‘SNL’ had a perfectly fine David S. Pumpkins sketch going. Then it derailed it with Trump.

SNL is broken. And I don’t know how the show pulls out of this death spiral.

This weekend’s Inde Navarrette-hosted episode was an easy assignment. It was the Halloween episode — on the real Halloween! — and SNL had the star of one of the biggest horror movies in recent history as its host. Do some spooky stuff. Have some Halloween fun. Right the ship after the first three episodes of Season 52.

This was only the fifth time that the Halloween episode of SNL landed on actual Halloween. Navarrette follows in the footsteps of Donald Pleasence (1981), Dabney Coleman (1987), Catherine O’Hara (1992) and John Mulaney (2020).

But SNL spat in the face of this episode’s Halloween potential the moment the show began.

The episode kicked off with a cold open that was obviously leading to David S. Pumpkins. When Tom Hanks appeared alongside Mikey Day and Bobby Moynihan, I breathed a sigh of relief. Finally we had a fun cold open. Finally the show wasn’t going to start with Donald Trump. I even made a joke about James Austin Johnson’s Trump appearing in the cold open.

Welp, the second after I hit send on that post, Johnson appeared. The fun was over.

I feel bad for Navarrette. She was a perfectly capable host. She was natural in her delivery, and it never felt like she was struggling to keep up with the show.

But SNL has no direction right now. It has no heart. It has no bite.

Ashley Padilla has been turned into the show’s straight man. Andrew Dismukes is missing from episodes. The show can’t even get things together to air a final sketch after its musical guest’s second song.

I love writing about SNL. For The Cold Open, I’ll churn out 2,000 words or more at 2 a.m. for the love of the game. But this episode? From the moment Johnson’s Trump showed up, it was rotten. And that vibe continued through the entire episode, so don’t be surprised when my sketch-by-sketch thoughts feel brisk in this newsletter.

We’re a fifth of the way through Season 52, and this season is absolutely lost. Is there anyone at SNL or NBC who can shake Lorne Michaels awake? I would say that SNL has been sleepwalking through this season, but sleepwalking would be better than the choices Michaels has made over the course of these five episodes. Shane Gillis hosting the season’s third episode? The egregious David S. Pumpkins/Donald Trump swap for this cold open?

SNL will be lucky to make it out of next weekend’s Druski-hosted episode before Mulaney can hopefully save the season.

COLD OPEN

Scary Halloween Cold Open (ft. David S. Pumpkins)

Of all the bad decisions made over the past decade of Donald Trump, this cold open might be the most unforgivable moment of them all.

It’s the Halloween show. We’re doing David S. Pumpkins again. Tom Hanks is here. Bobby Moynihan came back. It’s a nonpolitical cold open. We need this. We need this break.

Then James Austin Johnson’s Donald Trump shows up and freezes the sketch.

Goddammit, SNL. Goddammit.

Unforgivable. Absolutely unforgivable. I’ve often been disappointed by SNL. But this was the first time the show actually left me angry over a decision like this. Nothing that Johnson said as Trump stuck in my brain after I realized that, oh no, this was happening.

What an incredibly lazy way to incorporate Trump into the cold open too. The show could have had him popping into the horror vignettes. He could’ve interacted with David S. Pumpkins and his sidekicks. Doing the “Trump freezes the sketch and breaks the fourth wall” move is malpractice at this point.

Back in the days of Alec Baldwin playing Trump, I had a theory that the gloominess that accompanied a Baldwin cold open rippled throughout an entire episode. The cast knew it was bad. The audience knew it was bad. And it would take a few sketches for the show to shake off those vibes.

In the case of this cold open, the audience felt cheated. We thought we were getting some classic SNL fun, only to have it ripped away from us. The cold open mocked us for naively enjoying David S. Pumpkins.

Someone at SNL should’ve stepped in and stopped this from happening.

• Also starring: My rage tunnel vision cleared up just enough at the end of the cold open so I could catch Saidah Belo-Osagie as Nikki Minaj and Veronika Slowikowska as short-lived White House press secretary Katie Zacharia. Sorry to everyone who thought SNL should’ve brought in Scarlett Johansson to play Zacharia.

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THE MONOLOGUE

The last time SNL was new, we got Shane Gillis’s infamous monologue. (You know, the one where he said “women just dress like whores now” at the gym.) It shouldn’t have been Navarrette’s responsibility to clean up this mess, but she took a quick shot at Gillis when talking about how she’s getting in shape for a Marvel movie.