With just one week to go before Saturday Night Live‘s Season 50 finale, this week’s host Walton Goggins is gearing up for some major plot twists.
This week’s SNL host and star of HBO’s The White Lotus star seems to be confusing SNL with the cutthroat fiction of his own show with in a just-released promo for the sketch show’s next episode.
“I’m just super curious to see how the whole thing’s gonna end,” Goggins tells cast member Marcello Hernández in the clip, going on to share several theories about who’s “going to die.”
Goggins’ first guess: “Colin Jost, Michael Che, murder-suicide.”
While it’s a safe bet that won’t actually happen, name-checking Jost and Che won’t do much to quell speculation that the next two episodes may be the Weekend Update hosts’ final appearances as cast members.
The idea of a more dramatic SNL finale is also not without precedent. Saturday Night Live ended its 11th season (aka “Weird Year”) on a cliffhanger, trapping all of its cast members except Jon Lovitz in a room on fire.
“Who will survive? Who will perish? Tune in October 11,” a series of graphics read. As the end credits rolled, question marks were placed at the end of each writer and crew member’s name.
Goggins goes on to cite a handful of other theories in this week’s promo, including Emil Wakim dying, and Heidi Gardner or Chloe Fineman killing Hernández, before landing on what he believes is the obvious answer.
“It’s Bowen [Yang]. It’s always been Bowen. It would always ever be Bowen,” he tells Hernández. “Because he hates you.”
Spoiler alert: While this season’s SNL may not end in murder, the promo does, when Hernández dies at the hands of a fellow cast member—and one Goggins never expected: Michael Longfellow.
Longfellow explains his motive as he stands over his castmate’s lifeless body: “I should have been Domingo.”
Goggins’ hosting debut is generating its own share of buzz, with many predicting that his White Lotus co-star Aimee Lou Wood will appear, putting to rest two stories that have been tabloid fodder recently: a rumored falling-out with Goggins, and a potentially awkward relationship with SNL after she spoke out against her depiction in the show’s “White POTUS” sketch last month.
Goggins hosts the 50th season’s penultimate SNL with musical guest Arcade Fire this Saturday, May 10 on NBC. The season will conclude the following week with its May 17 episode, hosted by Scarlett Johansson with musical guest Bad Bunny.
