‘The Boys’ Season Finale Comes With a Warning: It’s About a Presidential Assassination Attempt

Season Four of Prime’s dark superhero satire, The Boys, began with one obvious real-life echo — the show’s designated Donald Trump analogue, Homelander, faced a criminal trial — and ended Thursday with another one that accidentally ended up hitting way too close to home. Mere days after the actual, unsuccessful assassination attempt on Trump, the season finale revolves around a plot to kill the show’s fictional president-elect, Robert Singer (Jim Beaver). In response, the show’s producers removed the episode’s title (instead of “Assassination Run,” it’s now just called “Season 4 Finale”), and in a content warning posted on Instagram, notes that some viewers may be disturbed by the episode, “especially in light of the injuries and tragic loss of life sustained during the assassination attempt on former President Trump.”

The statement emphasized that The Boys, which depicts a world in which people can fly and shoot lasers out of their eyes, is fictional and that this season was shot last year, making any similarities to events this week “coincidental and unintentional.” It concluded by stating that “Amazon, Sony Pictures Television and the producers of The Boys reject, in the strongest possible terms, real-world violence of any kind.”

In interviews for Rolling Stone‘s recent in-depth feature on The Boys, the show’s actors repeatedly marveled at showrunner Eric Kripke and the writing staff’s abilities to somehow end up mirroring real-world events, despite how far in advance the show is written and shot. “I’m always amazed,” said Jack Quaid, who plays Hughie Campbell. “Every season, we’ll shoot the season, and months will go by. And then by the time the show is out, the world, the real world reflects what’s happening in the show. So I don’t know what crystal ball Eric has, but it’s very odd, very weird that it keeps happening.”