Typically the ending of a Saturday Night Live season is accompanied by speculation about who may not return to the show next season, whether it’s newbies who will be unceremoniously booted, longer-tenured cast members whose finale appearances might be coded as a tacit farewell (or at least a retroactive one if they make the call later), or the occasional legend who receives a genuine send-off. But for the show’s not-so-landmark 51st season, little of that is in play. Last fall, Heidi Gardner and Ego Nwodim didn’t return to the show, which also lost Bowen Yang mid-season, leaving far fewer on-the-bubble veterans in their wake.

There are always question marks. It seems entirely possible that Chloe Fineman might peace out following her seventh season; while she didn’t get a farewell-coded sketch on the Will Ferrell-hosted finale, she did post a follow-up to her old “show understudy” bit as an Instagram video on Saturday night, as if shrugging off the idea that a sequel might have the opportunity to actually air. And of course, first-season cast members typically stand on shaky ground all summer—though the meteoric ascension of second-year featured player Ashley Padilla might encourage the show to take a chance on any freshmen perceived as underperforming in Season 51. You could also speculate about whether decade-long fixture Mikey Day or Weekend Update anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che might finally pack it in, but they all seem like lifers at this point. (That’s not to say they won’t leave, but that there’s no particular imperative for any of them to go. They’re not launching big movie careers, and Jost has already blown past his self-speculated post-election deadline from his memoir—that was the 2020 election, mind.)

It’s fitting, then, that with much of the cast divided between “at least a couple more years left” and “veterans with carte blanche,” the speculation would turn towards the ultimate veteran with carte blanche, the ne plus ultra of boomers who refuse to retire, the man himself: Lorne Michaels, the show’s 81-year-old creator and impresario. Last year, around the show’s 50th anniversary special, Vulture ran a comprehensive story speculating about what his retirement and succession plan for SNL would look like, kicking off a year’s worth of Lorne-centric content that seemed designed to both illuminate the man while obscuring the actual question at hand. Most notable are the print biography Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live by Susan Morrison, and the recent documentary Lorne, from Morgan Neville. Less eloquent but ever-present are internet comments about how he should retire immediately or possibly die.

Though there’s a sense of reflection in the occasionally intimate footage captured by Lorne, it’s not enough of an exposé to be of great interest to anyone beyond SNL obsessives, who will also probably already know most of what the doc actually conveys (though if they’re anything like me, they’ll nonetheless thrill at getting to watch bits and pieces of pitch meetings, table reads, and so on). It’s a bit more credulous than Morrison’s more comprehensive-by-nature book, though neither has quite the same skeptical-semi-outsider perspective as that Vulture piece, which casually describe Michaels playing “mind games” and flexing his power. Neville’s film, on the other hand, makes a vague case for all the seeming maneuvering as a product of habit, eccentricity, and genuine dedication to the show, rather than insecure or manipulative strategizing. In this context, Lorne’s own pre-50th speculation that he might retire after that half-century mark, which quickly turned noncommittal afterwards, isn’t the work of a fading power player so much as a guy who really, really likes his job.

Appearing as a sort of punctuation to this long Lorne Michaels sentence are the far less concrete rumors that swirled online last week, speculating that a finale featuring both beloved veteran Will Ferrell and Lorne’s personal friend Paul McCartney might double as a kind of retirement party. (Truly, there’s no escaping Michaels; when I saw McCartney at the Barclays Center some years back, Lorne was there too, with Jimmy Fallon; Macca shouted him out from the stage.) This seems like amateur speculation; as much false modesty as Michaels might prefer to affect, it’s probably a layman’s idea of what a Lorne Michaels sendoff would look like.