42x13 Kristen Stewart with Alessia Cara

7.6/10. I have to admit, I’m not the biggest fan of Kristen Stewart. In fairness, I’ve only seen her in the Twilight films, which may very well be like judging SNL alum Bill Murray based on the two live-action Garfield movies he did. But between that her runs in the tabloids, my only impression of her has been a meh-to-negative one. That said, Stewart doesn’t knock it out of the park, but she does well here, even if she clutches to a certain vacant detachment that makes it hard for her to blend with the rest of the cast.

In fact, it’s when the episode steers into the skid of her public persona that it’s the weakest. In the second half of the monologue, where Kate McKinnon and Aidy Bryant attempt to imitate Stewart’s “too cool for school” qualities, the bit dies from the hackiness in thirty seconds. And in a sketch where Stewart plays a wild child, spinning yarns about her insane and debauched life, at a gathering devoted to opposing college drinking, there is essentially one joke, it’s quickly driven into the ground.

But when SNL lets Stewart to play to her strengths, she does well. Pete Davidson does the heavy lifting in the inspired pre-taped short “Meet Cute,” where Davidson and Stewart meet in a coffee shop, make plans to have dinner, only to realize that they never set a date, time, or contact info. The contrast between Stewart’s romcom hope and heartbreak, juxtaposed with Davidson’s manic attempts to find this girl from the coffee shop, does a nice job at finding the funny amid the formula. At the same time, the show’s riffs on the (likely sponsored) pizza roll commercials with Vanessa Bayer have unexpectedly become one of my favorite recurring bits on the show. The twist this time, that Bayer and Stewart are enjoying a torrid, art film romance in the background of a generic Super Bowl snack commercial isn’t as cutting as the “playset for wives” version or as conceptually weird as the X-files version, but it’s still a fun subversion of the rhythms of these commercials that also works as an amusing parodies of the Sundance vibe. And even the first half of her monologue, a recap of Trump talking about her break up on Twitter, had a shaggy charm to it.

The show’s political humor was superb as well. The cold open saw Alec Baldwin reprise his role as Trump, making a series of ill-advised phone calls to assorted world leaders (most notably a welcome return of Kate McKinnon’s Obama-loving Angela Merkel) to stir the pot. Depicting Steve Bannon as a literal Skeletor type yet again is inspired lunacy, and the sketch got a lot of jabs in quickly. The follow up, with the revised TSA guidelines after Trump’s executive order, was a succinct and stylistically amusing way to criticize the move.
But the sketch everyone’s talking about, of course, is Melissa McCarthy as Sean Spicer. It’s another unexpected casting boon for the show, and McCarthy brings the right level of mockery, exaggeration and physicality to the part. The show bends Spicer’s persona enough to poke fun at him, but also to just go for laughs at the absurdity as McCarthy-as-Spicer goes full blast. It was a singular sketch (possibly the best McCarthy’s done on the SNL stage despite four solid turns as a host), and despite the inevitably rehash, I hope they never redo it, because this one deserves to stand on its own as a unique surprise.

For once, the weakest element of the program was Weekend Update. It’s easy to talk about the gaffes, with Che bungling a punchline despite two attempts and Jost nearly ending the segment prematurely, but independent of those snafus, both hosts just seemed off tonight. Che in particular lacked a certain sharpness in his commentary, and while some of the one-liners were amusing enough, on the whole they lacked the cleverness of the duo’s better outings. They also welcome Kenan’s David Ortiz to the desk, and if you’ve seen his spiel once on the show, you’ve seen it a thousand times.

The other sketches were hit or miss. Celebrity Jeopardy is the bit SNL turns to when it wants to trot out a boatful of impressions without much effort. The impressions weren’t especially convincing (though Leslie Jones’s Samuel L. Jackson worked amusingly and unexpectedly well despite not being very accurate) and the gags were pretty tepid (aside from Bobby Moynihan’s Bill Belichick engaging in some shenanigans to win) but the one-liners uttered by Kenan’s Steve Harvey kept the sketch passable if not a true winner. The only other real dud was the ten-to-one sketch, where Stewart plays Charlie Bucket in Charlie and the Chocolate factory and is aghast rather than pleased to discover that her grandparents could walk this whole time. It’s a standard “how would real life characters react to a movie scenario” type of premise that this show hits a lot, and there wasn’t another wrinkle to make this anything more than a ten second joke.

In the end though, it was a good episode, with a host that did not necessarily put in one for the record books (though her F-bomb—which led to an amusing ad lib about her never being invited back— is likely to warrant at least a footnote given how people tend to freak out about such things), but who did an admirable job out there, with some good writing and a couple of ringers to help the overall quality of the ep.