This Week's "SNL" Included a Riff on Intimacy Coordinators

On paper, the final episode of Saturday Night Live‘s 50th season looked great. Scarlett Johansson hosting? Sounds great; she’s a member of the Five-Timers Club and has terrific comic timing. Musical guest Bad Bunny? Again, a solid choice; he, too, has a fantastic deadpan comedic presence. And Mike Myers made an appearance as well, which is never a bad thing.

And yet the whole episode felt curiously flat. I’ve enjoyed the more sketch-like promotional spots the show has begun recording for episodes this season, but it’s a little frustrating that one for this week’s show — a Jurassic World parody — had a more inventive premise than several of the sketches from the actual episode. Johansson was consistently funny, especially in one sketch where she played a nightly news anchor trying to adjust to the lighter tone of a morning show. And a sketch that featured both Johansson and Bad Bunny featured a solid comic trope: people who think that they’re speaking a foreign language fluently when they are not.

That sketch also featured some fairly tired “men are drawn to unstable women” moments, though, and it wasn’t the only time this episode tapped into comic beats that felt stale. One sketch, in which Johansson and Kenan Thompson play wildly unqualified intimacy coordinators, spent part of its running time with jokes about straight men being turned on by the idea of a romance between two women. Longtime viewers will also note some parallels between this sketch and 2021’s Lesbian Period Drama.

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Walton Goggins hosted this season’s penultimate episode

The sketch did at least commit to the bit, however, with Thompson’s character at one point crashing through a wall like a Looney Tunes character. Mikey Day also made a solid impression as the film’s borderline-creepy director, and both Ashley Padilla and Jane Wickline got some memorably withering glances directed at Thompson’s character. In giving both host and cast some amusing moments to play, this sketch was one of the evening’s more memorable ones. But if you were looking for an all-time great episode to close out a landmark season, this wasn’t it.