‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ Season 17 Power Ranking: Episode 8 — Follow the Yellow Brick Road

With RuPaul’s Drag Race bringing back their Rate-a-Queen system for season 17, Billboard decided to rate each of the new queens every week based on their performance. Below, we take a look at this season’s Rusical to see which queens brought Broadway to the main stage. Spoilers ahead for episode 8.

As Jewels Sparkles aptly put it at the top of this week’s episode: “Every gay person has an attachment to The Wizard of Oz.” So, leave it to the production team of RuPaul’s Drag Race to turn their annual Rusical challenge into a maximalist mashup of the most beloved Oz-based properties in the world

For season 17’s Rusical, the 10 remaining contestants were given a script that combined three of the most popular musical re-tellings of L. Frank Baum’s beloved 1900 novel — the legendary 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, the 1975 game-changing musical The Wiz and the 2003 Broadway behemoth Wicked — and mashed them together with a fourth staple within the theater community, A Chorus Line. To simplify; season 17’s Rusical was a veritable feast for theater gays everywhere.

And feast the season 17 queens did, with the majority of the girls giving their all for a very good Rusical in this season. The performances were so good, in fact, that the judges panel decided to acknowledge four queens amongst this week’s tops, while refusing to place anyone besides Kori King and Acacia Forgot amongst the lower end of the critiquing scale. In the end, Sam Star earned her long-desired second challenge win, while Suzie Toot, Onya Nurve and Jewels Sparkles still got plenty of praise for their performances.

In their Lip Sync For Your Life, Acacia and Kori battled it out to guest judge Adam Lambert’s campy club number “Wet Dream.” Even with a wig malfunction on her part, Kori still managed to impress the panel with her unbridled energy — the Boston queen was granted another week in the competition, leaving Acacia Forgot to sashay away.

Below, Billboard takes a look back at episode 8 and ranks where our remaining contestants lie based on this episode and the season as a whole: