This blog post contains spoilers for episode 3 of season 8 of RuPaul’s Drag Race.

After last week’s double elimination, Ru called some unknown person and asked how quickly they could pack their bags. After a week of speculation about who might be coming back (a queen from a previous season? The very first queen to every be eliminated from Drag Race, Pork Chop? Someone we haven’t met yet?), Naysha Lopez, the queen eliminated in the first episode, waltzes back into the workroom to continue the competition.

This week’s episode had the queens split into two groups and and film short scenes of RuCo’s Empire, a parody of Fox’s Empire about the CEO of a hip-hop record labor and his family. Thorgy Thor and Bob the Drag Queen were both praised for their performances as Chocolate Chip Cookie in their respective groups (with Acid Betty rounding out the top 3). In the end, Bob takes the win for this challenge.

Derrick Barry, Robbie Turner, and Cynthia Lee Fontaine wound up in the bottom 3 for their lackluster performances. Robbie and Cynthia were asked to lipsync for their lives. The runway look had the queens rolling the runway in roller skates and the lipsyncers were given the chance to lipsync in heels or on wheels. Cynthia played it safe in heels while Robbie took the challenge in wheels. Robbie’s risk paid off, and Cynthia was asked to sashay away.

Last week, the average weighted scores predicted that Cynthia would be going home this week, and they were right! Throwing the data from this episode into the data set, what are our machine learning contestants new predictions for season 8? The table below contains the new predictions, with a weighted average prediction as described in the previous post. Bob’s win this episode moves her up in all but the SVM’s predictions and has her tied for third with Chi Chi DeVayne in the average rankings. Robbie’s lipsync resulted in her slipping out of the top three for GNB and the Random Forest Regressor. All but GNB predicted Cynthia going home early, and tonight’s episode bares that out. Cynthia’s lipsync doesn’t convince GNB to reduce it’s prediction of her much, though, slipping from first to second. As a result of Bob’s surge, the bottom three are now correctly predicted on average (though no individual contestant gets it exactly right). Who’s going home next? SVM has Chi Chi, Bob, Thorgy, and Naomi Smalls tied for the lowest place still in the competition right now. GNB has Robbie, Derrick, Kim Chi, Chi Chi, Bob, Thorgy, and Naomi similarly tied. Random Forest Classifier and Random Forest Regressor both predict Naysha to sashay away next. The average weighted score also has Naysha being eliminated next. Tune in next week to see if they turn out to be right!

See here for the original post. You can also check out the data and python script I use to generated the predictions.