Saturday Night Live Recap: Inde Navarrette Leaves SNL Obsessed

Saturday Night Live
Inde Navarrette
Season 52 Episode 4
Editor’s Rating ★★★★★
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If you were home this Halloween, either because you’re a parent, a teen staying up too late, or a 30-something in a sugar coma from eating all her niece’s Halloween candy, I hope you were watching Inde Navarrette, the breakout star of the horror movie Obsession, crush her first time hosting Saturday Night Live.

Considering that Navarrette is a relative newcomer, I wasn’t sure what to expect going into the episode. Navarrette proved to be a deft performer in Obsession, delivering a terrifying performance while also being genuinely funny. But no matter how talented a host is, there are always other factors at play. Would she be nervous? Would the writing give her enough to work with? Luckily, the Halloween episode is ideal for a first-time host because there’s so much infrastructure built into it: past Halloween sketches to call back to, excuses for guest cameos, the magic of spooky decor and lighting, and an audience hopped up on Nerds Gummy Clusters. A Halloween episode would provide a cushion for Navarrette, if she needed it.

But she didn’t. Navarrette started her monologue with a magnetic charm and confidence, guns blazing, with a smirk: “I’m gonna be in a Marvel movie … so every morning, I put on my little whore outfit, and I hit the gym.” Well, yes! I was wondering how the show would acknowledge the Shane Gillis episode fallout, and Navarrette delivered the callback perfectly. She held court the rest of the episode, slipping in and out of characters like they were Halloween costumes. She did well because she’s a good actor, but her performance was also buoyed by her incredible physical comedy instincts, notably as a blonde ghost child from the 1930s, which featured her hitting her head and crossing her eyes, a telenovela star who barrels off of furniture, and a curt Paw Patrol SVU captain lightly roughhousing her team of useless dogs. In addition to more out-there roles, she also adapted nicely to playing straight character roles, like in a Dan Bulla pretape, where she played a somber widow whose dead husband leaves her a robot that does, ultimately, rip her date’s penis off and shoot it to the moon. At the end of the night, when she took a backseat in the ensemble in the Plates sketch, it felt well-deserved. It almost made me sad that we don’t get a universe where Navarrette is a cast member, but perhaps whenever it is next year that Lorne wants to ask Shane Gillis back for the seventieth time, perhaps someone could float Navarrette instead.

And it helped that Navarrette had a lot of good material to work with. After a rocky start to the season, this episode’s writing was the best it’s been in a long time. The game show, Delta pre-tape, and the telenovela sketches were top-notch, and across the episode, there really wasn’t a bad sketch. I don’t usually care for the cold open, but Tom Hanks reprising David S. Pumpkins was a nice little cameo, and I really liked seeing Grace Reiter and Saidah Belo-Osagie right up at the top. Even the Queen Mary Ghosts sketch, which I’d put at the sleepiest, was still pretty funny (and a nice way to immediately introduce us to Navarrette’s physical comedy). At the season premiere, I had hoped the team would brush off the summer cobwebs, and you know what? Consider them brushed off. Between a compelling first-time host, sharp writing that revealed genuine playfulness and surprise, and a cast hitting a stride in their chemistry with one another, it was hard to go wrong. It’s early in the season, but this episode could be a contender for one of the best we’ll see in the next few months.

Here are the highlights: 

New Airline Class

In this pre-tape, we learn about Delta Disruptive, a new part of the cabin dedicated to unruly passengers. The only rule is that you can’t stab anyone with pens, but “almost everything else is fine.” We meet passengers who are clipping their toenails and fighting, to more extreme characters, like a conspiracy-minded passenger trying to open the plane’s emergency exit (played by a kooky-eyed Mikey Day). Navarrette, with a delightful conviction, plays a gum-chewing, pantless woman named Sondra who’s straight from the Jersey Shore. I also love this universe where these insane characters willingly act normal for the talking heads for about two seconds before going back to their upsetting behavior, which also made for fun reveals once the camera panned out (like Sarah Sherman’s Debbie duct-taped to the seat, or Tommy Brennan’s character, a quarter-zip-clad rich guy who looks like he’s been airdropped from Delta One, reading Mein Kampf). This sketch moved fast with a delightful chaos and a million jokes a minute.

Uninterested Woman Game Show

A classic game show premise, where our contestants are three scuzzy-looking men (Inde Navarrette, Jane Wickline, and Sarah Sherman) who really cannot just leave a married lesbian named Kelly (Saidah Belo-Osagie) alone. The notes I took during this sketch just say “everyone is so funny in this.” So joke-dense, and some especially memorable lines read from Wickline (“Do you want to get a drink right now? I know all the spots that are open in the morning.”) The contestants are so exasperating that even our host Sephora Outlet (Ashley Padilla) loses her cool by the end (“She is a lesbian! She said that!”). Shout out to Navarrette’s choice to hop and cling to the podium like a koala, and also to Belo-Osagie’s subtle and hilarious facial expressions, especially when the boys declare “Kelly’s a bitch!”

Telenovela: El Corazón Que No Siente

A telenovela shoot gets interrupted by two execs from Sprite (Mikey Day and Ashley Padilla) who want the stars (Marcello Hernandez and Inde Navarrette) to promote a new, particularly nasty Sprite flavor. So many laugh-out-loud lines (“It’s bad but they paid for this,” “The Sprite has made me hit a woman”), and between a devastating spit take and fully lobbing herself off of a couch, Navarrette’s physical comedy here is incredible. Padilla’s character losing her composure at the end (“We wanted it to taste good and it doesn’t! We know … for the first time in history, AI screwed up!”) and the reveal that Day’s character has been a double agent for 7Up the whole time land the plane. I also really enjoyed the sub-game of the director (Kenan Thompson) declaring, apropos of nothing, whether or not each take felt erotic to him. 

Weekend Update: Ben Marshall as Pennywise the Clown on Gen Z Wellness Parties and Bobby Moynihan as Drunk Uncle on the Milwaukee Brewers’ World Series

Pennywise (Ben Marshall) as a tech bro living in an Austin loft with “three other motivated young Christians” … that’s the kind of imaginative world-building I like to see this Halloween. And call me simple, but I laughed at the honking sound from Michael Che squeezing his arm. Ending it with an intervention for Che felt clever (and, in perhaps a win for Colin Jost, one of the few times his participation in a bit at the desk ends with him being likeable). 

I was delighted that Moynihan was back at the desk after his brief cameo in the cold open. “There’s only one gender” and “Yeah, I do voter fraud” were two favorite lines out of many! And congrats to the Brewers. I didn’t know baseball was happening, so this was also informative for some of the most unobservant among us! 

Plates

If there’s anything you can rely on in this one life, it’s an Ashley Padilla character sketch. In this one, Denise (Padilla) is out to dinner and determined to maintain her chill reputation after the server (Mikey Day) accidentally drops a bunch of plates on her head. When everyone at the table tries to check if she’s okay, she deflects by cracking plates against her head. Eventually, Denise reveals that she can no longer see after all that blunt force trauma. Thinking that everyone’s left her, lets out some of the most egregious farts, which sound so cartoonish and surprising that even Padilla breaks. If you don’t like poop humor, lines like, “I can smell my blood, and I can feel my bones, and at one point I saw the Ninja Turtles walk into the room” still make it worth it. 

Cut For Time

• “Pass out then! Come on!” 

• Both Gracie Abrams performances? Ethereal. 

• A sweet Patrick Stewart tribute at the end. 

• “I’m six-foot-negative three.” 

• For a second during the credits, I thought that Sarah Sherman had quickly changed into one of her classic clown outfits, only to realize it was Tommy Brennan dressed as Sherman for Halloween.