Welcome to my review and power rankings of the fifth episode of Canada’s Drag Race Season 3 – Snatch Game!
This was a classic Snatch Game with a clear top group of performers and a few obvious bottoms. The funniest queens were very funny, and the unfunniest queens were very bad. That lead to a shocking elimination.
Seriously: this wasn’t just any shocking elimination. This is perhaps the most-shocking early-t0-mid season elimination since Morgan McMichaels back on RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 2! We had a front-runner sashay away who tanking Snatch Game but who was crushing the competition, who killed her runway look, and who gave a strong lip sync that could’ve credibly been declared a win.
If Brooke and Yvie hadn’t been granted a double-save on their Snatch Game, it would’ve been exactly this shocking.
For me this raises an essential question of what we want out of Drag Race. Should it shock us, or do we want it to be predictable?
If Drag Race is a fair competition where queens battle to survive every week, then it will sometimes yield surprising results as queens make their own luck. We’ve seen that many times over, but especially starting with Season 9 with the fall of Valentina and the lip sync victory from Sasha Velour. Jaida Essence Hall’s Season 12 dominance was another fair win, as was Bimini defying her early-season story on Drag Race UK Season 2 to come back to crush the back half of the show.
If Drag Race is instead structured story with clear heroes and villains, then the weekly ups and downs matter less and we occasionally get counterintuitive judges choices to preserve that storyline and protect queens when they falter. There’s no better example of this than last week’s finale of All Stars All Winners, where several competitive wins were voided in favor of awarding success based on storyline. While it is typically more subtle on regular seasons, we’ve seen this with blatant saves of certain queens, like the “Kandy wait” moment in Season 13.
For me, the examples from the “fair fight” category have all been more memorable and satisfying, and the moments from the “structured story” category all linger as disappointments. That means I have to learn to take the shocking along with the satisfying.
I think a major difference in Canada’s Drag Race is that it has never shied away from these “fair fight” moments in its first two seasons, where there have been several eliminations that were shocking not due to the weekly performance that lead to them, but because they violated our story expectations.
Even if it’s frustrating in the moment, it’s not a bad thing. It is part of what gives Canada’s Drag Race a certain underdog charm compared to the US franchise, and it often becomes a star-making turn for the queen who got the shock.
What do you think? Do you prefer a season with some shocks, or a season where the story is obvious from start to finish? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
If you want to watch Canada’s Drag Race Season 3 outside of Canada and the UK you can sign up for WowPresentsPlus to watch the many worldwide Drag Race franchises for $4.99 a month or $50 a year. (Note that if you’re in the US you will need to use a VPN to “visit” another country to see the US Franchise.)
Readers, start your engines! And, may the best Queen (of the North) win!
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