Last week news spread across trade publications that long-time S.N.L. cast members Bobby Moynihan and Vanessa Bayer would be leaving the show after this week’s finale. Don’t cry for Moynihan, he already has a new CBS sitcom lined up and with several recent appearances in big-budget comedy films, Bayer likely won’t go looking either. But with 16 years of S.N.L. work between them, Bayer and Moynihan seemed owed a splashy farewell from their comedy home. And that’s what they got—mostly. But what happened behind the scenes may be even more revealing. A third cast member, Sasheer Zamata, also left the show Saturday without so much of a whisper of goodbye on camera.

In this week’s S.N.L. finale hosted by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Moynihan and Bayer got much more than their usual amount of screentime with one or the other appearing in almost every single sketch. The pair also got a chance to trot out some scene-stealing characters for their last appearances on “Weekend Update” with Moynihan resurrecting Drunk Uncle one last time and Bayer deciding to go with a more recent character: her bubbly, incomprehensible meteorologist Dawn Lazarus. Their goodbye culminating in a not-very-steady high school graduating seniors sketch that paid homage to the departing class of 2017. However, any emotional impact this farewell may have had got a little lost in the weeds. So Moynihan and Bayer fans—knowing in advance the two were leaving—may have been expecting a more formal goodbye to come in the final seconds of the show as The Rock gave his thanks. Something akin to what Ben Affleck (with an assist from the camera operators) gave Bill Hader and Fred Armisen in 2013.

Compare that to the scene on the stage last night where the focus was on celebrity guest stars Scarlett Johansson, Katy Perry, Alec Baldwin, Tom Hanks, and The Rock. That’s par for the course in a season that often placed a greater emphasis on celebrity impressions than highlighting the talents of its existing cast. Without rewinding, you’d be hard-pressed to even find Bayer and Moynihan (let alone Zamata) in the crowd.

But reports started circulating out of Studio 8H last night that Moynihan, Bayer, and Zamata all got a little more fanfare once the cameras stopped rolling. The effort started with Vanessa Bayer who was hoisted up and carried out by co-stars Alex Moffat and Beck Bennett.

Bobby Moynihan was then carried offstage by two all-time S.N.L. greats: Hanks and Baldwin.

But then why was Zamata also carried out by Colin Jost and The Rock?

Rumors about a third departure started circulating on social media Saturday night and by Sunday morning E.T. Online confirmed that Zamata would be exiting the show alongside Moynihan and Bayer. S.N.L. has never quite known what to do with Zamata’s particular skill set—which lends itself much better to longform showcases like her recent special, Pizza Mind—but she definitely deserved much more of a proper goodbye Saturday night than just playing the lead female in an ill-advised child molestation robot sketch.

Still, whatever you may think of Bayer, Moynihan, and Zamata’s last episode, they certainly got more fanfare than long-time cast members Taran Killam and Jay Pharoah who were unceremoniously let go in the middle of the summer last year. Killam had to make his own farewell video.

Still it’s hard not to see that S.N.L. has its favorite children. In 2002, the entire cast stopped to pay homage to Will Ferrell. When Andy Samberg and Kristen Wiig left the show in 2012, it was Wiig alone who got a massive, emotional farewell featuring Mick Jagger. (According to Lorne Michaels, Samberg and wasn’t quite sure about his departures at the time.) And in addition to their tearful farewells at the end of their episodes in 2013, Bill Hader and Fred Armisen each got goodbye sketches tailored to their particular tastes—a star-studded Stefon wedding for Hader and a musical-star-studded number for Armisen. And in 2014, a departing Seth Meyers was greeted by ghosts of “Weekend Update” past as he gave his final news report mid-season.

You could argue that Bayer, Moynihan, and certainly the under-used Zamata were never S.N.L. stars the way Ferrell, Wiig, Hader, Armisen, and Meyers were. They’re more on-par with the likes of Rachel Dratch, Chris Parnell, and Horatio Sanz who were all cut—without any on-air ado—for budgetary reasons in 2006. “It still stung a little because you don’t ever want to be let go,” Parnell told Vulture years later. “I was a little burnt out, so it was all right.”

But what’s also true about this new, well-watched era of Saturday Night Live is that the likes of Moynihan, Bayer, and Zamata have even less of a chance than they did before of breaking out the way stars of S.N.L. past did. S.N.L. hit ratings and critical gold this year by leaning heavily on Baldwin and Melissa McCarthy to recur in their show-stopping sketches. Baldwin joked during The Rock’s monologue this week, “What a season this has been. . .for me . . .I can’t take all the credit. What do you call those pale people who take the subway?” “The writers,” Johnson joked back. It was a funny acknowledgment of the excessive attention Baldwin has received, but the joke landed so well because it’s rooted in the truth that, even more than usual, the S.N.L. cast felt like supporting players this year. When The Rock’s episode of S.N.L. ended on the West Coast this week, an old re-run with Jim Carrey and, fittingly, Soundgarden, it was a shock to see the political cold open featuring Bob Dole, Ted Koppel, and Bill Clinton played entirely by existing cast members Darrell Hammond (doing double duty) and Norm McDonald. It’s easy to forget that, no pun intended, that was once the norm.

That shift of focus to celebrity guest stars became apparent in a recent Hollywood Reporter cover story when producer Steve Higgins said that after Baldwin was hired, he felt bad for “poor Darrell [Hammond],” who came out of S.N.L. retirement to replace Don Pardo as the show’s announcer in 2014, and played Trump for much of 2016. And writer Kent Sublette points out that if Melissa McCarthy hadn’t been tapped to play Sean Spicer, “it would have gone to Beck [Bennett]. He has an amazing impression. In fact, he reads Spicer for the read-through because Melissa’s not usually there.” With the exception of Kate McKinnon and, I’d argue, Kenen Thompson (by sheer dint of endurance), the S.N.L. talent isn’t rising up the ranks the way it once did. Even Leslie Jones—who has certainly become a household name—owes most of her fame to her own hustle outside of S.N.L. on social media and in last year’s Ghostbusters. Like Zamata, she’s rarely well-deployed in sketches.

S.N.L. declined to comment on both Zamata’s departure and the rumor that head writers Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider will also be leaving after just one season of helping rescue S.N.L. from the ratings gutter. There’s no explanation yet for why Zamata, who was initially hired under an intense amount of scrutiny, departed so silently. Zamata recently described the pressure of her very public audition process—which occurred amidst a loud controversy over a lack of black women in the cast—to Vanity Fair. “It was weird to have a very public audition in that way. No one else gets that. There’s no other kind of mass call for cast members. I was in the press for just auditioning. I’m getting all these texts and e-mails that are like, ‘Good luck!’—which is so nice and wonderful that I got so much support, but also so stressful. It’s historically a secret, and now it’s a very public thing. It was a very weird way to go through that.” If it was less attention Zamata wanted Saturday night, she certainly got it. But as for Sunday morning, something tells me it will be a different story entirely.