John Oliver Shares His Hopes for 2025: Less Elon Musk, Less ‘Wicked’ and … Tom Cruise Is Actually Shelly Miscavige in a Mask?

With the 11th season of Last Week Tonight winding down, host John Oliver took the opportunity to express his hopes for a better year after a “genuinely bad” 2024.

On Sunday’s episode of his HBO show, Oliver recapped some of the lighter stories and stunts he pulled off this season — including successfully getting a bakery to make a cake bear in his likeness. But, he also noted, he was “forced to spend eight different main stories covering issues surrounding the election, forgoing much more interesting ones that we wanted to tackle.”

That included, as Oliver showed in a post from someone on X, “Liev Schreiber just drop[ping] an enormous jar of vodka sauce in the Whole Foods self-checkout. Sauce everywhere.” Joked Oliver, “We had 23 minutes on that planned, but I had to scrap it for an episode on all the ways Trump would fight the election results if he lost, which, of course, he did not.”

To that end, he said he wanted to look forward to 2025 and shared his hopes for a better year.

“In 2025, I’d like Elon Musk to jump so high he never comes back down,” Oliver said. “I’d like to go just one day without hearing about the Wicked movie. And in 2025, I’d like the final Mission: Impossible film to end with Tom Cruise taking off his face mask to reveal Shelly Miscavige,” the wife of Scientology leader David Miscavige, who hasn’t been seen in public since 2007. “That would be an amazing twist.”

Oliver asked his the world to “please keep being weird in fun ways. Keep making terrible statues, holding weird contests and auctioning off bizarre items. Just be yourselves and we’ll find something we can work with.”

Still, he’s expecting to have to cover some “terrible shit” next year, which he expects to be “exhausting.”

“All we can really hope for a little pockets of time between new horrors and calamities,” he added. “And maybe the goal should be to savor those minutes of calm as best we can. Basically, I guess what I’m saying is, when chaos becomes the norm, we need to appreciate every second we’ve managed to go without a fresh affront to humanity. Every day without an incident, going forward should probably be cherished.”

The camera then panned to an oversize “Days Without Incident” electronic display, with Oliver stepping up to a big red “reset” button, which he predicted will be used a lot in the new year. He jokingly gave examples of some news alerts that might necessitate the use of said button: “Rudy Giuliani Appointed to the Supreme Court.” “Secretary of State Turns Out to Be Putin in a Fake Mustache.” “America Out of Helium.” “All Aquariums Indefinitely Closed to the Public.”

That last one, he said, is “so confusing it feels OK to kind of just ignore it until you get the alert ‘Please Stay Inside; The sky Is Full of Sharks Now.’ Ohhhh, I get it. The helium from before. I’m not sure what the exact chain of events was, but the sky’s full of sharks now. It’s very bad. It makes sense. And, boom, we’ve got ourselves a big old reset.”

Ultimately, Oliver ended his last show of 2024 on an optimistic note for when it returns with its 12th season in February.

“The point here is we will be here for you next year to talk about the bad moments and hopefully the moments of joy in between,” he said.