Saturday Night Live Season-Finale Recap: Scarlett Johansson Gets the Job Done

My expectations were high for the finale of SNL 50. This has been an okay season, relatively speaking, perhaps slightly energized by the writers hearing the phrase “50th anniversary” over and over, and there was no reason to think the show wouldn’t pull out all the stops for its conclusion. So I did feel a little let down by the result; this is by no means a bad episode, and it has some great standout moments, but it might’ve been nice to end on a more momentous note.

But Scarlett Johansson is an actor I like a lot, and she’s a fitting enough choice for the finale. Beyond her obvious megawatt celebrity and acting chops, she’s SNL family, often popping up in cameos or referenced in jokes about her husband Colin Jost. That doesn’t quite get her to Steve Martin or Alec Baldwin levels — though she’s now officially the most frequent female host in the show’s history, surpassing Tina Fey and Drew Barrymore — but it was sweet to see her join the rest of the cast in song during the more-earnest-than-funny monologue. The SNL-themed “parody” of “Piano Man” provided a nice enough introduction to commemorate this historic season.

Throughout the show, ScarJo contributed perfectly adequate work, doing everything required of her — though the sketches didn’t offer the most memorable or distinct roles. “Bowen’s Still Straight” is a watered-down sequel with Sydney Sweeney swapped out for the host, along with cameos from Gina Gershon and Emily Ratajkowski. Johanssen is amusing when she plays herself, like in the Please Don’t Destroy short “First Class,” where she flies the guys out to Newark for a vacation and a whole lot of flying paranoia. But she isn’t the highlight of that bit; that would be musical guest Bad Bunny, who shows up as a himbo air traffic controller who manages to get them on the ground safe after Googling “how can I help an airplane to land good.” Ditto the lackluster intimacy coordinators skit, where her vague confusion about lesbian sex can’t match Kenan Thompson’s befuddlement. All fine, but nothing spectacular.

Here are the highlights:

Local News Stories

This one rests on a simple comedic premise: a morning news broadcaster can’t stop making dark puns about gruesome local news stories. You can’t think about it too hard — some of these aren’t even puns, and wouldn’t the reporters be reading them off cue cards anyway? — but the punchlines keep coming, especially when Devon Walker’s on-the-ground reporter and even Heidi Gardner’s distraught mother of a missing child get in on the action. And Emil Wakim’s dancing weatherman inexplicably made me laugh out loud with both of his pitchy-to-the-point-of-near-unrecognizability “Pink Pony Club” jingles.

Couples at the Bar

Bad Bunny is a star! His banter with Marcello Hernández in Spanish is a highlight of this sketch about two men who unexpectedly connect at a bar over their relationships to the “crazy” women pressuring them to fight each other. Everyone brings the necessary energy, but I couldn’t take my eyes off Bad Bunny’s committed performance. James Austin Johnson and Andrew Dismukes’s side roles are a nice touch.

Weekend Update

Weekend Update has featured much of the sharpest writing this season, and that includes in this finale, which features a good RFK Jr. joke, another solid Miss Eggy appearance (Nwodim’s body language is what really got me this time), and a couple cutting political barbs (“It’s the kind of hilarious stunt that makes you realize why the Democrats will never win again”).

The highlight, of course, was always going to be Jost and Che’s joke swap. It hits the expected beats: Che makes Jost say racist stuff, Jost makes Che talk about his love for white women. But they’re going pretty hard this time, especially when Jost is forced to very carefully pronounce the phrase “Nick Kerr lover” shortly before referring to his favorite childhood hobby: “topping off priests with my pretty little mouth.” Also good to see Johanssen show up and receive an apology from Che for calling her vagina “Costco roast beef.”

TV Press Junket

Have you ever noticed that men and women get different types of questions at press junkets? That’s the point behind this funny sketch, where the gap between the hosts’ respect for Marcello’s character and the female performers keeps widening. Yang really relishes the most intrusive questions, including, “how come all of your exes are white?”

Victorian Ladies at Lunch

Well, this is a 10-to-1 skit if I’ve ever seen one. There’s not much to say here; it’s four Victorian ladies at lunch, bantering with their butler (Dismukes) and eating disgusting food like jellied eels, bowls of cow blood, and BLTs (bunnies and little turtles). Gardner claiming that she “went numbers two through seven” afterward really says it all.

Cut For Time

• The final cold open aimed at a predictable target: Trump’s recent sketchy trip to the Middle East. Before Johnson joins the studio audience to turn this into an interactive bit, it’s mostly just an excuse to hear Trump’s voice saying stuff like “Habibi,” “inshallah,” and “get me to Allah’s country.”

• “Oh, he ate that! … woman.”

• “I only have the pilot of Lost.”

• Yang as bad boy: “I would never do anything to hurt him … but I would fuck his wife.”

• Quick Marriage Story reference with straight Yang punching a hole in the wall.

• No sign of Mike Myers’s Elon Musk, whom I expected to make at least a small appearance, but we do get that elevator ride sketch with Thompson’s Kanye West. It’s fun to look back on the famous “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people” moment from the Hurricane Katrina fundraiser, but this is a bit outdated — Kanye spewing Nazi rhetoric and being generally unpleasant is nothing new at this point — and doesn’t really go anywhere. And Thompson’s Kanye impression made me miss Jay Pharoah.

• For anyone fortunate enough not to get the “How is it not relatable? Everybody got a cousin” joke, West recently released a song about giving his cousin head.

• Both of Bad Bunny’s performances were good fun, and I especially enjoyed his duet with RaiNao. That graffitied restroom set is a particularly impressive design choice.

• Several cast members’ fates still hang in the balance for Season 51, and this finale isn’t very clarifying on that front. But if this is Jost and Che’s last year as Weekend Update anchors, at least they’re going out on an outrageous (then wholesome!) note.

• Boo at the goodnights cutting out, but sweet to see Jost giving his wife roses.