Since its debut in 2019, Eric Kripke’s superhero series The Boys has established itself as television’s sharpest and most explicit satire of Trump-era fascism. In Season 2, the antagonist is a literal Nazi superhero named Stormfront (Aya Cash) with an enthusiastic online alt-right following. Season 3 ends with Superman-powered, dyed-blonde media-darling and psychopath Homelander (Antony Starr) murdering a civilian in cold blood in front of a crowd. The gathered fandom breaks into spontaneous cheers, an intentionally unsubtle evocation of Donald Trump’s boast that he could shoot someone and not lose any voters.

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Season 4 continues in that vein; one of the new heroes this season is Firecracker (Valorie Curry), a podcaster conspiracy theorist who rants about groomers and the evils of abortion and Jewish space lasers. It’s a decent gag, and Curry does a great job of channeling the combined menace and clownishness of GOP reps like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert. But the mix of mean-spirited humor, gore, and horror is nonetheless a little too familiar; the show often feels like it’s reiterating past seasons rather than building on them. The protagonists have fought Homelander before, and won—but the guy just keeps coming back. As we face a third Trump election and head towards a decade of MAGA........

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