So how much bearing should the musical guest have on an evaluation of a Saturday Night Live episode, anyway? Generally speaking, my rule of thumb has been that an engaging musical performer can kick the show up a notch or two, but can’t hurt it too much in the opposite direction; the vagaries of musical taste and the difficulties of translating raw musical talent onto the SNL stage are too great, and the ultimate role of non-comedic music on the show is often too limited. But this week’s episode wound up a weirdly appropriate test. Arcade Fire’s sixth appearance as musical guest (in addition to their recent 50th anniversary special contributions) comes packaged with a beloved character-actor host whose presence will delight his many fans but doesn’t seem destined to become a classic repeat host. See also Steve Buscemi, or the cameoing Sam Rockwell; sure, there’s always a chance that one of those types of guys could turn into a next-gen Christopher Walken, but generally these are performers who probably work too frequently to take more than very occasional week-long time-outs for ketch comedy (or as Walken memorably referred to it, “crazy make-em-ups”). Walton Goggins hosting the show now, or at all, is the equivalent of Arcade Fire appearing as musical guest back in 2007: far from getting in the ground floor (much further, in Goggins’ case, because the guy’s been at in this business way longer than Arcade Fire has been in theirs), but still obviously a win compared to some of the bigger names that turn up in this same spot. He could also use some help from a marquee musical act, because, you know, who couldn’t, outside of that Chalamet kid?

Goggins had a sweet-natured monologue throwing the spotlight on both his White Lotus moment earlier this year, and his mother, who got on stage for a little mini-dance number that was genuinely affecting without crossing the line into cloying. Goggins was also up to the task of alternately bringing his skeleton-cowboy aura (in his first few sketches) and playing along (in his later sketches). But an electric pair of Arcade Fire performance segments could have gone a long way toward elevating this episode’s somewhat ramshackle feel into something more intentional and celebratory. I don’t know that the band would be anyone’s choice for the tightest or most surprising live act in indie rock, but I’ve seen them several times over the past 20 years, and they usually deliver something energized and entertaining, sometimes cathartic, even when supporting a mixed bag of new material. Now, whatever the reason—whether married lead band members Win Butler and Régine Chassagne are still wobbly following the accusations about Butler that surfaced back in 2022, in the midst of an artistic and/or personal rethink, or just unable to pull out of the downward trajectory of their last few records—the vibes are off. The material off of the new album Pink Elephant, and their delivery of it, felt sweaty and deflated, no matter how much dumb shit Win wrote on his lapels or whatever. It’s possible that it’s just tough to take Butler trying to do his passionate literary-society-pledge-goes-to-the-circus routine in the wake of those allegations, but there are plenty of other problematic artists who can lead to genuinely thorny debates about their work versus their behavior. Butler accidentally seems hellbent on trying to make it easy for anyone with conflicted feelings about his band. So maybe the problem isn’t so much that they gave a lackluster performance (although it certainly was that!) but that the show didn’t fill its occasional rock-band slot with an act that’s more exciting in 2024, rather than coasting on increasingly hazy memories of a time when they were a bigger deal.

Anyway, that was almost 11 minutes from an approximately 75-minute show spent feeling bummed out, where in years past there might have been some excitement or elation to keep the energy up in between sketches. And then to that, add on nearly 18 minutes of Weekend Update, which feels like a lot even when the segment as at its best. And look, I know there are people who steadfastly consider the current incarnation of Update a highlight of the show; I certainly remember feeling that way during Norm Macdonald, during Tina Fey, and sometimes even during less distinguished news-readers like Kevin Nealon just because it was a reliable place to see Adam Sandler do something silly. But regardless of how you feel about Jost and Che entering their second decade at the desk, isn’t taking up about a quarter of the show’s non-commercial runtime too much? That’s not even on the anchors this week, though if anything their jokes might have been a little weaker than last week (slightly less self-conscious, at least!). I admit, I just do not get Marcello Hernández’s “Movie Guy” routine; second time through, and I’m not any closer to understanding it. “Guest talking about a thing he doesn’t know about” is an Update mainstay, but what’s even the premise here? That the Movie Guy works at a theater, but doesn’t watch movies? Only most of the movies he’s talking about aren’t out yet anyway? And he gets names wrong? It’s a mystifying bit, and the reasoning behind having Mikey Day come out and do some well-performed physical comedy as a guy who just walked through a spider web wasn’t much clearer to me. That only leaves Heidi Gardner as the mom who gets her New York City news from Facebook; by contrast, she always communicates what her Update character’s deal is perfectly. But by the same she came on, the segment as a whole was heading for the 15-minute mark and it felt like the show overall was losing a battle with the clock.

The remaining sixty percent of the show that did feature Goggins included some sketches that were able to capitalize on his weird energy, if not always fully. The strangest near-miss in that regard was the sketch where Goggins played a guy named Matt who emerges from the back of the room where it happens to push a pro-gun amendment weirdly high in the original U.S. Constitution. It’s a very funny idea, especially as other men excitedly fall under his spell, and normally a tight three-and-a-half-minute sketch would be a major plus, but this one just abruptly curtailed without much escalation. Same went for both of this week’s restaurant-set sketches: the Mother’s Day brunch with Woggins as an incurably flirtatious (which is to say horny for moms) server, and the “Deathly Diner” with a paucity of spooky backstory that felt like the staff had been reading up on the about-to-open Dark Universe land within their parent company’s new theme park. (To be clear, I support any and all thinking about the Dark Universe, whether in park, film, or restaurant form.) It was sort of neat to see Goggins on either side of the servers-acting-weird divide but it might have been cooler to simply choose one restaurant sketch this particular week. After all: It could have been their last! All in all, attentively watching this week simulated the experience of distractedly half-watching a pretty good episode, which is where it really falls down on the Goggins deal: Normally, when he’s on screen, he commands more.

What Was On

Jane Wickline graduated from Weekend Update songs to first-half-hour music video with her song about finding a single baby shoe on the sidewalk. As it bounced from a wistful baby-fever riff on Cinderella to an absurdist bit involving both Goggins and his spiritual relation Sam Rockwell having tiny baby feet, it maintained a delightful unpredictability that the show could use more of. In general, it seems like the show has done fewer music videos this season than the few that preceded it, and it seems increasingly like Wickline should help that turn that around. Also, the sketch with the hilariously belabored premise of service dogs being trained to sit and watch plays, perhaps particularly bad ones, with their future owners was irresistibly silly. And it’s always great to see Cecily Strong, who appeared in the cold open as the loathsome Jeanine Pirro, another Trump appointee from the Fox News trough.

What was off

Boy, but the rest of that Trump sketch was pretty bad, huh? Another walk-on fake-out with a bunch of in-jokes about the show! And then Strong spitting wine at Jost as Pete Hegsweth, which is always funny, but on the other hand, leading with a much-repeated Weekend Update bit from several years ago didn’t exactly feel inspired, either.

Most valuable player (who may or may not be ready for prime time)

Jane Wickline. Yes.

Next time

It’s an SNL family affair for the Season 50 finale: Scarlett Johansson, known to no one as Mrs. Colin Jost, becomes the show’s most-frequent female host with her seventh episode, and her first episode in more than five years. The question on everyone’s lips: What about this one? Or that one? Meanwhile, Bad Bunny becomes one of the most frequent musical guests of the 2020s with his third appearance.

Stray observations

• • Where the hell was? Here’s the part of the recap I haven’t been doing that often where I ask where the hell a particular cast member was. Where the hell was Chloe Fineman? And also, where the hell was Devon Walker? Fineman has been making the rounds to promote her new movie Summer of 69, so while it’s understandable that she might not have had the time to really push for a ton of her own material this week, it’s also a little odd that she wasn’t in anything.
• • Does anyone understand a nation’s aunts of a certain age as well as Heidi?
• • Dan Bulla’s Midnight Matinee pre-tape segment where Andrew Dismukes gets in his own head after spotting a toilet accessory of sorts in his new boss’s bathroom made me sort of nod in appreciation of its cinematic dedication to its premise. It did not make me laugh very much.
• • So yeah: A less disappointing musical performance might have inched this up to a gentleman’s B-. Arcade Fire really does make a difference in precisely the opposite way I would have expected for a solid decade-plus!