Harvey Birdman, Attorney General 2018

Phil Ken Sebben wakes up to a jarring reality: he has been elected the 46.5th President of the United States, yet memory of any campaign or vote eludes him. His first act is to bring Peter Potamus, the host of a satirical radio show, HippoWars (a parody of Infowars), into his White House circle as Senior Advisor to the President. His second move is to hire Harvey Birdman, who had retired to become Sebben’s ghostwriter, operating from an off-the-grid lakeside cabin and happily married to a woman he only refers to as “dearest wife.” Birdman, however, is more eager to publish his first standalone novel, A Matter of Wife and Death, than to focus on governance. This setup also reveals how Sebben amassed his fortune and financed his law firm through best-selling action thriller novels.

After a narrow escape from an assassination attempt, Birdman journeys to the White House where Sebben launches a nuclear missile toward Washington, D.C. The strike can only be halted if Sebben is impeached and the next president issues an order to cancel it. Birdman is sworn in as “Attorney Corporal,” and it’s revealed that Birdgirl(/actor/paget-brewster) has already been named Attorney General, while Sebben, Potamus, and Myron Reducto are plotting an Inaugurpeachment party. Birdgirl struggles with the impeachment mechanics and depends on a digital assistant named DeiDra (a spoof of Amazon Alexa) to make all legal decisions, as Potamus escalates a chaotic I, Libertine scenario around a fake book at a White House function.

When Birdman and Birdgirl confront Potamus in his office, he crumbles, revealing that Icelandic forces have already overthrown the government. Meanwhile, Mentok the Mind-Taker is running a mental health retreat in Iceland, claiming he was hired to mind-control enough Americans, and some Canadians, to elect Sebben. Mentok uses his brain as a storage drive for his thriller library, and Birdman signs off on the plan before slipping into the hospital for a coma. Mentok’s involvement underscores a surreal web of manipulation behind the presidency, while Birdman and Birdgirl recruit Peanut (also known as Birdboy) and infiltrate the Sebben & Sebben office, which has been turned into a WeWork. They recover the signed document and hold a press conference as White House Press Secretary, only for Potamus to crash in and admit he was behind it all to cash in on hat and t-shirt merch.

Then it’s revealed that Black Vulcan was the previous president, and Sebben’s illegal ascent becomes clear as his attempts to undo the missile falter. He quips, “this isn’t how the Constitution works,” hinting at the delicate balance of power at stake. Birdman, Birdgirl, and Black Vulcan then travel to X the Eliminator’s island; X had been hired by Black Vulcan to develop a series of modified Minuteman IIIs to be used domestically on white supremacists, but one launcher misfires, striking delivery rockets branded with Amazon Prime, Blue Origin, and Alibaba logos instead of its target.

With the missile still imminent and the impeachment process grinding on, Devlin’s anarchic Inaugurpeachment journey culminates in a ludicrous ramp jump over the Lincoln Memorial (which has been replaced with Sebben), crashing into the Samuel Hahnemann Monument. He pulls a Constitution from his pocket and declares that defacing a monument is punishable by imprisonment, a moment that underscores the constitutional theater at the film’s center. Black Vulcan is ceremonially sworn in by Bear, and the missile stops mid-flight just above the White House.

In the end, the closing scene hints that the entire sequence may be fictional, a plot device for Birdman’s forthcoming book rather than a real political upheaval, leaving the audience to wonder what truly happened and what was merely imagined for the sake of storytelling.