There are 30 days until the election. It’s time to break your wine glass likeMaya Rudolph’sKamala Harris from the stress of it all.

This weekend’sSaturday Night Live cold open tackled an event that already seems a lifetime ago: the vice-presidential debate betweenJ.D. Vance andTim Walz. It’s quite a study in contrasts to watchBowen Yang andJim Gaffigan dig into their respective roles. Yang has slowed his natural tempo way down and wrapped his voice in an evil silk. It’s like he’s playing Vance as the devil from an old black-and-white movie. Gaffigan, on the other hand, is treating Walz as a cross betweenIt’s a Wonderful Life’s George Bailey and Uncle Billy: a little bumbling, surprisingly decent.

Gaffigan clearly has enormous affection for the man he’s impersonating. When asked by the moderators how he had confused the important details of a Tiananmen Square trip, Gaffigan guessed that he’d mistakenly been thinking of a visit to the Epcot Center. “Anyways,” he said apologetically, “I’m a knucklehead!”

Dana Carvey’sPresident Joe Biden also showed up, and continues to delight. Carvey has our president’s open-mouthed vulnerability and lights-out moments down. His grumpy righteousness is cranked to perfection. Waving his ice cream cone around like a toddler, smears of vanilla hanging from his lip and Rudolph’s cheek, Carvey vowed to launch a Biden 2028 campaign.

The host of the evening was comedianNate Bargatze, who crushed during hisfirstSNL go-round less than a year ago. He has such a laconic way about him; you get in the passenger seat of his everyman sedan and find your feet on the dashboard, cruising alongside as he unspools his jokes. Bargatze opened with a riff on community college, so named because its students aren’t expected to ever leave the community. He can’t pronounce the wordoil. He has great simple confessions, like this one: “The first time I had a raspberry was when I was 40 years old.”

But alas, this monologue wasn’t as strong as the one from his first hosting gig. The pacing felt off. Bargatze’s Door Dash bit drifted into his wrap-up promise of a great show ahead. As he flashed the Vanderbilt hand sign in honor of his team’s stunning upset win, one wondered if his mind was perhaps still on that game instead of this one.

Bargatze was more effective in the sketches themselves.SNL was wise to place him right back in a boat on the Delaware River in his George Washington wig in a sequel to a sketch last year, about America’s confounding liberties with units of measurements—one of the strongest of theentire season. On this fateful ride, with troops played byJames Austin Johnson,Kenan Thompson, Yang, andMikey Day, Bargatze was once again rhapsodizing about the possibilities of American innovation, this time with the English language. “We’ll have two names for animals: one for when they’re alive and a different one when they become food,” he promised. “So, cows will be beef, and pig, pork. Chickens are chicken.” Later, he assured his men to fear not: “A hot dog will not be made of dogs.” When Johnson dared to suggest Americans deserved to know what a hot dog was, in fact, made of, Bargatze went cold: “Get out. Get out of the boat.” This was a perfectly fine sketch, and well played, but it didn’t match the delightful surprise of its original.

I prefer the sketch of Bargatze playing a golfer who blasts a bird out of the sky during a tournament, or playing an EMT who’s hoping to just send a dead body down the slide at a water park rather than lug it back down the 255 stairs. Or as a hapless contestant out of his cultural depth onSabado Gigante, in which Marcello Hernandez paid scrumptious homage to legendary host Don Francisco.

Coldplay was the musical guest this episode, withChris Martin crooning and carrying on in his now signature bare feet from his stool. It didn’t do the band any favors that their second performance was immediately followed by The Lonely Island’s decidedly more compelling “Sushi Glory Hole.”Andy Samberg andAkiva Shaffer spun us back in time as they pitched their idea of being fed sushi through the hole of a toilet stall. “Now hear me out, now hear me out,” they urged. “You wanna be discreet. Can’t be eating omakase in the middle of the street.”

The real surprise of the evening was new cast memberJane Wickline—who built an audience on TikTok, and has a serious fresh-out-of-Oberlin awkward coolness, getting called up to the desk on Weekend Update so early in the season.Colin Jost teed her up with a statistic that 71% of Gen Z has cut back on going out. She gave her rebuttal with a strange little song called “Party.” With nothing but a keyboard and some nervous pipes, she sang about refusing to leave a party to which she was never really invited. At one point, Jost tried to wrap it up and she responded, “I intend to keep singing.” Twitter is going to love her.

During final goodbyes,Heidi Gardner, cleaned up from an earlier face-plow into a pile of hamburger, wore a vintageWayne’s World t-shirt in honor of Carvey joining them up there on stage. Next to her, Day wore a t-shirt emblazoned with Carvey’s George Bush and his famous “Might Be Prudent” line. His Biden truly is going to make this time more bearable.