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Saturday Night Live opens in the Oval Office, where president Trump (James Austin Johnson) dictates an insane, Islamophobic Truth Social post to press secretary Karoline Leavitt (Ashley Padilla). She voices her concern over the backlash she will have to field, but Trump assuages her: “Like I said to Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem right before I fired them, you’re doing a terrific job.” As she takes her leave, Trump gets a huge laugh by breaking the fourth wall to note, “All three of those were played by Ashley, it’s an interesting detail.”

Moving on to more pressing business, Trump rings up Tiger Woods (Kenan Thompson), currently in rehab in Switzerland after flipping his car and getting a DUI but hangs up on him when informed there’s no golf course on site. He then answers a call from wife Melania (Chloe Fineman), who informs him that she has decided “to do a big, random speech completely out of nowhere and say, ‘I am not Epstein victim’.” For once, it’s Trump who’s acting sane by comparison.

Finally, he turns his attention to the war with Iran and calls Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (Colin Jost). Hegseth brags, “Iran is as obliterated as me every Saturday night, allegedly,” even as he floats the idea of drafting 40-year-olds to “fight millennial cringe”. Hegseth wonders why Trump agreed to negotiate with Iran, but the president assures him: “I just heard they’re going really, really bad. I sent in my secret weapon: JD Vance. After those Iranians spent 20 hours taking to JD, they said, ‘please, sir, go back to bombing us.’”

With this past week being as insane as it was, SNL had a lot of ground to cover upfront, so we can excuse them of rushing through the headlines. Still, a little bit more time could have been spent on any one of them to give this cold open a little more heft.

Colman Domingo hosts for the first time. An actor since the ’90s, he has an impressive resume: “Fear the Walking Dead, four seasons. Lincoln, Sing Sing. I was Carly in iCarly. I was inside C-3PO’s suit in Star Wars, and I was also your uncle.” Despite being in everything (“like raisins in a Caucasian cookout”), he’s better known at setting a great vibe. He proceeds to prove this by having the band and crew set a sexy mood that gets the audience making out and makes dweeby on Jeremy Culhane almost cool-looking. Domingo is so natural and at ease on stage you would think he had hosted half a dozen times by now.

Interestingly, indeed, suspiciously, while Domingo does mention his turn in the HBO series Euphoria, the long-awaited fourth season of which is set to premiere tomorrow, there is zero mention of his turn as Joe Jackson in the controversial Michael Jackson biopic Michael, which releases stateside in two weeks.

The top story of a New York news program is an armed bank robbery that occurred in the city’s fashion district. A reporter interviews a group of bystanders, three students and their professor from the nearby fashion and design university. Decked out in uber-chic outfits, they are more focused on the style crimes of the suspect than his actual crimes. Their witness descriptions are of no help: “Be on the lookout for a mess.” “The fit must have been in the unemployment line, because it was not working.” “The colors floated with boldness, but couldn’t get her in bed.” Domingo’s bitchy professor is one of the better characters the show has introduced in a long while.

Black Barbershops is an alternative to therapy for depressed white guys, giving them a new perspective on things by offering “a spot where brothers could kick back, talk a little mess, and get our drink on”. Even with the nonstop ball busting, suspect relationship advice (“Cheat”), casual violence, and bad haircuts, it works wonders on the hapless white men.

Next up is a video log from Nasa’s recently returned Artemis II. Domingo’s lead astronaut attempts to record a poetic, thoughtful message about the grandeur of space, only to be interrupted by the rest of his crew, who just want to goof off in zero gravity. Said goofs involve a floating hat, a giant wad of snot, and a makeshift penis pump. Dull and overlong.

The Knowledge Hour is a cult classic PBS show in the mold of Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction? Domingo plays the Jonathan Frakes-like host (his catchphrase is, ‘What if I told you…”) who loves to blow viewers minds by revealing that most of the set is actually people disguised as objects. Things spiral out of control when his surprise guest doesn’t appear, before ending with a sudden same-sex marriage. The type of absurdist sketch is usually relegated to the second-to-last slot or else cut for time but this somehow made it to the middle of the episode.

Musical guest Anitta performs her first song of the night, then it’s on to Weekend Update. Their first guests are two kids from the back of the school bus (Kam Patterson and Marcello Hernández). There to discuss inflation, the rowdy boys can’t stay focused on their assignment, choosing instead horse around, hitting Jost with a couple “Deez Nutz” and pretending to shoot him. Jost eventually turns the tables on them with a well-played “Ligma” joke.

They’re followed by Gen Z sexpert Lindt Greer (Jane Wickline), there to teach her celibate generation about healthy sex practices. Her guidance, such as it is, boils down to two rules: “One: have fun. And two: no raping.” It turns out she’s completely out of her depth, unsure if she’s even ever had sex: “I’ve had something that might be sex and I’ve had it a lot. If I haven’t had sex, then what do you think I had?” Wickline’s appearances at the Update desk heretofore have mostly been musical performances, so it’s fun to see her channel her quirky, nervy energy into a new, original character.

At an open casket funeral, the grandsons (Hernández, Culhane) of the recently departed voice their regret that they never got to know him well. They quickly come to learn a lot about him as they’re greeted by his friends “from the life” who come to pay their respects: a rolling cavalcade of pimps, prostitutes and johns (one of whom makes out with the corpse, another of whom goes down on it). It turns out their grandpa was a “boy whore”: “You could have your way with him, no matter what you looked like, as long as you paid him his dollar.” The recurring gag of each pimp attempting to recruit Hernández while disgustedly dismissing Culhane is solid gold.

It’s followed by a clunky parody of Dead Poet’s Society where Domingo’s new boys’ academy professor tries to inject his free-spirited ethos into math with disastrous results.

Then the show wraps up with a spoof of 90s YA adventure series Animorphs (here called Beastomorphs). After saving the planet from an evil alien invader, a group of superpowered teens attempt to morph from animal to human form, only for one of them (Sarah Sherman) to get grotesquely “stuck mid-morph” after she combination sneeze-farts. A fun bit of scatological nostalgia.

One of the stronger episodes of the season, with Domingo staking his claim as best host so far. His theatrical style made a great fit for the show, and his range saw him play a array of wildly different characters. SNL would be wise to bring him back next year.