Season 48, Episode 12: Pedro Pascal/Coldplay
Air Date: February 4, 2023
Sketches:
- "Cold Open": MSNBC correspondent Katy Tur interviews the Chinese balloon that was shot down.
- "The Big Hollywood Quiz": Pop culture experts take on a game show about recent pop culture and find that they can't answer anything.
- "HBO Mario Kart Trailer": HBO and Nintendo decide to follow the success of The Last of Us (2023) with a Mario Kart adaptation.
- "Waking Up": A man awakens from a coma with a completely different voice and personality.
- "Fancam Assembly": A teacher hosts a social media seminar with the students and hopes to stop them from making fancams of him.
- "Wing Pit Commercial": A chicken wing commercial offers more...and more...and more chicken wings.
- "Overprotective Mom": A young man brings his girlfriend Britney to meet his conservative Hispanic mother.
- "Italian Waiters": A group of waiters at a restaurant shower all the women at a table but one with compliments.
- "Lisa from Temecula": A birthday dinner goes awry when one of the guests orders an extra, extra well-done steak.
Coldplay performed the songs "The Astronaut" and a medley that ended in "Fix You". Weekend Update guests include a burned-out Punxsutawney Phil and British rappers Millie Founds and Shirty.
Tropes:
- Adam Westing: Mr. Ben in "Fancam Assembly" is a blatant stand-in for Pedro Pascal, who often displays similar confusion and discomfort over being sexualized by hordes of teenaged fans.
- Bilingual Bonus: "Overprotective Mom" features some additional small zingers for the Spanish-speaking viewers, e.g. Mrs. Flores calling Britney "this little witch with her Pinterest".
- The Cameo: Pascal's long-time friend Sarah Paulson shows up in "Fancam Assembly" as another teacher, Ms. Jenny.
- Darker and Edgier: Compared to the extremely unserious Mario Kart franchise, the version of it in "HBO Mario Kart Trailer" is grungy, postapocalyptic, and populated by a cast of LGBT gunslingers/go-kart drivers.
- A Degree in Useless: The titular "Overprotective Mom"'s blunt response to hearing her son's girlfriend is getting an art degree: "So she doesn't like money."
- Easily Forgiven: In "Overprotective Mom," Claudia has a very low opinion of her son Luis's girlfriend, a white girl named Britney, and disparages everything about her. But as soon as Claudia hears Britney ask if she can say grace, thus proving that she's "a woman of God," she beams with delight and immediately starts asking about when she can expect grandchildren.
- Follow the Leader: Invoked in "HBO Mario Kart Trailer", where Nintendo and HBO deliberately cash in on The Last of Us (2023)'s success by patterning their adaptation of the Mario Kart franchise on it.
- Gratuitous Spanish: Pascal breaks into some during his monologue, after he says he has a message for his relatives watching in Chile.
- Hiding Behind the Language Barrier: Luis and his mother in "Overprotective Mom" discuss Luis's non-Hispanic girlfriend Britney in Spanish, except they leave some choice words in English like "nice white girl", "hit it and quit it", "unisex apparel", and "The White Lotus", so Britney clocks that she's being insulted pretty easily.
- Hot for Teacher: "Fancam Assembly" is about how the students can't help but make fancams of their favorite attractive teacher, Mr. Ben.
- I Want Grandkids: In "Overprotective Mom", once Mrs. Flores learns Britney is a fellow Christian, she does a complete 180 of her opinion of her and demands to know when she can expect grandchildren.
- Identity Amnesia: In "Waking Up," Charlie comically awakens from a coma as basically a delirious Valley Boy, mumbling such phrases as "Oh my gah!" and "Let's put a pin in that" with what his friend describes as an "LA Mushmouth thing." Even though Charlie remembers his first name, he can't recognize his wife or sister, and when the former plays a video of him before the accident, he simply swoons that the man in the video is the hottest guy he ever saw.
- Immigrant Parents: In "Overprotective Mom", a Hispanic young man brings his white, non-Hispanic girlfriend to meet his strongly-accented, conservative immigrant mother. The mom disapproves of the girl's diet, degree, attitude towards mental health, and fashion sense...but does a 180 once she realizes she's Christian.
- Mood Whiplash: In "Overprotective Mom", after a whole sketch of Spanglish passive-aggressiveness Britney cancels out all of her boyfriend's overly critical mom's complaints about her simply by revealing she's Christian.
- Punctuated Pounding: Mrs. Flores is prone to slapping her son to the rhythm of her scolding in "Overprotective Mom", first because he doesn't call enough, later because he failed to tell her his new girlfriend is a devout Christian i.e. an ideal daughter-in-law after all.
- Running Over the Plot: According to Charlie's sister, he fell into a coma after a Party City truck hit him in Arkansas.
- Secret Relationship: "Fancam Assembly" reveals Mr. Ben and Ms. Jenny have been keeping their relationship from the school, but admit it in the end to their students' delight.
- Serial Escalation: The "Wing Pit" sketch initially starts like a normal wing commercial that takes place at a Super Bowl party. However, the amount of wings and sauce escalate as the sketch goes on alongside the increasingly absurd methods of delivery, such as a liquified alcoholic chicken smoothie, three-thousand chicken wings delivered through a black contractor bag that knocks out a football fan, and airdropped ranch. And then there is the revelation that not only Wing Pit owns the police, but the events in the sketch were done to appease a chicken god of death, concluding with the people at the party drowning in thousands of chicken wings delivered via cement chute.
- Sound-Effect Bleep: In "HBO Mario Kart Trailer", Luigi's "I love this shit!" is bleeped with the loot noise from Mario and a star over his mouth.
- Shocking Voice Identity Reveal: In the monologue, Pascal states that a man once asked him to Facetime his six-year-old son, who loved The Mandalorian. When the boy failed to recognize "Mando" without his armor, the man suggested that Pascal "do the Mando voice." Pascal admits that "Without the mask, it just sounds porn-y," and demonstrates by growling, "I can bring you in warm, or I can bring you in cold," into an imaginary iPhone.
- Weird Crossover: Mario Kart and The Last of Us.
