already be heating up when some queens reveal a strategic edge to their decisions in their confessionals and a few queens promising to perform in separate groups in order to rate each other highly. Sam Star and Acacia Forgot in particular, who are both doing country-inspired numbers, seek to be separated by group. 

Elimination Day

The queens begin getting ready in the mirror and sharing about their personal lives. Jewels Sparkles opens up about her medical history and having a bionic spine due to a tumor in her neck when she was younger. “Bitch, you a robot?” one queen quips, and Sparkles affirms this. Lucky Starzzz opens up about the previous day being the first time they have done makeup since last year due to family and financial struggles. 

Then all of a sudden, Katy Perry herself sashays into the Werk Room. “Anyone got some duct tape?” she jokes. She hypes up the queens with a speech about playing up the alter ego, while still balancing a vulnerable side to the queens’ personas. Feeling encouraged, all the queens race back to the mirror to finish painting. All except Joella, who starts feeling the pressure as Katy Perry’s self proclaimed number one fan. “I actually used to go by Joella Perry,” she says in a confessional. But she better dry those tears up because Drag Queens Got Talent, part one, is about to begin!

Drag Queens Got Talent

The stage lights up in usual iconic Drag Race fashion, and RuPaul appears in crimped white-blond hair and a fringed pink, orange, and yellow minidress. This year, there’s a slick, streamlined, brand-new stage for the queens to perform on. Ru shares one too many Katy Perry puns in her opening remarks, and the pop star actually asks her to “chill out on the puns”—jokingly of course. Although only seven queens are performing tonight, all 14 contestants will strut their stuff on the runway in a masked singer-inspired runway show. 

First up is the runway portion, and the highlights include Suzie Toot as a prohibition-era dime, Crystal Envy and her two-faced princess look, Lucky Starzzz serving a “delicious pizza face.” Lexi Love comes down the runway as an MTV Awards Moon(wo)man, and Sam Star struts as a gay storm cloud. 

With the runway show concluded, the queens participating in part two of the challenge settle in to watch. Jewels Sparkles opens the show with a milk-themed, energetic performance that includes a wig reveal, comedic lyrics, and multiple splits dropping to the floor. The dancing is particularly impressive when the bionic spine is considered. Next up, Arrietty performs a Mexican dance with a long dress that soars through the air as the queen spins and turns, but it seems to fall a bit flat without any real “gags” involved. Following that is Lydia (Butthole) Kollins in a strange, sock puppet-eqsue getup that comes with its own custom reveals. Kollins emerges from behind the puppet mid-song to deliver the rest of her track in a red sequined dress. It seems to similarly fall flat among the audience, again no real wow factor displayed in the peformance.

The show picks up a bit when Lucky Starzzz begins her number tricycling onto the stage in a lemonade cart, dressed as a lemon herself. The cutesy accompaniment descends into a rap verse, and Starzzz’s big lemon boobs squirt lemonade in the air, to Ru’s delight. The spray is so huge that it even gets on the camera (and on Pit Crew member Bryce, who is seen sticking his tongue out for the lemonade like he’s trying to catch a snowflake.) This is probably the highlight of the evening, which does Joella no favors, as she’s next. Although she dances with energy and sells her lip sync track well, impressing her idol Katy Perry, the performance is a bit forgettable due to a lack of props and the repetition of lip sync tracks seen in Drag Race‘s talent shows.

Acacia Forgot takes the stage after that with a guitar to deliver a live country song. Taking one look at the queen, you can once again tell that she is definitely familiar with blush. Man, her cheeks are pink! The performance isn’t much to write home about, according to her country rival Sam Star. “My country competition is—(blows raspberry) flopping,” she says. Suzie Toot closes the talent show with a tap routine that makes Ru howl with laughter when she starts tapping out the Gettysburg Address in morse code. It sounds bizarre, but the technical skill of the dance is also deftly exhibited by Toot, and the humorous lyrics come across effortlessly. She somehow makes Depression-era themed tap dancing feel exhilarating and fun.

Rate-a-Queen

Next, the power shifts to the group of queens performing in part two of the show. They rank the seven queens based on their performance in the challenge, but some take a more strategic turn in their decisions. Then the queens are brought back on stage where it’s announced that Acacia Forgot has landed in the bottom with her country singing performance. The rest of the queens are safe, except the top two, who opened and closed the show: Jewels Sparkles and Suzie Toot. They face off in a lip sync to Katy Perry’s new song, “Woman’s World.” Sparkles puts up a fierce fight but in the end, Toot wins the lip sync with her continued tap dancing antics, and also snatches up a cash prize of $5,000 in the process. 

And that’s where the story ends—for now. Next week, “the tables will be turned,” according to RuPaul. Indeed, the power shifts to the queens from the first group. Acacia Forgot is already looking out for herself and wondering “who to put in the bottom” in the teaser for next week. Whatever happens next is sure to leave a mark on the competition. 

RuPaul’s Drag Race airs every Friday night at 6 p.m. MST. Our weekly review of the show as it happens will post every Friday morning before the next week’s show.

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