Imagine America barreling toward fascist doom as an election looms. Imagine billionaires colluding with beyond-crooked politicians and a mendacious, corrupt media to usurp the rules of democracy and law to achieve their longed dreamed-of Christian nationalist, oligarchic dystopia. Is it fun to spend time thinking about this right now? The new season of Amazon’s bleak and bloody superhero satire The Boys sure hopes so.

Season four (premiering on June 13) is an unsubtle analog to our own fraught times, a grim and near entirely hopeless race toward oblivion. The Boys, from showrunner Eric Kripke, has always parodied the noxious absurdities of America in the age of Trumpism, but it has never seemed as urgent in its messaging as it does in this new run of episodes. The show’s latest season seems at least partly inspired by the insidious threat posed by Project 2025, a real-life conservative proposal for the total overhaul of the federal government that would centralize presidential power and clench down on dissent (among other frightening things) should a Republican (so, Trump) be elected in November. In season four, the alarm bells are ringing—as they should be for us, too.

But The Boys is also a raucous, gory comedy, as high as on shock-value pessimism as it is on sincere political convictions. This makes for an awkward mix, especially in season four. Toward the end of the season, the show seems to be encouraging the viewer out of political despair, urging us to continue the good fight despite ever eroding ground. But that’s a bit hard to accept amid the show’s relentless onslaught of terrible people doing awful things. The Boys is too enamored of merry misery to convincingly position itself against it.

The gist of the season is that the fearsome sociopath superhero Homelander (Antony Starr) has grown tired of feigning benevolence and has decided that a new national order ought to be established. So he marshals his forces and sets a plan in motion, guided by a “supe,” Sister Sage (Susan Heyward), who is said to be the smartest person in the world. Compellingly played by Hewyard, Sage is a chilling stand-in for the many amoral strategists and think-tankers who treat politics and power as mere theory, an experiment in acumen above all else.

Fighting against this organized, doggedly motivated cabal are the ragtag avengers of the title, plagued by in-fighting and hampered by a moral determination to not be as bad as the enemy. (Sound familiar?) Their mission is scattered, and characters frequently express exasperation over having to wage a battle on so many fronts. One character has begun to suffer from panic attacks; another has become the target of a media campaign designed to make them lash out and thus prove the propaganda correct. Theirs is an exhausting if not outright impossible cause, which is where The Boys tries to extend its empathy to the audience. Vigilance is hard, especially in the face of such a ruthless, implacable opposition. How do you appeal to the humanity of those who see sensitivity as weakness, who are so adept at weaponizing the languages of identity and care? How do you combat something that seems to have no ethical bottom?

The Boys season four ultimately has no answers to those questions, and leaves the real America to fend for itself as we march toward November. This might be a cop-out—though, who is really turning to this series for inspiration or deliverance? We mostly watch The Boys for gnarly violence and otherwise graphic material. While the show still leans too hard on that aspect—there are so many floutings of taboo that it all begins to feel curiously banal—much of its excess is guiltily appreciated. One watches the series eagerly awaiting the next gruesome thing.

Such anticipation goes a considerable distance in covering up season four’s erratic plotting. There are myriad story threads tangled together, longer arcs and shorter digressions that, in their abundance, try patience. Thus we crave the giddy punctuation of some nasty visual to snap us back to attention. The performances also help in that regard. Over the years, Jack Quaid has nicely developed hapless human Hughie, who has become increasingly weary and cynical as minor victories beget, Hydra-like, ever more obstacles. Starr manages to make Homelander more than a one-note villain, aided this season by the complications of parenting. Colby Minifie is another standout, deftly locating the trembling, vaguely sympathetic person cowering underneath a CEO’s power suit.

There are pleasures, if you can call anything on this show pleasant, to be found in season four, even if it struggles to wrestle true meaning from its annihilating riot. One dreads what season five will have to reflect should we find ourselves caught in the era prophesied by these eight episodes. Let’s instead hope (against hope) that next season will, instead, be about something milder, or at least less pertinent to these times of ours. Ideally, one should turn to The Boys for diverting entertainment rather than for dire and helpless confirmation of how well and truly fucked we are.