Saturday Night Live opened its latest episode with an Independence Day-style alien invasion story, imagining the President of the United States as the inspiring voice of a country in dire need of hope and guidance. Unfortunately, Bill Pullman was busy, so they got Donald Trump.
When NASA announced last month that they’d discovered Earth-like planets around TRAPPIST-1, a relatively nearby star system, a lot of people first thought, “Wow, does that mean First Contact?” But, it was soon followed by, “Oh shit, now’s really not a good time for First Contact.” And now we can see why. The sketch is about American troops struggling to defeat alien invaders from Zorblatt 9, but their fearless leader can’t seem to grasp the severity of the situation. Also, he might have financial ties to the aliens. You can watch the sketch below.
I will admit the sketch, as a whole, wasn’t very good. The jokes felt like copy-paste versions of Trump puns we’ve already heard SNL do, and Alec Baldwin’s clearly ambivalent about continuing his role as Trump. Plus, and this might be a science geek nitpick, but why not feature TRAPPIST-1 as the source of the aliens? Come on, writers, it would’ve been perfect! Trump pretty much ignored the announcement last month, instead bitching about FBI leaks and “fake news.” Meanwhile, people were joking about how NASA lovingly gave the rest of us an escape plan. It was practically gift-wrapped for you.
Long story short, a good effort but a subpar execution. Also, I miss President Pullman.
[YouTube]