The fourth episode of Saturday Night Live season 50 kicks off with the surprise return of Alec Baldwin – only the second time he has appeared on the show since his accidental fatal shooting of a crew member on the set of the movie Rust, and his first since the charges against him were dismissed.
Baldwin plays Fox News’s Bret Baier, who is sat down to interview the US vice-president, Kamala Harris (Maya Rudolph). When Baier interviewed Trump, his first question was about the issues facing the country, but with Harris he starts off by asking “Give me the exact number of murderers you let into this country? One million? Two million? Ten million?”
He continues to interrupt Harris, but she stands her ground, hits her points and her memes (“In the clurb, we all fam”), and makes the case that Trump is dangerously unstable.
Baier rolls a clip from Trump’s (James Austin Johnson) Fox News town hall, where he denies threatening anyone (except for violence) before going on a crazy rant about Alphonse Capone, Al Pacino, Freaky Friday and his disdain for Americans. A little later they cut to Trump’s bizarre 30-minute dance-a-thon during one of his increasingly dire rallies.
Baier continues to try to trip up Harris by playing more misleading clips featuring Joe Biden (Dana Carvey) rambling about Joker: Folie à Deux, but Harris manages to turn the tables on him by simply uttering the words “abortion”, “uterus”, “menstruation”.
This was a solid cold open, managing to fit in all the big election moments from last week without feeling random or overstuffed. Baldwin’s muggy Trump impersonation during his term in office got tired fast, but this was a welcome reminder that he’s one of our best comedic actors and SNL’s greatest returning guest. Props too to the writer’s for not trying to “both sides” things. Baier’s open animosity and bias during the Harris interview and Trump’s continuing mental decline are obvious to all but the most brainwashed Maga members and SNL directly acknowledging this was the right move.
Michael Keaton has hosting duties. The actor reminisces about his time working as a PA on Mr Roger’s Neighborhood the same year SNL debuted and notes the similarities between the two programs: “Lotta puppets, tons of cocaine.” He moves on to his hit movie, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, before being joined on stage by Mikey Day and Andy Samberg, both in Beetlejuice costumes, and Sarah Sherman, dressed as herself, doing impressions of the iconic ghoul. They badger Keaton into doing the voice, and then it’s onto the rest of the show.
The first sketch sees Keaton play a sassy southern cookie salesman hawking his wares on a Halloween themed episode of Shop TV. His latest confection is a cookie that’ supposed to look like a zombie eyeball, but it more resembles like a female breast with a giant pink nipple. Lots of spongy sight gags and bosomy double entendre ensue.
Four episodes in, we get the first Please Don’t Destroy of the season. John Higgins and Martin Herlihy celebrate the former’s birthday by taking skydiving lessons, but their instructor (Ben Marshall) throws them off by admitting that he feels nervous and “off”. The others on the plane – including Keaton’s suicidal instructor who has just lost custody of his kids and the rookie pilot – add to bad vibes. Things end very bloodily. This is the best PDD had been in a couple of seasons.
Next, we find ourselves in 1950s Detroit, during a tense meeting between the families of a mixed-race couple (Andrew Dismukes, Ego Nwodim). The white parents (Heidi Gardner, Keaton) of the son are worried about what people will say, while the black father and brother of the bride (Kenan Thompson, Devon Walker) are more open minded – at least until the groom busts out a ukelele and plays a song he hopes will the bridge the gap between them all. That song is Hey, Soul Sister by Train, an earworm so white and lame that it earns his parents’ blessing even as it causes his wife to break up with him. No clue why the writers decided to parody 1967’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner via a 21-year-old one hit wonder, but at least Dismukes is having fun.
This is followed by the worst recurring sketch of the past couple of seasons: a scroll through TikTok, wherein the cast recreate the most popular viral videos from app, in this case cooking videos from tradwives, the Costco boom guys, the Call Her Daddy podcast, election memes and the like. As with previous segments, this is nothing but a grab bag of lazy references and a desperate, unconvincing stab at relevancy.
Musical guest Billie Eilish (alongside her brother Finneas and backing band) performs her first song of the night, then it’s time for Weekend Update. With only 16 days until the election, Colin Jost compares Harris’s energetic, women-focused messaging against Trump’s incoherent, profanity-laden tirades about Harvey Weinstein getting “schlonged” and his dementia-laden dancing.
Jost invites new cast member Emil Wakim to the desk to talk about the youth vote. He’s feeling good going into the election, even though he doesn’t know who his dad – a Lebanese immigrant who did so well in America that he became a Republican – is voting for. He describes the weird space he currently occupies as a Lebanese Christian: “Christian Arabs are kind of like Black dudes with anime backpacks; racist guys are like ‘I don’t like it, but I’m not going to cross the street anymore.’” One of his jokes bombs (appropriately enough, a joke about bombing the Middle East), but he recovers by ad-libbing that Jost wrote it. He wraps up by talking about hypocritical American backlash towards pro-Gaza protesters – the show’s most direct acknowledgment of the situation since the war began a little over a year ago.
Later, Jost welcomes his nemesis Sherman on to talk about Victoria’s Secret’s recent walkway show that focused on inclusivity and diversity. It wasn’t quite inclusive enough for Sherman, who bemoans the lack of “tired, cranky, busted bitches in real underwear”. Her descriptions of her hygiene and body get increasingly gross, although she ends by begging Victoria’s Secret to put her in their next show, even if she has to change everything about herself. Sherman and Jost’s chemistry remains strong, even if they both crack up at their own jokes a little too much.
Next, Sherman and Bowen Yang play friends taking an Uber ride to the airport on their way to Miami. Their crazy Uber driver (Nwodim) forces them to take part in a live-streamed, ride-along game show that revolves around QAnon-style conspiracy theories. None of the jokes land and the cast seem to know it.
Eilish performs her second set, then we find ourselves behind the scenes of the latest film in the Halloween franchise. What should be a simple slash and stab scene is thrown out of whack by the “sassy and flirty” movements of the actor playing Michael Meyers. It turns out he was given this direction by the film’s movement coordinator (Keaton, going so fey with his caricature that it wouldn’t feel out place in an 80s episode of SNL). Another flop that drags to a finish.
The episode wraps up with an engagement dinner at a Mexican restaurant. As with the earlier sketch, Keaton and Thompson play the respective fathers of the mixed-race couple, only this time there’s no racial animosity between them. Instead, the dinner goes off course when Keaton notices a resemblance between their waitress and an old flame. Keaton struggles with a lot of the lines and it ends awkwardly and abruptly.
While this episode started out strong, it floundered as it went along. A definite drop-off in quality from the last two episodes, but not a disaster. The show is off air next week but will return on 2 November for one more episode before the election. Here’s hoping they bring the heat for that one.
