SNL After Party (S50 E21 Air Date 5/17/25) - "Must be the Mandela Effect"
Host: Scarlett Johannson
Musical Guest: Bad Bunny
A nostalgia and cameo-packed Season 50 of SNL has come to an end.
Did the historic season go out with a bang? Or did the episode helmed by SNL-family-by-marriage member Scarlett Johannson get Lost in Translation?
Let’s find out in the long awaited Season 50 ending After Party.
Cold Open
Hey, look! It’s yet another James Austin Johnson Trump cold open. This time it features POTUS visiting the Middle East and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (Emil Wakim).
The bit has grown tiresome. It’s a great impression, and the material is good, but week in and week out it’s just fatiguing.
JAJ breaks the fourth wall and acknowledges we are possibly tired of this, but the self awareness does not help.
The Presidential impersonation is a time-honored tradition, but that doesn’t mean it has to be front and center every episode.
We are all ready for a break, regardless of how well executed the sketch is.
Monologue
Scarlett Johannson is a pro on the stage of Studio 8H. The actress, and part owner of a ferry (through her husband Update host/head writer Colin Jost) is comfortable in her hosting duties.
This is Johannson’s seventh stint hosting the show, which makes her the most frequent female host in the show’s half-century history.
This time out she does a parody of Billy Joel’s Piano Man. It’s cute, as she incorporates most of the cast (oddly not Jost). The song also makes the first joking (or is it?) reference of the night that a cast member may be departing. In this case, it’s Sarah Sherman.
This is a solid and amusing monlogue, if not wildly hilarious.
Local News Stories
ScarJo is a nighttime news anchor substituting on a morning show, where co-anchors Kenan Thompson and Ashley Padilla introduce cute, fluff stories with puns (and weatherman Wakim sings!). In an effort to fit in, Johannson makes puns to lead into tragic stories.
It’s a fun enoughsketch, and Johannson does a great job with her delivery. (“Next stop, the hospital! A woman was assaulted on the train.” and “Take me to the river….if you want to see the dead body that washed up today.”)
The puns begin to offend everyone, particularly as a reporter in the field (Devon Walker) joins in on the act in a stand-up in front of a Chili’s in which he announces a woman wants her “baby back baby back baby back” following the kidnapping of her infant.
It’s not bad for a one joke premise.
Please Don’t Destroy - First Class
Johannson takes the PDD gang on a first class airline ride….to Newark.
The plane (mimicking current events) experiences system troubles, and Bad Bunny pops up as an air traffic controller who is on the job for his first day.
The bit turns into a weird song. The whole pre-taped piece is slightly odd, and highly entertaining.
It’s what we’ve come to expect from the Please Don’t Destroy guys.
Couples at the Bar
Ego Nwodim and Marcello Hernandez are in a bar, where Nwodim is trying to accelerate their three week old relationship by moving in.
Meanwhile, Johannson and Bad Bunny show up to try and claim their usual table from them.
This puts Hernandez and Bad Bunny in a position to seem to fight in Spanish, when really they are just commiserating about their poor choices in love.
Meanwhile, the women spout some Spanish themselves, but what they say is absolute nonsense.
It’s a funny, well executed sketch that is solid throughout.
Bowen’s Still Straight
In a pre-taped piece, ScarJo confides in Nwodim and Heidi Gardner that she has a crush on Bowen Yang. She says its no big deal because she’s married and Yang is gay.
In a repeat from the Sydney Sweeney episode (complete with Gina Gershon as Bowen’s main squeeze!!), that simply plays on the concept that Bowen being gay is just a persona. (“He just dials up the gay for clout.”)
It’s not new, but still good for a lot of laughs due to the performer’s commitment to the piece.
Mike Myers Elevator Ride
This one is baffling. Mike Myers cameos (again!) as himself, trapped in an elevator with Kanye West (Thompson).
This is an extended reference to a twenty year old incident at a Hurricane Katrina relief concert in which Myers and West were onscreen and West claimed “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people,” which made Myers visibly uncomfortable.
It’s a very, very odd choice that does not pay off, and wastes the one SNL alum cameo in the show.
Not sure how or why this one happened.
Weekend Update
Is this the last time we will see Jost and Che at the desk? There are rumors that it might be.
But, who knows?
The news this week was fine, but the bits defined this one.
Nwodim brought back her FCC fine producing open mic comic persona “Miss Eggy” who riffed on airlines this time. (A stewardess offered her some butter nut squash ravioli, to which Miss Eggy responded “Butter not offer me that mess til you put some meat in it…Squash that, sucka!”)
The jokes are intentionally terrible. Nwodim’s delivery is absolutely perfect.
Update ended, as it has each recent season, with the joke swap, where jokes read by Colin and Che were written by the other one, and which were purportedly seen for the first time as they aired.
This bit revels in its inappropriate line shattering, and is always a highlght. I won’t repeat the jokes, but the video is below.
One regret I have is that Johannson came out for jokes read by Che, but Che didn’t write any for Jost to aim at her. Granted, that’s been done before, but man why waste that opportunity when she’s literally sitting right there.
Intimacy Coordinators
Johansson and Thompson are intimacy coordinators for a love scene between two women.
The concept confuses Thompson.
And that, my friends, is the entire concept of this sketch that aired in the year of our Lord 2025.
TV Press Junket
In a sketch that I am almost certain was pitched by this week’s host, TV reporters (Johannson and Yang) ask the cast of a TV show questions. They toss softballs to the cast’s single male performer (Hernandez) while asking the women difficult, personal, and rude questions.
We’ve seen videos of Johannson enduring this kind of thing for Avengers movies (and she has famously pushed back against this), so its not a stretch to believe this was her concept.
Victorian Ladies at Lunch
A group of Victorian women eat gross food and make a mess.
It’s funnier in execution than it sounds like on paper.
The Goodbye Wave
Best Sketch: I’m a sucker for the joke exchange. So it wins the spot.
Worst Sketch: Intimacy Coordinators felt dated, wasn’t well executed, and ended abruptly. It fairly easily takes these honors.
Random Notes:
-Bad Bunny provided two interestingly produced numbers (one set on a construction girder and one in a bathroom with Puerto Rican singer/songwriter RaiNao). I like this guy as a performer, but I am not entirely sure if I am supposed to take him seriously, or if he is actually a Fred Armisen character.
I’m going to forego most of the random notes to discuss the episode in general.
The 50th season certainly had a lot of nostalgia and star power. But, that seemed to fizzle as the season wore on. How did we not get more alum to show up at the end? All we get is a fairly anemic Mike Myers sketch? Really?
And, what about some farewells? Surely some of the cast is not coming back next season. If that’s the case, didn’t long time cast members deserve their goodbyes?
And, finally, is Lorne coming back? If not, we should have at least gotten a glimpse of the guy, even if he didn’t really want to do that.
It feels kind of…incomplete.
For a season that started off with a bang, it ended … well, not with a whimper, but with a mild breeze.
Had this not been a season ender in general, and the season 50 finale in specific, this would have been a perfectly fine episode. But, as it is, it’s kind of an anticlimactic cap to a truly historic milestone in television history.
None of this is to be critical of Johannson. She is an excellent host with shrewd comic timing and sensibility.
But, I don’t know, it felt to me like this finale should have been more about the cast, the show, and the sense of history.
Yes, I know we got all that earlier. But, I wanted one last taste before the Season 50 table was cleared.
In any case, here’s looking forward to what the next half century has in store for one of the most incredible achievements in television history.
Episode Grade: B-
As always, we grade SNL episodes in comparison to other SNL episodes. Not TV in general.
If you enjoy our content, please consider supporting us on Patreon.