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The season finale of Saturday Night Live opened with the cast reminiscing about the past year, which saw them go from doing “very weird shows at home to terrifying shows in person”. They recollect about life and work under Covid, which saw them perform for a smaller audience made up of first responders (including a guy who read a medical report during one show).
They also review some of the season’s “highlights”, including Elon Musk’s humiliating Wario impression; musical guest Morgan Wallen being booked, unbooked, rebooked and ultimately canceled; and the endless Mike Pence/fly sketch from November. Chris Rock, who hosted the season opener, makes a brief appearance, before things wrap up with an emotional group sign-off, sparking speculation about cast member exits.
This cold open has its moments, but as with the last couple of episodes, the decision to include every single cast member leaves it feeling overstuffed.
Actor Anya Taylor-Joy, hosting for the first time, welcomes the first full – and fully vaccinated – audience since the start of the pandemic. She admits to being nervous but psyches herself up by picturing her cue cards as chess pieces floating on the ceiling, in the night’s only reference to her role in the hit Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit.
The rest of the show gets off to a good start with a retro rerun of a 1998 episode of Hollywood Squares. The broadcast has to edit out the majority of the show, since almost all of the celebrity guest stars – including Bill Cosby, Jared Fogle, Matt Lauer and Kevin Spacey – have been canceled in the intervening years.
A properly gruesome send-up of a very real (and very stupid) American tradition, Picture with Dad sees a prom date go horribly awry after a father’s attempt to take a jokey picture standing beside his daughter’s date brandishing a shotgun results in his accidentally blowing his dick off. Everyone involved is excellent – Aidy Bryant as the horrified wife, Andrew Dismukes and Heidi Gardner as the openly sexually active teen couple, Taylor-Joy as a stone-faced surgeon – but it’s really Beck Bennett’s show. He turns in yet another deranged and pathetic, but sympathetic performance as a hapless suburban loser.
In Making Man, two groups of angels look over the prototype of human man. The female angels question some of their male counterparts’ design choices, such as “one big toe instead of five”, an unnecessary amount of body hair, useless nipples and a multicolored penis. This high-concept sketch flopped hard, but it’s saved by some good recurring side jokes, including Kenan Thompson’s growing frustration at his work being criticized and Melissa Villaseñor’s goofy positivity getting on her team’s nerves.
Pride Again is a party rock anthem from Bowen Yang, Kate McKinnon, Punkie Johnson and Taylor-Joy. Meant to celebrate the return of Pride month, the party is short-lived thanks to personal drama and petty annoyances – including unrequited crushes, couples fighting, political arguments and corporate appropriation. Particularly funny is a brief interruption that sees Yang angrily defending himself when told he doesn’t “read theory”.
Celtic Woman is a musical show that offers “Irish culture the way it was meant to be enjoyed – in Ohio”. The show includes traditional Gaelic folk songs alongside “a random assortment of not-Gaelic songs the audience just kind of wants to hear” such as Sweet Home Alabama. It’s fun, if a little sloppy. Credit to Taylor-Joy for not only showing off some decent musical chops, but also doing a better Irish accent than her co-stars.
The musical guest is Lil Nas X, who performs Montero (Call Me By Your Name). The artful set design combined with the sexually charged dance choreography makes for one of the more memorable musical performances of the season.
On Weekend Update, Pete Davidson stops by to discuss Mental Health Awareness Month, although this is really just an excuse to get some digs in at targets such as Chrissy Teigen, Bill Gates and the state of Florida. But the best – and most deserving – is reserved for the show itself, with Davidson comparing SNL to Aids: “It’s still here, it’s just no one’s gotten excited about it since the 90s.”
Continuing their yearly tradition – and their best recurring bit by far – Colin Jost and Michael Che celebrate the end of the season by swapping jokes. As per usual, they try to get one another canceled by writing terribly offensive (by network TV standards, at least) material for each other to read, sight unseen. Standouts this time include Jost delivering a number of racist jokes about the upcoming Black Superman movie, and Che having to declare “blue lives matter”.
Cecily Strong shows up as Fox News host and hopeless lush Judge Jeanine Pirro. She partakes in her own yearly tradition of dousing Jost in wine, taking things up a notch this year by stepping into a tank of the red stuff while singing a slurry rendition of Sinatra’s My Way. Before going to commercial break, the show gives a brief (but still much appreciated) nod to one of their all-time great hosts, the recently departed Charles Grodin.
In Lingerie Store, Taylor-Joy and Bryant play two brassy New Jersey business owners who cater to large-breasted women in need of heavy-duty support. They don’t sell undergarments so much as “scaffolding”. Then the pair return as hosts for a livestreamed guest panel featuring the cast of a hit HBO show, where they lob idiotic softballs to the show’s straight, white heartthrob, while asking horribly offensive, personally devastating questions such as “How has being gay and Chinese prevented you from being happy?”, “If I gave you the option to be white, would you take it?” and “Marital rape is still not a crime in 50 states – what will you, as a comedian, do about it?” – to everyone else.
Lil Nas X returns to perform the soulful Sun Goes Down, before we’re treated to a message from AMC Theaters starring Bennett as Vin Diesel. The chrome-headed movie star welcomes audiences back to theaters, reminding us of what we love about “the mooovies”: “The straws … the sticky floors … the hand dryer in the bathroom that’s louder than a choo-choo train … the little boy at the urinal with his pants all the way down … the Aerosmith arcade game …” It’s hard to say what’s funnier here, the way the sketch accurately captures the weird specificity of corporate multiplexes or Bennett’s bang-on impression.
Regardless, it’s a perfect sketch to close out a surprisingly strong episode. Taylor-Joy and Lil Nas X both killed it, and as far as the post-monologue sketches went, there wasn’t a dud in the bunch. After the lows of the last few weeks, kudos to SNL for turning things around for the season’s finale.
