Photo: Elizabeth Fisher/Paramount+
Evil friends, what a bittersweet way to kick off a new season. As I’m sure you’ve heard, as I’m sure you’ve screamed to the heavens (or to hell, you do you), we are embarking upon Evil’s fourth and final season. The one silver lining I keep in my head is that, at the very least, knowing this is the last hoorah, Robert and Michelle King will certainly be going for broke. Not that they ever don’t. It’s why we love this show, right? Okay, never mind, this is the worst. Isn’t there a demon I can sell my soul to for a renewal or something? Netflix? (Just kidding.) (Or not.)
Unsurprisingly, we’re starting off the season with a bang. And I’m not even talking about that hilarious, oddly hot sex scene with Kristen and Andy in the Bouchard kitchen. But also I guess I’m not not talking about that? The horniest knife work I’ve ever seen! But really, we should kick things off where the show does, with that glorious opening scene in which Kristen takes in the news that Leland has hijacked her eggs and tossed in his sperm to create the Antichrist. The Antichrist will be born in 38 days, and Leland will raise him, and Kristen thinks that’s honestly just hilarious. No, seriously. As only Kristen Bouchard can, she laughs and laughs at the thought of Leland raising a child. “I can’t think of any greater torture than to give you a baby,” she says, thwarting his plans to get under her skin. “I giggle at the thought of you waking up at 3 a.m. because the Antichrist needs changing.” Oh, reader, I giggle too. Leland always feels a few steps ahead of Kristen and our merry band of assessors, so whenever she can get the better of him, even for a minute, it is delicious. Oh, it’s so good to be back.
After Kristen saunters out of that baby shower (what’s on the Antichrist’s registry?) laughing like a goddamned boss, she gets down to business. Sheryl, who of course has known all along that this was Leland’s plan, is now banned from the Bouchard house and forbidden from seeing her granddaughters. I still can’t get a handle on what Sheryl’s endgame is here. Does she have one? Is she simply possessed and loving it? Is there any part of who she used to be before Leland lit her bed on fire (literally, remember)? She remains a mystery.
Kristen’s plan, though, is crystal clear: In her life, in her house, religion is out and science is in, baby. She’s not even entertaining the possibility of this stuff being real anymore. She wants things to go back to normal. No more demons and goblins and Antichrists, just hot kitchen sex and refusing to take her kids to Sunday Mass. Normal!
She carries this new outlook with her to work, too. The gang is summoned to St. Joseph’s for their next assignment with Father Ignatius. Thank God, this sweet man is back to make us laugh but also, mostly, to make us cry — a picture of Monsignor Korecki up on the wall in his office? Be still my heart. He’s apparently just filling in until the Vatican sends someone else, but come on, we need him. We deserve him.
He hands them our case of the week: People are protesting a particle-accelerator lab called Garrow Research Facility, claiming it could open the gates to hell, and the scientists there have requested that our trio investigate to prove those protestors wrong. At the facility, the scientists, led by a physicist named Ethan, don’t help their cause — they’re super-shady, especially when the team starts asking about the whereabouts of a woman who used to work there and was part of a viral video of people performing a blood sacrifice at the lab. In the video, they stab her — it looks super-fake, but their excuses for why she isn’t around also sound super-fake.
Nothing’s adding up, and when David heads back to his little electric scooter — because Evil can find ways to make anything, even checking out a particle-accelerator facilty, just a little extra kooky — one of the custodial workers, Mateo, has left him a note that says “They’re lying” with a time and place to meet him.
And so they meet. Mateo tells the whole story: When they were building the accelerator, they came across a huge sinkhole miles and miles deep; instead of trying to fill it, they cemented over it — but something’s down there. Mateo has his own video, in which smoke starts to fill the accelerator loop and some sort of creature is obscured by it — a big creature. We see only its outline, but it’s enough to be like, Yeah, sure, that could come from the depths of hell.
Well, for us — its not enough for new, skeptic-on-steroids Kristen. Back in the car, she immediately asks Ben to debunk it, something she requests he now do immediately, and he shows her a video he made using some app that can insert “angels” into videos. Mateo’s video could easily be a fake. The way Katja Herbers gleefully tells her friend “It’s good news, David, there’s no monster coming out of hell” should be studied in universities across this country. It is so good. Why are they canceling this show, again?
Things get more muddled when the crew finally meets with the new Vatican rep, Father La Russo. La Russo informs them that the Vatican isn’t actually worried about the gates of hell being opened but rather about the particle accelerator creating a chain of quantum black holes that could swallow the earth. Admittedly, that is much freakier than the gates of hell. Science is crazy, people. Ben is of the understanding that something like this occurring is nearly impossible, but La Russo wants more than just nearly impossible odds — back to the lab the team goes.
This time, the trio splits up. David hops on his cute li’l scooter again and heads down to the section of the loop Mateo had directed them to. Once he’s left alone, weird things start happening. Mainly, he watches as a giant monster bug demon thing comes slithering out of the hole with the woman from the video’s head on it and she’s still whispering for help. Maybe I take back the thing about the black holes being freakier — it’s a tie.
Kristen and Ben go with Ethan to check out all the safety protocols the lab has to prevent black holes from swallowing the earth. (God, I missed the insane sentences doing Evil recaps allows me to write.) Everything looks normal and up to code, but then Ethan invites them both to actually step into the accelerator, which, like, I know nothing about quantum physics, but I do know not to hop into a particle accelerator. Especially one that may or may not be related to the gates of hell. You know my girl Kristen is an immediate “no” when Ethan makes the offer.
You can probably guess that things go terribly wrong: The accelerator starts up — later, they blame it on a test run, but come on, that thing turned on by itself! — and an ion beam … well, I don’t know how to tell you this exactly, but Ben takes an ion beam directly to the face. In the exact moment it happens, he sees flashes of some weird shit but gets a clean bill of health from several doctors. That sounds all well and good, but then Ben goes home and has a wild vision/hallucination/actual sighting of yet another giant buglike demon. Are all our demons this season going to be bug-esque? I miss Ben’s freaky-deaky horny night ghost, but this development is interesting. For some reason, he doesn’t fill in his buddies on this post-ion-beam occurrence, and that is frustrating. Why do these people who have seen the absolutely weirdest shit together not trust one another when the unexplainable happens.
David does the same thing: He lies to Ben and Kristen about his experience with the sinkhole at B33. Instead, he confides in Sister Andrea. Yeah, she’s a real one, but so are Ben and Kristen. Everyone needs all of the information! I am concerned! During his visit with Sister Andrea, David also informs her of another vision he had, of an angel telling him, “Woe to Babylon in 38 days.” Sounds like a prophecy about the end of the world. And no, you’re not wrong: We’ve heard about something else happening in 38 days, too.
The gang heads back to the particle accelerator one last time, and in true Evil fashion, we get something wild happening with no concrete answer. On security cameras, they watch as Mateo, who has apparently copped to blackmailing the facility and making up all of those videos (yeah, right), heads over to the sinkhole. It looks as though he might jump in, but the sinkhole isn’t fully visible in the shot. We see his arms swinging around, we see him moving around in the bottom of the frame, but who can tell what’s happening here? Then Mateo’s gone. When they run over to check out the hole situation and the whole situation, Mateo is still gone, noises like his screaming are coming up from the bowels of the earth, and there’s blood and huge scratch marks on the outer edge of the sinkhole. Are they from his trying to hold on for dear life, or are they from a giant bug monster demon dragging him to the depths of hell? Is it weird that the latter actually seems more plausible?
Back at St. Joseph’s, they tell La Russo and Ignatius that their findings are inconclusive. However, if they are really looking for a reason to shut the place down, their safety codes are not totally up to snuff. La Russo wonders if they can do so before the particle accelerator is officially opened … in 38 days.
Thankfully, David doesn’t keep everything to himself any longer. His friends clock his strange reaction to that number and ask him to spill once they’re alone. He had a dream, he says, about a warning that the world would end in 38 days with the birth of the Antichrist. Once again, Kristen cannot hold in her laughter. “I’m having a son in 38 days,” she tells them. Things are about to get wild.
Actually, things are already wild. While all of this particle-accelerator stuff is happening, something even stranger is going on right under Kristen’s nose. Remember how Leland and Sheryl kidnapped Andy and kept him catatonic in his closet? Remember that? Well, Andy gets a phone call from Leland, and good ol’ Lee plays him that version of “Feliz Navidad” we’ve heard coming from Leland’s toy. Andy is suddenly in a trance. Yes, he knows where he’s supposed to go, he tells Leland before hanging up and leaving his house. “Feliz Navidad” is a trigger noise for whatever the hell they did to Andy, and while I like the guy and want the best for him, that’s just hilarious.
Later, we find him back on that meat slab in the closet, fully catatonic again, with both Leland and Sheryl trying to brainwash him for their own benefit. Leland repeats, “Why is your wife fucking a priest,” to attempt to sow discord in their marriage, and Sheryl repeats, “You need Sheryl back in the house,” because, well, you can figure that one out. I hope at some point their commands start to get crossed and it leads to chaos. But, like, the fun kind. Not this kind, in which Andy shows up at the rectory and wants to start a fight with David for fucking his wife. I don’t want Kristen’s boys fighting like this!
David immediately calls Kristen to have a little check-in on their friendship in light of this accusation, which honestly is adorable. The cute part doesn’t last long because once David finally tells her why he’s worried that the two of them aren’t good anymore, she gets pissed. “Do I have feelings for you? Yeah! But my husband needs to shut the fuck up!” she yells before marching home, chugging a canned margarita and spitting some of it at a picture of her and Andy.
The next morning, she confronts him, and he continues to press her on how far she and David have gone. She tells him to shape up or ship out. In short, Leland’s plan worked spectacularly. Now, we’ll have to wait and see exactly what Leland wants out of this and how far he’ll go to get it.
• Evil’s opening credits remain the best in the biz, and it isn’t even close.
• Sister Andrea may be the busiest nun in New York. She has a revolving door of guests, including David and Lynn and, surprise, surprise, Kurt. Sister Andrea’s frustrated “Oh my God” when he busts in is hilarious on so many levels. I mean, we do know she’s tight with the big guy. I missed our girl!
• Demon Kristen is back taunting David, and yes, she too drinks canned margs.
• Still laughing about Ben’s homemade angel video in which he yells, “I guess I was wrong about science!” I love Ben with all my stupid little heart.
• Evil’s got jokes! Lynn, who is sneaking out to chat with Sister Andrea about becoming a nun, would rather lie to her mom about sneaking around with her boyfriend than tell her the truth. What a world.
• Wait, there’s more jokes. Not that Leland is ever the “good angel,” but I love his hovering over Kristen’s shoulder and trying to be gentle about the whole Antichrist-baby-against-her-will thing and then switching shoulders to be downright demonic about it.
• Is there a creepier sentence in the history of sentences than “Your egg and my sperm, destined for each other from the beginning.”
Maggie Fremont
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