Saturday Night Live/Rainn Wilson/Arcade Fire

Rainn Wilson/Arcade Fire
Season 32, Episode 14
Airdate	February 24, 2007
Production Number	1485
Written by	Seth Meyers Andrew Steele Paula Pell (head writers) Doug Abeles James Anderson Alex Baze James Downey Charlie Grandy Steve Higgins Colin Jost Erik Kenward John Lutz Lorne Michaels Matt Murray Marika Sawyer Akiva Schaffer Robert Smigel John Solomon Emily Spivey Jorma Taccone Bryan Tucker
Directed by	Don Roy King
← 32x13 Forest Whitaker/Keith Urban	32x15 → Julia Louis-Dreyfus/Snow Patrol
Saturday Night Live — Season Thirty-Two

Rainn Wilson/Arcade Fire is the fourteenth episode of the thirty-second season of Saturday Night Live, and the six hundred and twenty-second episode overall. It is the first appearance by both the host and the musical guest.

Guest Stars: Rainn Wilson (Host), Arcade Fire (Musical Guest)

Special Guests Rashida Jones (Karen)

Episode Breakdown

• The Situation Room: Wolf Blitzer (Hammond) details the events of the day while a news ticker at the bottom of the screen comments on how boring the Iraq War is and how it wants to hear more about the recently dead Anna Nicole Smith. The screen changes to video of Smith with Blitzer's head traveling across the bottom of the screen. Blitzer forces them to take down the ticker and bring him back so he can throw to Andrew Sturdevant (Wilson) supposedly in the field at Walter Reed Hospital. Instead, Sturdevant is in the Bahamas following a lead on the Smith story. He says Smith is on a Russian ship and will be put on display in Red Square next to Lenin and Vladamir Putin, who died last week. But he quickly withdraws the story after getting confirmation that he was being pranked. Wolf tries to throw to another correspondent when Sturdevant breaks in again to say he's got inside information that Smith will be rising from the grave as a zombie. This proves to be false as well when his source robs him of his wallet, iPod, pants and camera. Left with no correspondent, Blitzer throws to Larry King (Armisen), who teases his upcoming show that's entirely about Smith and a bunch of people who are barely connected to her.
• Rainn Wilson's Monologue: Wilson says he used to be a stage actor, but now he gets to work in an office on television. He takes the cast people on a tour behind the scenes to prove that it's nothing like working in an office. Backstage, Wilson meets several cast members dressed up as characters from The Office, including Wiig (Pam), Sudeikis (Jim), Poehler (Angela) and Thompson (Stanley). Rashida Jones also makes an appearance as Karen Filippelli (she calls Wilson "Dwight") in a brief cameo. Eventually he gets to Lorne Michaels, who isn't dressed like Michael Scott, but who does make inappropriate jokes and does an interview segment like on the show.
• The Cheap Stuff: Four friends (Hader, Forte, Sudeikis and Wilson) are drinking at a bar and reminiscing about a song that one of them (Wilson) put on the jukebox, but all of their stories are depressing and dysfunctional. One of them heard the song while coming back from the emergency room, another talks about when he realized he had a father and not just a father who had Down's syndrome, and the third is reminded of when he became an arsonist. The final friend is reminded about when he was having anonymous gay bathroom sex at a Bennigan's. After all of the stories, they pull out guns and rob the bar.
• SNL Digital Short - Corporate Headquarters: The CEO (Wilson) for a corporation locks all of the executives in a room so that they can fix the budget for the company. He goes around the room asking for ideas on what to do, getting opinions from employees who get stranger and stranger, including the invisible man, a woman dressed as Wonder Woman and a talking sandwich. The CEO eventually gets a call, and the building they're locked in implodes.
• Art Dealers - Architectural Digest: A reporter named Rob Schieffer (Wilson) from Architectural Digest and his photographer Kay (Wiig) have come to Nuni (Rudolph) and Nüni's (Armisen) home to do a piece on the strange architecture. Rob sits in a chair made out of toast, and Kay is forced to sit on a revolving disco ball before they try to initiate the interview. Before the interview can start, Nuni and Nüni call in a man with cotton candy for hair (Samberg) and force Schieffer to eat some. Thoroughly creeped out, the journalists leave quickly before the two can take off their "privacy glasses."
• Peeping Jerry: Detective Reynolds (Rudolph) and her partner (Poehler) bring in a creepy peeping tom named Jerry (Wilson) who witnessed a murder in progress. He is brought into a room to view a suspect line-up to finger the perpetrator, but he can't get it to work, because he's looking at them directly and not peeping. Wilson makes the detectives jump through hoops by putting up a fake curtain and making the first suspect (Sudeikis) pretend to take a shower and sing. After getting his jollies, he admits that he never saw the murderer and just wanted to have bizarre control over the suspects.
• Intervention: Arcade Fire song.
• Weekend Update:
  • Judge Larry Seidlin (Armisen), the judge for the Anna Nicole Smith trial, emotionally comments on the press he got about how most people believe that Seidlin was attempting to steal the spotlight and turn the courtroom into a circus for his own publicity. After a while, he bursts into tears for no good reason.
  • Amy's Aunt Linda (Wiig) talks about the Academy Award nominees, including Helen Mirren in The Queen, who she believed was the actual Queen of England. She also says Will Smith in The Pursuit of Happyness shouldn't be sleeping next to a toilet even if he is a "hobo," and Letters from Iwo Jima was terrible because it had subtitles. She says the only movie she liked this year was Fast & The Furious: Tokyo Drift.
  • Prince Harry (Samberg) talks about his upcoming deployment in Iraq. Meyers asks Harry how he feels about being a potential bullet magnet who would endanger the men in his unit. He is apparently oblivious to this and prefers to quote Rudyard Kipling and talk about his ability to prove his courageousness. When Meyers brings up all the things that could happen to him in Iraq, Harry vomits all over Meyers.
• The Introverts - Coworkers and a Copy Machine: Neil (Forte) and Jean (Wiig) show a new employee named Oliver (Wilson) around the office. They spend most of their time instructing him on how to use a copy machine, a pen and the water cooler. They continue their horrible boring conversation until the new employee breaks out a flask of alcohol, and they all drink for a couple hours. During this time, Neil explains his plan to become a woman, get married to Oliver and use Jean as the surrogate mother. They plan to sell the baby and open a pornography store so they can buy as much meth as they can. After several more hours, they go over when they plan to commit the murder they planned, but they run into a problem with they only have a half hour for lunch.
• Black Snake Moan: A movie based on the trailer for Black Snake Moan is being released a week before the film is released. It is called White Possum Scream, and it stars a bluesman (Thompson) and a man who parked in a handicapped space (Wilson). Most of the scenes involve the man trying to escape from the bluesman but failing miserably, showing that the director has no idea what the movie is about, but he's giving it a try anyway.
• River Bliss: River Bliss, a new age band featuring Naseem (Thompson), Tracey (Wiig), Kendra (Rudolph), Josiah (Armisen) and a man playing the harp (Wilson) rehearse in a recording studio. But the group slowly dissolves because of in-fighting linked with Enya winning the new age Grammy this year. The leader attempts to refocus them to play nicely with each other, but it fails until he starts threatening to fight them.
• Keep the Car Running: Arcade Fire song.

Notes

"Live from New York, It's Saturday Night!"

• Darrell Hammond as Wolf Blitzer.

Music

• Danny's Song, by Loggins and Messina: The song that plays on the jukebox during the sketch "The Cheap Stuff" is "Danny's Song" by Kenny Loggins and Jim Messina, who are most commonly shortened to "Loggins and Messina." The song is likely their best known and is from their first album in 1972, Sittin' In.

• Miserlou, by Dick Dale: At the end of "The Cheap Stuff," "Miserlou" by Dick Dale plays. The song is an old Greek song popularized by Dale's surf rock style in the 1960s. It rose in popularity a second time in 1994 when it was featured over the opening credits in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, where it became recognizable to many as the film's unofficial theme song.

• 

  

  Win Butler smashing his guitar.
  Intervention, performed by Arcade Fire: The first song performed by Arcade Fire was "Intervention," the first song released from their second album, Neon Bible. The song, though not an official single, was released on iTunes several weeks prior to the album's release and was also available via a phone number. Midway through their performance of the song, Win Butler broke a string on his guitar. He progressively broke more and more strings until he gave up and smashed the guitar at the end of the song.

• Keep the Car Running, performed by Arcade Fire: The second performance by Arcade Fire was of "Keep the Car Running," also off Neon Bible. The song was the first single release in UK, although in the US the first single was "Black Mirror." The song is notable for using several unusual or otherwise unique instruments in the performance, including a hurdy gurdy and a mandolin.

Trivia

The Show

• Bonus Songs: The Arcade Fire left the stage right after they were thanked by Rainn Wilson because they were going to play three songs on the live music set after the show had finished taping. These three songs were "Rebellion (Lies)", "My Body Is A Cage" and "Wake Up." The first and last songs were from the band's previous album, Funeral, and the second was from Neon Bible.
• Network Censorship: In the original broadcast for this episode during the "Cheap Stuff" sketch, Bill Hader said the line "It was the first day I thought to myself just, 'I have a dad' and not 'I have dad with Downs Syndrome.'" When the episode was rebroadcast on March 31, 2007, "Downs Syndrome" was bleeped out.

Behind the Scenes

• Cut from Dress: Several taped sketches were cut from the dress rehearsal, including a rerun of the Urigro commercial parody, a parody of Air Force One and Nike, and Samberg in an "out of breath jogger" sketch set in the 1930s. Four additional live sketches were cut, including an episode of The Falconer where the Falconer has a dream that he's a character on SNL and that Donald is a puppet. The non-recurring cut sketches include a parody of medicine commercials that ends with Wilson as a Texan coffin salesman, a morning talk-show where the anchors have ADD, and a man dressed as Michael Jackson going to a job placement councilor where he's told that he's qualified for a well-paid IT job but he doesn't realize it.

Allusions and References

• Pulp Fiction: The sketch "The Cheap Stuff" ends with the four characters grabbing guns and robbing the bar where they are drinking. They freeze-frame, and the words "The End" in yellow block letters with red drop shadows come on screen while the song "Misirlou" by Dick Dale plays in the background. This is a parody of the famous opening scene from the 1994 classic film Pulp Fiction. The film opens with a young couple identified only as Pumpkin (Tim Roth) and Honey Bunny (Amanda Plummer) in a coffee shop discussing how tired Pumpkin is of robbing liquor stores. Honey Bunny asks what Pumpkin would rather rob, and Pumpkin suggests robbing the coffee shop. He pulls out a gun, kisses Honey Bunny, and then the two turn and start to rob the coffee shop. Immediately after Honey Bunny's first line in the robbery ("Any of you fucking pricks move, I'm gonna execute every motherfuckin' last one'a ya,") the scene freeze frames as "Misirlou" plays and the opening credits (in the same font as that used for the words "The End" in the sketch) roll.