‘Saturday Night Live’ review: Alec Baldwin’s Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton’s ‘Love Actually,’ Dunkin’ Donuts, Casey Affleck (videos)

You knew it was going to happen the moment that you saw the “Saturday Night Live” articles earlier in the day (including here), but it was nice to see it become reality: Alec Baldwin (of course) reprised his role of Donald Trump at the start of tonight’s episode, the final one of the calendar year.

This opening featured the character of course doing a little bit of what he does best: Being completely ridiculous. Of course, this time around it also featured an appearance from none other than Beck Bennett as Vladimir Putin, which is one of his finest impersonations. The show had a whole lot of fun out of Putin visiting Trump in order to hand over a Christmas gift — which was an Elf on the Shelf that was secretly also some sort of recording device.

Here was the big surprise of the night: The appearance of John Goodman as Rex Tillerson, Trump’s new Secretary of State candidate. Him and Putin Trump like a child was hilarious, but also the sort of thing that will surely get Donald riled up on Twitter. The ending of the sketch was pretty ho-hum, so that’s the worst thing we can say about it.

If there is some good news, it’s that we got no evidence that this would be Baldwin’s last appearance playing the character.

We’ll be back soon with more LIVE updates on the night!

Casey Affleck monologue – Something didn’t quite work here, almost as though the cue cards were wrong or someone couldn’t read them at the end when Baldwin and Goodman came out after a surprisingly-fast costume change. The guys all had a good sense of humor about it, so for the most part we’re just happy that there wasn’t any singing in here. Casey, like he was for most of the night, was completely game.

Dunkin’ Donuts – It’s hard to say exactly why exactly we loved this so much, but we’re pretty sure Casey played here the guy you tend to see in almost every single Dunkin’ Donuts store at around this time, someone who was completely obnoxious and thinks they know everything about the story. This tickled us greatly.

Robot Demonstration – We’re not sure why we needed the return of Fred Armisen for this sketch, but we got him for this sketch where Bennett played a robot who repeatedly brought up his sexuality. The reason this was great was just because it made fun of perceptions of homophobia, and also a sensitivity that so many people have. This is the weird sort of stuff that we like Fred around for, since he does indignant very well.

Barack’s Last Christmas in office – This was a really fun little old-school rap piece talking about everything that we could lose following Trump’s election. While we wouldn’t say that any of the jokes in here were altogether surprising, did they really need to be? We don’t think so. What was great about this mostly was seeing musical guest Chance the Rapper getting involved in a little bit of comedy and being game to have a little bit of fun with Kenan Thompson.

Santa Testimony – While this wasn’t as good as the first two iterations, we do still love the whole “Kate McKinnon’s character recounts bizarre experiences that somehow involve her losing her pants and encountering a chorus of weirdos.” It’s the same formula every time, but her performance brings it home. This time it was about meeting variations of Santa Claus.

Chance the Rapper – Head over here to see our take on this performance.

Weekend Update – It was a little short for an Update this week, though there were some good jokes wedged in here about Chipotle and how becoming President of the United States is one of the highest honors that you can be given by the Russian government. The one thing holding it back? Armisen and Vanessa Bayer’s take on “Putin’s Friends from Home.” We do like Fred a lot for some things, but one of these things is not in “Weekend Update.” His comedy is just not broad enough for it.

Long Island News – Was this intentionally bad? It feels that way, since we were seeing a report about bad performers talking about their bad nativity play. Pretending to be bad, at least to us, just doesn’t work all that well on the show. It’s just not that funny, and there are so many other things that we wish we were seeing the show try out instead. We’re all for taking risks, but this was basically them intentionally being bad at quoting other things and using accents.

Love, Actually with Hillary – To have Hillary take on the role with the cue cards in hopes to convince an elector to do something different with their vote was pretty outstanding — even if “SNL” did a parody of this same movie a couple of years ago with Pete Davidson and Amy Adams in a deleted sketch.

Kinky Elves – This would’ve probably been really funny had it not been a repeat of a sketch we’ve seen before with Santa Claus. It’s still funny in a really disturbing sort of way, but we are starting to wonder why this show is basically doing rehashes of so many old things.

Bar scene – This was a moderately funny exercise in a bunch of people going through a terrible sequence of events, but acting like it wasn’t that big of a deal. It was probably a better “Whose Line Is It Anyway Sketch?” than something for this show — but given that we’re at the end of the show, it’s hard to be too mad over this. At least the writers gave us something moderately amusing.

Overall – A great start, but a mediocre finish. While it falls short of some past Christmas specials, it was still a mostly-enjoyable end to the calendar year and Affleck turned out to be a great host. Grade: B+.

Want some other news when it comes to “SNL,” including some other recent reviews? Then just be sure to head over to the link here right now! (Photo: NBC.)