SNL Scorecard: Walton Goggins / Arcade Fire

If you're as big an SNL nerd as I am, there's a decent chance you are not, like me, also a big sports nerd, so I hope you'll forgive the upcoming sports metaphor. If you follow this blog closely and/or just know me in real life well, you know I'm a huge Liverpool supporter. In case you don't keep up with English soccer, my beloved Liverpool claimed the Premier League title a few weeks ago, by reaching a point where it was mathematically impossible for the 2nd-placed team to catch them. However, at that time there were still numerous matches left to play in the season, so since then (and as will likely be the case for the last two weeks of May, too), Liverpool have kind of just been going through the motions, rather than come out with the sharp focus and unending motivation that dictated so much of their season. It's not a joyless "throwing in of the towel," mind you, rather more of a meandering through a celebratory stupor.

Here's why I tell you all this: the feel of these last couple episodes of Saturday Night Live, the third-to-last and now second-to-last of the season, have very much mirrored the feel of these last few Liverpool matches. SNL's Season 50 was always going to be about the fanfare and celebration that surrounded its 50th anniversary special; that came and went, pretty spectacularly so. There was still a large chunk of the season left to air once that February special was complete, though (and for that reason, just as I did 10 years ago with the 40th anniversary, I wonder why they didn't just have the anniversary special function as the season finale?), and they ran the risk of sleepwalking through 3 more months of the program. In that vein, their "championship" were the wildly original and hysterical Lady Gaga, Jack Black and Jon Hamm episodes. The first two-thirds of this final May stretch, though, have felt like a team of cast, crew, writers, and producers generally proud of how this calendar year has gone already and counting down the days until Summer. Still enjoying themselves! Still putting on a decent show! But they're not at their best or sharpest.

I realize I've said all this without getting too specific about the penultimate episode of Season 50 that took place this weekend, hosted by outgoing White Lotus (RIP) and Righteous Gemstones (RIP) star Walton Goggins, but I think you can guess how I felt about it by my long preamble. It was a perfectly fine hour and a half of television. There were a couple really great sketches, some really weird ones, and a handful of snoozers. The most striking thing about this episode was how it, in a way, felt like the inverse of last week's: where Quinta Brunson showed up ready to crush every role and she and even the writers were a little let down by an unusually low-energy crowd, this week the studio audience was electric and high-energy from the start, but for one reason or another, the host just did not seem ready for primetime, and as such, a lot of the admittedly creative writing didn't really land and let the eager crowd down somewhat.

One note in case you forgot- I know my rankings can seem a little arbitrary, and truthfully there have been times where even I will look back at scorecards and think "Now, why did I rate (x) an 8.5, if (x) from this other episode was only a 7...?". So, both to hopefully clear up my scoring system for any curious readers, but also really to help keep myself consistent, here is the rubric to reference:

10/10: Perfect, no notes

8-9.5/10: Very funny-to-hilarious, definite rewatch

6-7.5/10: Pretty funny-to-funny, but won't necessarily be a rewatch

4-5.5/10: Not BAD, but not particularly funny or memorable

1-3.5/10: Terrible/poor taste, to simply bad/unfunny

Here's the sketch-by-sketch breakdown of the 19th episode of the season:

Sketch of the Night

"Mother's Day Brunch": 8/10

Goggins was glued to the cue cards in this one, and missed the timing on so many line reads, including the final one, otherwise this could have been an instant classic. In fairness, it was still a great sketch, in large part due to how well the host hammed it up with Sarah Sherman and Heidi Gardener. But the writing was really killer here, and Mikey Day and Andrew Dismukes (Day in particular) had some golden moments as the thoroughly unimpressed sons.

The Good

"Weekend Update": 9/10

After a so-so outing last week, Che and Jost were back in fine form this week, with plenty of great Trump and Pope Leo XIV jokes. Michael Che’s Lisa-wearing-Rosa Parks joke was better than any of the numerous Twitter takes about it I saw, and his follow-up was even funnier. And Colin’s second straight Osama bin Laden joke in as many weeks was a good bit. And if they set the bar high, the walk-on guests met that mark. Marcello Hernández’s “Movie Guy” is a great late addition to the pantheon, and Heidi Gardner as another form of an unhinged Karen was a winner, as is always the case. But Mikey Day stole the show for me with a genius bit of physical comedy I, frankly, didn’t know he was capable of. A great Update; one of the best of the season. 

“Trump Mother's Day Cold Open": 7.5/10

The episode kicked off with the show’s best and freshest political cold open perhaps since Trump’s election, and it required some misdirection— given how often SNL does do a Mother’s Day special, I genuinely did not see the Trump appearance coming — and calling on a couple old friends— yes I know Colin Jost is still on the show, but when was the last time he appeared in a sketch as anyone apart from himself? Cecily Strong is such an institution and her Jeanine Pirro so iconic that, and I’m not exaggerating, it took a good 90 seconds for me to remember that she isn’t on the show any more and the crowd’s wild applause for her appearance was because it was Cecily coming back, and not just because the audience loves her Pirro. Anyways, as we’ve well-established by now, I’m a fan of just letting JAJ’s Trump rip, and Cecily is just dynamite, and this was a clever tie-in from her farewell form the show as she once again got to drench Jost in alcohol, this time as a way of trolling Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

“Tiny Baby Shoe": 7.5/10

This was bizarre, perhaps a little too bizarre for me to find it laugh out loud funny. But absolutely delightful in its own way. Goggins killed it in this role, part musical showman, part incel creep with a surprising deformity. Great cameo from his real-life friend Sam Rockwell, too. And for the record, 2 inches IS a lot.

"Monologue": 6.5/10

I always pay special attention to how first-timers appear in their monologues and while veteran actor Walton Goggins unsurprisingly looked very comfortable onstage, I will say his delivery fell a little wooden and didn’t flow naturally. Still, it was getting into a nice self-deprecatingly comedic rhythm when all of a sudden he took a hard turn into sincerity that rivaled Australian parliamentarian Bob Katter, as he spoke about his mother, and then brought her onstage to briefly dance with her. And then that was it! A very short, kind of sweet, kind of funny monologue overall!

"The Deathly Diner": 6.5/10

This one also felt half-realized as an idea, but it had such dumb/chaotic 10-to-1 energy that I kind of didn’t mind. It won’t win any awards, but I’ll admit the “be careful…it might be your last!!!” worked on me every time.

The... Less-Good

“Service Dogs": 5.5/10

Another funny concept that just didn’t go much of anywhere as a sketch. Some true laugh out loud moments, and using live animals as the vehicle for a sketch’s comedy— rather than just a byproduct of it —was genuinely radical. But, it seemed like the writers didn’t really think of much beyond that. A fun one! But not nearly as memorable as it should have been.

“Boss's Bathroom": 5/10

I won’t out him, but I have a good friend who recently told me about a toilet habit of his that has made me look at both him and a certain bathroom appliance in a different light. That’s all I’ll say about that, but just to say, I actually totally understand what made this sketch happened. That said, while I love weird humor…this was mostly just weird and not all that humorous.

“The Second Amendment": 5/10

In what was the first sign that maybe Goggins might just not be at home in the live sketch format, the first post-monologue sketch of the night had him saying about 5 total words. That was a big part of the joke in this sketch, to be fair, but the joke ended up being somewhat unclear. It felt like someone in the writer's room had a funny rant about how unclear the 2nd Amendment’s purpose is and how for all we know, they just threw it in there because some dude in the room named Matt said he wanted something about guns. A funny joke, in-person? Sure. A funny sketch? Not really.

Musical Performances

Arcade Fire: 7.5/10

I am a big fan of Arcade Fire’s early stuff, and I know they have a long history on the show. But I am nowhere near enough of a die-hard to be up to speed with their latest stuff, nor find it cute or fun that Lorne Michaels invited them back on the show in the wake of frontman Winn Butler facing pretty serious sexual assault allegations. But I was curious to see what they sounded like in the year 2025.

The answer in the first song, “Pink Elephant,” was “still pretty good!” This was a more straightforward soft rock song and less experimental than a fair bit of their music in the past, but it made for a pleasant live performance, with the instrumentation well-calibrated for the often unkind studio soundstage, and Butler’s and wife/co-lead Régine Chassagne’s vocals sounded solid. Their second performance, of “Season of Change,” also started off as a pretty meat and potatoes tonal palette, albeit this time with more of a rockabilly beat and with Chassagne taking the lead on vocals. However, the latter half, as it repeated and repeated, and crescendoed and crescendoed, felt like a throwback to the Funerals-era Arcade Fire so many millennials fell in love with, in the best way. 

OVERALL SCORE: 6.80 ('Comedy Only' score: 6.72)