Bill Hader and Kate McKinnon shine during Vince Vaughn's mediocre episode

I wrote SNL recaps for the original version of Popculturology from 2012 to 2015. The opinions voiced in these recaps may be outdated based on the events that have occurred since their writing. This article was originally published on April 14, 2013.

Welcome to Edition No. 18 of Sunday Morning Live, Popculturology's look at the latest episode of Saturday Night Live. All of your questions about the Vince Vaughn-hosted episode will be answered after the jump.

How'd Vaughn do?

Now that we're eighteen episodes into Season 38 of SNL, the shows start to blur together. I can remember standout episodes like Louis CK's and Justin Timberlake's, but the mediocre (or worse) episodes become a fuzzy haze of meh. Vaughn's episode joined that haze of meh before the show was even over. I can't tell yet whether this weekend's SNL was the worst of the season, but I think it's definitely a challenger for most uneventful. SNL thrives on buzz, which means an uneventful episode is even worse than an awful episode. People will talk about an awful episode. An uneventful episode will dead on arrival.

Vaughn spent much of the night reading cue cards, appearing stiff and uncomfortable. I have no idea what his monologue was trying to accomplish. I don't even really want to highlight the best sketches of the night. I would rather talk about how Bill Hader and Kate McKinnon worked as hard as they could to keep whatever tiny spark of life this episode had going alive.

So you'd like to talk about Bill Hader and Kate McKinnon?

Yes, I'd like to discuss Hader and McKinnon and how they dominated Vaughn's episode. While Vaughn was snoozing his way through SNL, Hader and McKinnon were on full display. I pegged McKinnon as the next SNL star last season, but her first full season hasn't exactly made good on that potential. I don't blame her — I blame the show itself. Between McKinnon and Cecily Strong, SNL has two dynamic and hilarious female castmembers, but it refuses to properly highlight them. Strong was pretty much missing from the entire episode this week, something that seems to happen to McKinnon too way more often than it should.

SNL wasted little time this week going to a short, giving Hader the chance to set the episode's tone early with the Al Pacino Accused Murderer Biopic Series. After Al Pacino played both Jack Kevorkian and Phil Spector in HBO biopics, SNL figured the actor could also portray famous accused murderers like Amanda Knox, the Unabomber and the Mendendez brothers. We'll gladly accept any opportunity for Hader to break out a bunch of impressions, even though we'll laugh very, very uncomfortably when he's in blackface.

Short-Term Memory Loss Theater may have been the highlight of a vanilla episode. Hader was the central character in this one, playing a doctor/director/actor of a theater troupe made up of people with short-term memory loss. Even though his techniques were supposed to make everyone remember their lines, no one could remember anything, forcing Hader's character to constantly feed his actors lines. When Fred Armisen and Vaughn have trouble navigating the stage, Hader can't keep it together anymore and starts to break. We know from past episodes this season that Hader and Armisen are a dangerous breaking combo.

McKinnon playing Marina Chapman, a woman who claims to have been raised by monkeys. What more do I need to say?

While McKinnon dove headfirst into this sketch (or, technically slid headfirst up this sketch's stretchy shirt), it just couldn't compare to the first time SNL did this sketch this season. Sorry, Vaughn, you're no Louis C.K.

Anything else even worth mentioning from this episode?

This sketch was the non-Hader/McKinnon highlight of the night, shedding light on the origins of NBC's NBA theme music. Who knew the Tesh brothers and a pair of tiny hammers were involved? "That’s right, burn it down, Teshes!" Jason Sudeikis actually showed up in a lot of sketches during this episode. Just think, we're only a few weeks away from overanalyzing whether or not he's leaving the show again.

It was also odd to SNL do a sketch about Margaret Thatcher so early in the night. Does the audience SNL is trying to attract find Thatcher-related humor captivating? Based on Twitter, the kids at the helm of the social media ship don't even know who Thatcher was.

SNL tried to make a statement on Congress' inability to function as a governing body, but the sketch was maybe a bit too heavy handed for a cold open. It was also disappointed to see SNL use up the "Jay-Z goes to Cuba" story in a throwaway line by Jay Pharoah's President Barack Obama.

"We did it. Racism is over."