Somehow, in a year when Beyoncé and Taylor Swift both dropped massive albums, Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan each rocketed to overnight superstardom, and Kendrick Lamar reduced Drake’s career to shambles, earning five Grammy nominations in the process, Charli XCX still emerged unambiguously as the music story of the year.

The hitmaking British club kid came to own 2024 through maybe the most well-executed album cycle of all time. Brat had instantly identifiable iconography in its color palate, a title concept so strong it bent vernacular to its will, but more importantly, it managed to sustain intense cultural attention for five straight months, an eternity in the TikTok era. Now, her coronation concludes with Charli’s SNL-hosting debut, in an episode whose structure echoed the brat album rollout: huge impact up top, surprising twists to keep the momentum going, and a strong finish.

Although she’s set to begin appearing in movies pretty soon, including one she co-wrote (!) with Jeremy O. Harris over the summer, the singer doesn’t yet have the acting experience of recent host Ariana Grande and might not be ready to carry a sketch like Grande’s “Charades.” Still, her established fashionably-bored-Brit persona translated well into several sketch roles, including fellow chanteuses Adele and Victoria Beckham. She earned laughs throughout the show without breaking a sweat or breaking character.

Elsewhere in the episode, Marcello Hernández cemented himself as the new-ish cast member with the most range. Maybe it was the rare absence of Mikey Day, ordinarily a utility player appearing in a ton of sketches, but Hernández seemed omnipresent throughout the night, casually vacillating between center stage and supporting roles, original characters, and celebrity impressions. Much like Charli XCX, he’s been a rising star for a while, and now he has risen.

With the election still all-too-fresh in Americans’ memories, the writers wisely avoided taking on the cultural ricochet of the host’s presidential endorsement. There was no meeting between Charli and Maya Rudolph, assuring the latter that Kamala Harris is still brat. Instead, we simply got a largely consistent night of comedy to help viewers forget any of that ever happened.

Here are the highlights:

Joe Biden spent a huge chunk of his time in the White House bending over backward to prove his bipartisan bona fides while paradoxically stressing the other side’s fascist intentions. The only upshot of his overly sunny embrace of Trump as president-elect is that it means more Dana Carvey as Biden on SNL. The cold open immortalized the pair’s chummy summit and also introduced Trump’s Dr. Caligari-style cabinet of horrors. (“They’re some of the most dynamic, free-thinking, animal-killing, sexually criminal, medically crazy people in the country,” James Austin Johnson’s Trump says.) Sarah Sherman dons a Neanderthal forehead and chevron eyebrows to play freakazoid congressman Matt Gaetz, while Alec Baldwin pitched down his voice ever so slightly to play RFK Jr. Although Sherman’s portrayal has a lot of potential, it would be better for humanity if we never see either character on this show ever again.

Like a supercharged episode of Nailed It, this sketch revels in baking competition show challenges gone horribly wrong. The wild variety of ways they go wrong, though, along with the immediate dismissal of Heidi Gardner’s lone competent baker, is what makes this sketch work. Charli XCX’s can’t-be-bothered affect is especially successful here because it’s such a contrast with the unholy abomination of her baking project — a writhing turkey with full bush, birthing a mound of chunky stuffing. You sort of have to give it up for any sketch that will definitely ruin several viewers’ Thanksgiving.

Speaking of Thanksgiving, this episode’s Weekend Update was a bountiful feast. Whether it was just the universe providing an abundance of material to work with or a burst of inspiration, the political jokes were razor-sharp. (Well, aside from one unfortunate Michael Che joke that would’ve slotted in nicely with Bill Burr’s unfortunate monologue last week.) Bowen Yang busted out a four-years-too-late Joe Exotic impression that hit its beats so hard, it felt right on time. After the enormous puppet tiger claw from that segment vanished, it was soon replaced by another wild animal: Sherman’s widow squirrel. In a highly physical performance, she achieved a level of facial gymnastics I would not have thought possible.

Look, this sketch is not for everybody. If you happen to be the kind of demented pervert for whom it was created, though, it’ll be so up your alley the alley may need to be renamed after it. So many different strains of humor converge throughout, all of them stupid. Yang’s character is inexplicably named Gidget. (Though he nearly breaks when he accidentally says “Gadget.”) Sherman’s character seems exhausted to have to remind her friends, “Yes, directors can be men too.” Someone in the Avatar theme park is apparently passing out crack rocks and calling them “unobtanium.” It’s an intoxicatingly strange brew and a high note to end the episode on.

Although a Please Don’t Destroy short was promised in the opening credits, it never quite arrived in the East Coast feed. It must have aired on the West Coast, however, since the sketch appeared on YouTube this morning without being marked as “Cut for Time.” In any case, it’s a shame that it didn’t make it to air, as this is the best PDD short in some time. It has the same brutally self-deprecating energy of the incredible “Roast Battle” short from Dakota Johnson’s episode last season, including another nepo-baby jab. This time the guys went a step further, acknowledging that they now only appear on the show “once every six or seven episodes.” Ouch. If they really wanted to take a shot at themselves, though, the guys might have mentioned the very real insurance commercial they confusingly appeared in between sketches.

• Surprising to have former cast member Kyle Mooney’s cameo in the monologue and also the bake-off sketch without mentioning that he wrote and directed an A24 movie that is coming out in three weeks. Guess he didn’t want to spoon-feed us baby birds, and we appreciate his confidence in us.

• It feels a little too soon to bring back Kel Squad with another song dedicated to “Domingo,” but considering the first one has 10 million YouTube views and launched countless TikTok videos, the rush to return is understandable. This new iteration worked better, though, partly by abandoning the painful premise that Kel Squad is awkward at singing and choreo.

• The Wicked Auditions sketch was a fine opportunity to welcome home beloved impressions like Yang’s Fran Lebowitz and Devon Walker’s Shannon Sharpe and introduce some new ones like Chloe Fineman’s immaculate Leslie Mann. And in the same way that having Andy Samberg on contract for election reasons means a bonus Lonely Island song, having Carvey around translates to a fresh celebrity impression here from him: Al Pacino.

• Julia Fox introduced Charli XCX for her performance of “360” because she is indeed the Julia referenced in that song’s “I’m so Julia” refrain.

• The hosts of Banger Boyz going from a story about a sack-punch to a discussion about how the pyramids were built, all while surrounded by bottles of Prime, was a solid encapsulation of the kind of podcast Trump visited during the election. The cold open closed on such a great joke about Trump’s cabinet picks, though, that it felt a bit unnecessary to weave that thread some more here.

• Hernández’s quirky commercial acting instructor who helps his students “almost” land roles just may have the juice to become a recurring character.

• I can’t stop thinking about Heidi Gardner’s Cher wearing a black chef’s hat with a diamond-studded pilgrim buckle during the It Girl Thanksgiving sketch.

• Eagle-eyed viewers may have noticed Alec Baldwin’s fly was fully open during the good-byes.