You don’t need a priest for an exorcism when you have Ego Nwodim.
Saturday Night Live didn’t lean too heavily into the spooks when host Jenna Ortega came to Studio 8H but we did get one frightening sketch, and that’s when Ego Nwodim comes in to save the day. A young girl (Ortega) is possessed and her parents (Chloe Fineman and Andrew Dismukes) don’t know what to do to stop it. They have the Catholic church there ready to help but without the Priest, it’s not going to work. But the people in their building clearly need to sleep and that’s when their neighbor steps in.
It’s one of those sketches that is so completely outlandish and yet works because Nwodim really knows how to sell a character. Mrs. Shaw is the upstairs neighbor who comes to see what is going on when there’s a lot of noise late at night. When the family and the other priest who is there tells her that they’re trying to rid Ortega of a demon, she decides to take matters into her own hands. Which does include basically scolding the demon into doing what she wants.
When the demon tries to levitate, she tells it to sit down. When the demon starts acting out, she puts it in its place. And so when the time comes to send the demon to another body, she calls down her husband (Kenan Thompson) and tells him that he has to be the vessel so that she can go back to sleep. And honestly, a demon probably would listen to Nwodim and do whatever she asks of it. She’s just that powerful.
While the episode overall was great, it also was the last episode before the editors strike is planned to happen on April 1st. The editors of Saturday Night Live have been fighting with NBC for their contracts and their rights for quite a while and in the last month have ramped up getting support for them but still, NBC hasn’t budged, so they’re taking to striking as a way of making their questions heard and answered. You can show your love and support for the editors by sharing resources and listening to them through their social media posts.
What this sketch in particular did was show us all one thing: if they wanted to remake The Exorcist but with Ortega in the Linda Blair role, it’d be pretty amazing. You just also need Nwodim to be there ready to get the demons out and put them in her husband.
