“Hillary Actually” is one of SNL’s best sketches of the year, a clever collision of many of the things that are in the air right now: the holiday season, and with it the many, many televised re-airings of the controversial rom-com; Monday’s vote in the U.S. electoral college; the general anxiety that this particular election managed to have an outcome without also having a full resolution. The sketch was also fitting, though, because Clinton, as McKinnon plays her, is precisely the kind of person who would show up at a stranger’s door, boombox and cue cards in hand, to make a political argument. Here, the comic collisions that made McKinnon-Clinton such a compelling caricature—swagger and neediness, warmth and creepiness, cool control and inadequately contained exuberance—found a new outlet, by way of the personage who may have a name, but who is most accurately remembered as “cue card guy.”

What’s most remarkable about the sketch, though, is what it hints at the continued resurrection of McKinnon’s Clinton character, even as someone not named Clinton prepares to assume the presidency. In SNL’s boombox-stalker version, Clinton isn’t just a caricature; she is also a political advocate. She’s making an argument, and a plea. One of the cue cards Clinton reveals in the sketch offers 16 reasons why the electoral college should vote against Donald Trump. One of them: “He won’t acknowledge Aleppo but he tweets about Saturday Night Live.” Another: “He wants to leave NATO.” Another: “He doesn’t know how the government works.”

Clinton’s final argument is this: “If Donald Trump becomes president… he will kill us all.”

It’s an open question, right now, what the political future of the actual Hillary Clinton will hold. Will she, in the manner of Al Gore, devise alternate strategies for keeping the issues she most cares about in the public consciousness? Will she serve as a party elder? Will she run again? Will she give it all up for a life of Chappaqua-hiking? Whatever the fate of the real Clinton is, though, with “Hillary Actually,” Saturday Night Live might have settled on the future of its fictional version: as a voice of advocacy, and of political resistance. As a hovering specter of what might have been. As a candidate who has become, in the aftermath of her loss, a conscience—and, quite possibly, a Cassandra. In SNL’s estimation, at any rate, Hil, actually, is all around.

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