I think Cecily Strong was solid if unmemorable, and would love to have seen her paired with Che.

The 10oclock rerun- the first Alec Baldwin hosted episode from about 1989- was a great showcase of her talent. It included a ton of short character sketches like Greta Garbo doing charades and the famous "you shouldn't give away your pie with breakfast" bit.

There were only 13.

I've been looking years for this sketch- it's nowhere on the Internet.

She's arguably the most underrated SNL cast memeber of all time, as she was easily the equal talent of Phil Hartman.

It's ultimately the greatest flaw of this season. You have to completely turn off the rational and common sense portions of your brains to allow the central conflict driving the plot to make any sense whatsoever.

So I finally decide to give up on this show because I'm tired of the near non-existent plotting and I hate Sky with the flaming passion of 1000 suns, and we have a halfway decent episode?

I guess that's why no one has challenged Gemma about the "some Chinese dudes" lie this season. To even suspect Gemma of lying around these idiots you have to actually catch her in the act and pull the gun out of her hands while riding in the car with her.

From the Leland death through the last episode, you can essentially skip all of it. There's a terrible sub-soap opera subplot involving the biker guy, and the season 2.2 villan is essentially Pistachio disguisey from the terrible Dana Carvey movie.

Ho
Lee
Shiz

Yep,

Aside from the monologue, white people, and the Michael Che parts of WU, that was largely terrible. The nice women soap opera, dumped in the car, and 650 juicer were kind of funny in the begining, but just went absolutely nowhere. Not the best showcase of SS's talents.

I'm not arguing original Dallas was Shakespere in the park (because it wasn't).

Last weeks was no worse than an a-, and this was no worse than a b.

Also:

I can't believe jax's brilliant plan of shooting random people to get to Lin didn't work! Maybe he was expecting Jemma to explain to them it was the Chinese's fault?

I still like the show, but as others have noted 26 seasons is almost guaranteeing that a show will be past its prime. There have been just as many Al Jean(solo) produced episodes as there were of anything that came before. Even though there have been some late era classics, it's hard for them to distinguish themselves…

It is weird rewatch ing the first season when I was Bart's age, and now in 2014 I'm almost Homer.

And "A Star is Burns" is still a fantastic episode in spite of that. Jokes about boo-urns still will get a laugh in 2014

One of the biggest reasons that the Mike Scully produced episodes still stand out as the worst of all time, even given the 13 years of Al Jean mediocrity, is they got rid of the humanity of the first eight seasons in favor of cynical, mean-spirited, jokes about the assholes of humanity.