In the days leading up to this weekend’s Walton Goggins-hosted Saturday Night Live, the show released a promotional spot with a compelling concept: what if the penultimate episode of this season of SNL functioned like the penultimate episode of most prestige TV shows? In other words, it found Goggins speculating on which cast member would die in the lead-up to the season finale. (Answer: Marcello Hernández, stabbed by an angry Michael Longfellow.)
While this week’s episode did not actually feature any truly shocking moments, there were some unexpected callbacks to moments from earlier in the season. This included Andrew Dismukes’s character in a sketch about the Constitution using the same catchphrase a gangster with comedic ambitions he’d played used earlier this season. That wasn’t the only way in which this episode hearkened back to earlier moments, though.
Over the course of this season, new featured player Jane Wickline has shown up on Weekend Update to sing a few songs, including one about dating advice that turns into an extended riff on the trolley problem. Wickline’s songs have been offbeat and charming, but I was not expecting to see an entire musical sketch based around an even more surreal premise: Wickline trying to track down the owner of a lost baby shoe in the Central Park Zoo.
That description really doesn’t do justice to how thoroughly strange the sketch is. For one thing, Goggins plays the owner of the shoe, who is not a baby. Also, Goggins’s The White Lotus co-star Sam Rockwell also makes an appearance. As someone who’s long believed that weird SNL is the best SNL, this sketch gets especially high marks.
Nobody Asked for a New Arcade Fire Album
Even if you can ignore the allegations against Win Butler, what could we possibly need from this band in the year 2025?It summoned up memories of a season 37 sketch in which Kristen Wiig and Anna Faris played women ogling the men in a Ferrari calendar. (Faris’s delivery of the line “No. Nose. Just. Holes.” is a highlight.) This new sketch has the benefits of a surprisingly catchy melody, some utterly surreal moments and a squirrel playing the tambourine. The choreography isn’t half-bad, either.
Also of note: this ode to lost shoes might not have been the strangest sketch to air this week.
More Like This
This article was featured in the InsideHook newsletter. Sign up now.
