Adele didn’t sing in last night’s Saturday Night Live (oh wait, she did a little), but she was more than passable in a number of sketches in her first-ever hosting gig. In one painfully standout piece, she played one of four unsuspecting pals (alongside Ego Nwodim, Heidi Gardner, and Bowen Yang) who, on an innocent lark, decide to pop into the local palm-reader’s shop to find out just how much better their next year has to be compared to the horrible, no-good, very bad year that was . . . 2019. Bum-bum-buuuuuummmmm.
With Kate McKinnon’s Madame Vivelda lulling the quartet into a false sense of corny security, what with her overdone accent and glazed performer’s eyes, things quickly turned. Gardner’s leading question about her relationship received confirmation that, yes, she and her boyfriend will be living under the same roof for all of 2020. And having crying fights about whether or not he’s using enough soap to wash off the outside of a bag of snack chips from the store. Huh. Adele’s question about her 2020 work prospects turns out to be all about screaming at a delivery driver because he’s late with a time-wasting hobby she can’t imagine she’ll ever, ever take up. And Yang gets the double-whammy of romantic travel with his boyfriend taking the shape of a terrified, bag-peeing car trip, and him being ostracized by these very friends for committing an unpardonable sin whose innocuous 2019 ordinariness nobody can translate into friendship-ending conflict.
Madame Vivelda also has some bad news for Gardner’s character (a New Yorker with the last name “Toobin” and a father in the magazine industry), and baffles Adele’s character by envisioning a vocal feud with the Postmaster General, whose name she somehow knows. Plus, McKinnon’s eerily accurate psychic keeps making chilling references to an unspeakable something she only refers to as “It.” So before you ask, “How could 2021 possibly be worse?,” remember Madame Vivelda—you could be putting a curse on us all.