Amy Poehler, Tina Fey and Seth Meyers challenge Colin Jost and Michael to a Joke Off

Hey there, Deep SNL Thoughts fans. Sorry for the delay on this week’s Episode Review. I was actually in California when this weekend’s episode of SNL aired, which gave me the surreal experience of seeing updates from the Amy Poehler-hosted episode at like 9 p.m.

But I wasn’t going to skip this episode. Not with Poehler returning to host, and not so early in this season.

I had few doubts about Poehler hosting SNL. She’s a legendary cast member — a key figure in an golden era* — and so much would have to go wrong for one of her episodes to actually be bad. With this being only the second episode in Season 51, though, I was eager to see if the show would do a better job at figuring out what it looks like in the wake of losing both Heidi Gardner and Ego Nwodim — departures that left SNL without strong female leads — and as it integrated four new cast members and Ben Marshall’s shift from Please Don’t Destroy.

(*In the early days of The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast, Seth Meyers coined the term “an golden era” to describe the period of time he was on SNL. Other members of Meyers’ an golden era would include Poehler, Fred Armisen, Will Forte, Maya Rudolph, Andy Samberg, Jason Sudeikis, Kenan Thompson and Kristen Wiig.)

While I have my doubts that Lorne Michaels actually had a vision for what Season 51 was supposed to look like after his promises of a big shakeup, this episode gave me a very strong look at what this cast has the potential of doing.

It helps when an episode of SNL has a host like Poehler, but this episode had a confidence in how all these puzzle pieces can fit together that last week’s Bad Bunny episode was missing. (Not Bad Bunny’s fault. That’s not his job.)

While last week’s episode gave us the bizarre sequence of back-to-back sketches featuring Sarah Sherman and Chloe Fineman sitting in the exact same spots in two restaurant sketches, this weekend’s episode pretty effortlessly mixed and matched the show’s veteran cast members like Mikey Day, its greener cast members like Ashley Padilla and its freshman performers like Jeremy Culhane. (The episode was light on Thompson, if I’m looking for something to complain about.)

Will we see this spark nurtured into something consistent when Sabrina Carpenter hosts? (We’re getting a Domingo sketch, right?)

COLD OPEN

Pam Bondi Hearing Cold Open

Here’s a wild one: SNL kicked the episode off with a political cold open … that didn’t feature James Austin Johnson’s Donald Trump. Crazy, I know. After the show went back to “Trump breaks the fourth wall” bit in the season premiere’s cold open, I kind of thought that’s what we were going to be in for now.

This was also a rare cold open where the host made an appearance, with Poehler portraying Pam Bondi. She was joined by her former Weekend Update partner, Tina Fey, as Kristi Noem.

• “Hold my gun”: Fey’s version of Noem had strong Sarah Palin vibes.
• “Before I don’t answer, I’d like to insult you personally”: The cold open got a bunch of cast members, both old and new, in the mix right off the bat. Johnson, Day, Culhane, Padilla, Andrew Dismukes and Tommy Brennan all got a moment during this cold open.

THE MONOLOGUE

I love that SNL chose to have a former cast member return to host the show on what was the actual 50th anniversary of its Oct. 11, 1975, premiere. (I’m gonna assume this is what Michaels was going for when he selected Poehler for this episode.)