As the crowd erupted in applause when Kamala Harris showed up Saturday evening live this weekend she was surprised by her appearance, perhaps they were the only ones. The moment Air Force Two changed course in mid-air and headed for New York instead of Detroit, it was a hit. Lorne Michaels had said it before SNL‘s season started with the presidential candidates not going to appear on the show for fear of running afoul of the Federal Communications Commission’s concurrent rules, but the opportunity to seize the national spotlight must have been more than he could resist. And if it gave the vice president a few moments of uncritical admiration during the final weekend of the campaign, so much the better.

Michaels has long proclaimed the show neutral on electoral matters, and the past month’s political sketches have attempted bipartisanship. But the jabs at Harris were either affectionate or toothless, or both, with her making fun of her linguistic tics or half-heartedly recycling right-wing attack lines, while Trump’s portrayal was, if not exactly vitriolic, at least utterly devoid of empathy, leaving James convicted. Austin Johnson’s Trump wanders endlessly around the stage, while Maya Rudolph’s Harris kicks her heels away from the campaign trail. Weekend updateColin Jost merely formalized an already obvious slant when he joked that the election “will decide whether the next president is Kamala Harris, or whether everyone SNL will be checked.”

SNL‘s attempts to reach the political moment were often cringeworthy – remember Kate McKinnon’s ‘Hallelujah’? And the celebrity cameos often veer into submission. But Rudolph’s confrontation with the real Harris, staged as if they were seeing each other in a dressing room mirror, managed to strike a precious balance between parody and poignancy. When Harris wished of Rudolph that there was someone she could be like-minded with, “a black South Asian woman running for president, preferably from the Bay Area,” the joke was in the specificity, but it was a reminder also to how rare a figure is in American history. politics is the real Harris – so much so that only her comic doppelgänger can understand what she’s been through.

There’s a built-in shock to public figures confronting their impersonators, the kind of anticipatory silence that falls in a classroom when the teacher turns unexpectedly to catch a child making faces behind his back. But Harris seemed too chuffed to make even the mildest complaints, except in the form of a question: “I don’t really smile like that, do I?” At a Trump campaign stop the next day, Marco Rubio joked that Harris’ unbridled laughter was “probably worth 2 to 3 million votes.” But while Republicans have tried to make an issue of Harris’ smile, so what? Saturday evening liveWhat the cameras captured was not a sinister chuckle, but a beaming smile, backed by thirty seconds of rapturous applause, as if a woman who had spoken to a stadium-sized audience was overwhelmed by the admiration of a few hundred people. A day or a week from now, this moment may feel like the last whiff of hopium, a group of blue-state elites clapping for their own rightness. But with the polls roiling emotions in every conceivable direction and both sides acting like they’re losing, it’s a balm to see a candidate act as if the race could actually do some good, if only for a few minutes.

SNLTrump’s Trump, meanwhile, was, in his own words, ‘walking on smoke’, free-associating before an impassive audience on stage, while clearly wishing he could be somewhere else. And while Trump’s real campaign asked for and got their equal time, the minute-long message Trump recorded for NBC to broadcast on Sunday was also low-powered. It felt like he, and not the network, was the one being forced to comply. Trump has always fed his audience, but in recent weeks he has shown signs of turning on them, complaining about broken microphones and looking more exhausted than energized. If only he had someone to talk to Unpleasant.