There are times when you can reasonably guess the quality of an episode of “Saturday Night Live” by the host. It doesn’t yield a particularly reliable prediction of what unfolds, but it’s a fairly good rule of thumb all the same. Christina Applegate hosting? One could reasonably assume a solid show. Daniel Craig? One could reasonably assume a shaky show. Neither assumption directly related to the result, but expectations were raised or lowered accordingly ahead of time. But with a host like Bruno Mars? All bets are off. It could be the best show of the season thus far. Or the worst. Or somewhere in the middle. Anything is possible, which is both thrilling and terrifying. Mars’ musical chops are known. His comedic chops? Far more unproven. But hey, Eli Manning was also unproven, and he led one of last season’s strongest episodes. So let’s err on the side of optimism until proven otherwise.

 

As always, I’ll be rating the sketches in real time. As always, you’ll be doing a Google search to discover where I live so you can bring the pitchforks to my place of residence rather than the comments section. Why mess with success?

 

The body count keeps rising this season on "Sons of Anarchy" and "Small World" was full of "collateral damage."

 

The hour's four violent deaths provide a pretty decent overview of the episode, so let's look at each one:

 

 

The good news? There’s little place for “Saturday Night Live” to go but up after last week’s Daniel Craig-hosted debacle. The fault lay not with Craig but the way the show used him. Rather than using his stoic persona to comic ends, the show bent over backwards to portray him as a wacky guy. It didn’t work, and the show (as well as its audience) suffered as a result. Hopefully, “SNL” has more of an idea what to do with tonight’s host, Christina Applegate. A gifted comic actress, Applegate last hosted the show in 1993 during the middle of her run on “Married…With Children”. Since then, she’s dealt with a dead babysitter, Ron Burgundy’s jazz flute, and countless other fictional conundrums. Along for the ride with her tonight is musical guest Passion Pit.

 

As always, I’ll be grading each sketch in real time. As always, you shouldn’t worry too much about the grades. As always, most of you will violently overreact. It’s just a thing that happens round these parts each Saturday night. And I wouldn’t have it any other way!

 

After a strong second outing, this week’s “Fringe” faltered as it set out on the first of what promises to be several outings dedicated to the scavenger hunt established in “In Absentia”. Well, if all outings are as poorly executed as this one, I think we might be second-guessing the show’s decision to go down this route. It’s more likely that “The Recordist” will be an outlier rather than standard operating procedure over the final ten episodes of the series. But who knows? I didn’t expect last week to knock my socks off, and I didn’t expect this episode to bore me to near tears. Surprises are fun. Until they aren’t.

 

Tonight’s episode opens on Astrid lasering the wall of amber in Walter’s former laboratory. Inside they find the third of a still-unknown number of tapes, since Walter went so far as to leave the video evidence of his plan against The Observers out-of-sequence. The tape reveals coordinates in a wooded area of Northern Pennsylvania. What do our heroes have to do there? No one knows, but the Bishop Boys, Olivia, and Etta head out anyways and leave Astrid behind to slowly piece together the rest of the damaged message. Had the episode been stronger overall, I wouldn’t have constantly wondered, “Why didn’t they simply wait until they had the tape deciphered before leaving in the first place?” I understand that time is nominally of the essence, but it certainly seemed like the five of them had full run of the place without fear of Observer detection.