41x21 Fred Armisen with Courtney Barnett

This is as flat a 6/10 as you're ever going to get out of me. Little about this episode was superb, but little about it was truly bad either. It stayed just enough above the line of "enjoyable" to work, while never really excelling at anything.

That "good enough but not great" spirit extended to nearly everything in the episode, with a lot of dull or standard stuff then briefly found a second gear to elevate a sketch or a scene to a passing level. The opening political sketch hit the standard Hillary/Bernie beats that the show's been doing for a while now, but managed to throw in enough of a twist with the studio-spanning dance number to make it feel like a little bit more. Armisen's monologue started out as a hoary parody of the already hoary tropes for one-man shows, but managed to infuse enough little performance details here and there to make the piece work. Even the return of Andy Samberg in an SNL Digital Short felt like a lot of the same old same old from The Lonely Island (their "Iran" song comes to mind) with only the minor joy in their return engagement being enough to make it seem special.

It extended to Weekend Update, which felt like it gave into the rhythms Jost and Che have settled into entirely. That means it was solid, but not especially inspired. Maya Rudolph's deposed President of Brazil continues the tradition of Kenan's David Ortiz with the entire joke being that people with accents sound funny. And Kenan's Willie is always worth a chuckle, but had nothing new in his bag of tricks. The only thing that gave the segment a spark were their "cut for harshness" rapid fire joke recitations that varied in cleverness, but at least provoked a reaction.

The rest of the episode waxed and waned. The return of Armisen's "Regine" was the sort of broad physical comedy that doesn't jibe with me, despite my affection for Matt Foley. His fancy escape pod sketch fell into the usual trap of one mildly amusing joke stretched out too long. The Lewis & Clark sketch had a good ridiculous energy to it until it fell into odd rapey territory. And getting the whole cast and then some to sing a song about Summer in Arkansas was perfectly pleasant, but little more.

The only sketch that really made an impression was "Goodbye Mr. Bunting," which perfectly captured the tone of Dead Poets Society and its ilk, while building to an enjoyably dark and absurd conclusion. In a fairly underwhelming episode, it was the only sketch that really stood out.

Otherwise, Courtney Barnett was enjoyable as what felt like a throwback style of rock and roll that worked for me, and Armisen was perfectly at home in his old stomping grounds and game as ever, even if his style's never really been my thing. It was buoyed a bit by the abundance of appearances by former cast members, but overall it was a perfectly adequate finale to a perfectly adequate season.