With former cast member Will Forte back as host, his beloved MacGruber character returned to Saturday Night Live… as an anti-vax, Fauci-hating conspiracy theorist.
Joined by Kristen Wiig and Ryan Phillippe — Forte’s co-stars on the new MacGruber Peacock series — the bumbling special agent and his cohorts are locked in a room where MacGruber has one minute to diffuse a bomb. However, he keeps getting sidetracked by Covid-19 rabbit holes in increasingly dangerous ways.
First, MacGruber burns the trio’s “face diapers,” ensuring them that he’s “vaxxed and relaxed” before presenting a Sizzler napkin that claims he got the “Fizer” shot. “I’m not getting that stupid shot, alright? ‘Cause I don’t want the government putting a tracking device in my scrotum,” MacGruber admits.
After getting blown up, a Covid-infected MacGruber and his team find himself in another locked room with another bomb that’s about to explode. Faced with a deadly situation, MacGruber goes to the anti-vax playbook of Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to save him both from the coronavirus and the pending detonation. He once again fails.
When we rejoin the threesome in yet another locked room, MacGruber is now in full-on QAnon Shaman garb and spouting conspiracies about celebrities eating babies, behavior that worries Wiig and Phillippe’s characters more than the bomb that’s ticking away next to them.
“I’m just your average American who believes in limited government, ‘My Body, My Choice’ (for men), and suppressed voting rights for alternatively skinned people. Now I’m not sure how that makes me brainwashed,” MacGruber tells them.
“I’m just a shaman. All I can do is pray for you, take up arms against you, and keep the oath that I took to protect this country, because I am an Oath Keeper, and boy, am I proud of that, which I guess makes me a Proud Boy.”