Warning: this post contains spoilers for episode 9 of season 8 of RuPaul’s Drag Race!
This week on Drag Race, the final four had to perform in a music video of one of RuPaul’s singles. This has been a staple of of Drag Race since season 1. This season, the queens star in the music video for RuPaul’s The Realness. There’s a catch, though – whichever queen goes home at the end of this episode won’t have her scenes appear in the final edit of the music video. The episode challenges the queens to come up with three looks for the video. The first for a “floating” scene, an avant-garde look, and a glamorous look.
At this point, all the queens are incredibly strong. They all delivered in their performances, though Kim Chi struggled with looking graceful in the floating scene, and Chi Chi DeVayne had some wardrobe malfunctions during the avant-garde scene.
For the runway, the queens were asked to present their best drag. Kim Chi delivered, as usual. Naomi Smalls also brought it, with a Cher inspired jump suit look. Chi Chi stepped out in a pageant gown, looking quite the opposite of her trash bag look in the first episode. Bob’s look was on point from the waste up, but the leggings were underwhelming compared to the rest of the outfit (and the other queens on the runway).
After a final judges critique, the queens were asked to give their child selves a piece of advice. While all were touching, Kim Chi’s tearful message urging that it would get better was especially moving. In the end, all four queens had to lip-sync for their lives. After a great performance, including a choreographed move planned during untucked, Chi Chi DeVayne was asked to sashay away.
And so we’ve got our final three: Bob the Drag Queen, Naomi Smalls, and Kim Chi.
The Algorithms
There’s no new data from this episode (since all the queens had to lip-sync, I don’t count it as a lip-sync for prediction purposes). Below are the latest predictions, along with updated measures of accuracy for the season.
| Actual | Support Vector Machines | Gaussian Naive Bayes | Random Forest Classifier | Random Forest Regressor | Neural Network | Average Predicted Score | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kim Chi | 1 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 2 | 1.59191735 | |
| Bob the Drag Queen | 1 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 2 | 1.648435126 | |
| Robbie Turner | 7 | 3 | 6 | 5 | 3 | 8 | 4.839866302 |
| Derrick Barry | 5 | 3 | 6 | 5 | 1 | 4 | 3.584320875 |
| Acid Betty | 8 | 5 | 1 | 1 | 8 | 7 | 4.710118505 |
| Chi Chi DeVayne | 4 | 5 | 10 | 4 | 5 | 4 | 5.333637192 |
| Naomi Smalls | 7 | 1 | 7 | 5 | 1 | 4.462777271 | |
| Thorgy Thor | 6 | 10 | 1 | 7 | 7 | 8 | 7.026435734 |
| Naysha Lopez | 9 | 8 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 8 | 8.640838651 |
| Laila McQueen | 11 | 8 | 11 | 10 | 9 | 6 | 8.646308113 |
| Cynthia Lee Fontaine | 10 | 10 | 8 | 12 | 12 | 8 | 10.13855971 |
| Dax ExclamationPoint | 11 | 10 | 11 | 10 | 10 | 12 | 10.55089638 |
| rank | 0.46 | -0.11 | 0.43 | 0.58 | 0.64 | ||
| Tau | 0.46 | 0.42 | 0.58 | 0.63 | 0.44 |
At this point, the best performing algorithm by Kendall’s Tau is Random Forest Regressor, and it has the second highest rank score. Neural Network has the highest rank score, and it is also the only algorithm that accurately predicted the top 3 – it has Naomi Smalls taking home the crown, with Bob and Kim sharing second place. Based on the weighted average, however, Kim Chi is predicted to take home the crown (though Bob is very close behind).
Monday is the grand finale of the season, where the America’s Next Drag Superstar will be crowned. We will know soon if the algorithms were correct in predicting the crown!