Well, apparently SNL wants to finish out its season with the most truly dismal run of episodes that it can. Brie Larson was a lackluster host who couldn't elevate any of the terrible material she was given tonight, and it made for one of the worst episodes of the season...but I feel like I've been saying that for a while now. Sigh.
COLD OPEN: I guess this is the one bright spot of the night, as Dana Carvey triumphantly returns as the Church Lady to mock Trump, the Met Gala and Ted Cruz. It goes on for a while, and he hasn't missed a beat with the character, but Taran's Cruz and Darrell's Trump impressions seem tired. It's not really that funny overall, but it's nice to see the Church Lady again.
MONOLOGUE: Brie Larson takes the stage to give thanks to her mom, who's in the audience for the Mother's Day show, and let some of the cast dole out Mother's Day messages to their moms, but this is the beginning of what I feared she'd be, which is someone who plays the straight man supporting character because they don't think she's funny enough to do any jokes.
PRESIDENT BARBIE: This is an ad for dull, boring "president" Barbie, that little girls hate and don't want to play with, instead preferring an old broom to the toy that won't "smile enough." Okay, so it's a Hillary analogy. It's alright, I get the point. (Methinks the female SNL cast members are getting irritated with the over the top HIllary hate lately).
UFO STORIES: Kate's sketch where she plays the unimpressed alien abductee reutrns, and even though this one was very funny the first time, this time the dialogue just isn't as good. Kate does her best, but there's nothing really clever for her to say in this one. It's a miss.
BABY SHOWER: An extra long sketch where Brie is a pregnant woman told by all her friends that she will eventually succumb to the "mom" spiky, short haircut that forces all moms to do weird Stepford-type shit. This goes on way too long and just isn't at all funny. Episode's becoming dreadful.
UPDATE: Jost and Che do a ton of Trump jokes in the wake of him securing the actual Republican nomination, and then Vanessa comes on as the perky kid who reads the news- she's okay, but has been funnier in this. Sasheer of all people shows up as a correspondent trying to defend Larry Wilmore for using the n-word at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, and man is this bad. She seems totally unrehearsed and actually tries to interact with the audience at times, breaking character completely. Finally she says it's her birthday and I half wonder if that's why she was allowed to do this bit. Last guest is Pete doing his mom schtick, and he gets a couple good jabs in there at the tweets his mom put out in his defense, so that's kinda cute.
GAME OF THRONES: Yet another GoT parody, this time poking fun at how slow and predictable the resurrection of Jon Snow was on last week's episode (spoiler alert). This isn't sharp or clever, and it seriously should have been. All they do is have Cecily and Brie stand off to the side as hecklers to the scene, basically. Man, the writing is awful in this episode.
QUIZ WHIZ: An abominably bad sketch that takes place in 2018 and the joke is that contestants forgot who came in second to Trump in the 2016 primary. Wuh? Why on earth? There's NOTHING funny about this, I don't even really understand what the joke is supposed to be. People forgot who Ted Cruz is and...what's the joke? I don't get this at all. At the end there's a "Hail President Trump" bit, but I still don't get what the angle of this was.
DISCREET ANNIHILATION: A lame Kyle/Back video that is the 50th variation on the same stupid skit they do over and over again. I'm not even gonna bother explaining it.
DEAD BOPZ: A hologram of Beck as Bing Crosby introduces a CD of famous dead people singing modern hits- everyone's impressions are really bad on this except a quick few seconds of Jay's Tupac, but that's it.
Whew. That was HORRIBLE. Ugh, a really painful episode to sit through tonight, and Brie Larson was a blink and you'll miss her host who amounted to nothing more than vapor in these skits. Ugh. I give it a D-, saved (if you can call it that) only by the Church Lady's appearance at the beginning. Drake comes back next week, and even though he was one of the surprise fantastic hosts in the last few years, I'm going in with low expectations, simply because of how dire the show's been lately. See you guys next week if you can bear to finish out the season. Wouldn't blame if you if you couldn't.