Evil Is Over, but Evil Will Live Forever
This week, one of the most delightful yet nightmarish TV shows in recent memory came to an end. While it’s sad to bid farewell to Evil, the series left on a high note with (mostly) satisfying send-offs for its main characters, all while staying true to its core message: evil is everywhere, it always has been, and it always will be.
The quartet of bonus episodes added to season four—a decent gesture by Paramount+ after the show was canceled—have been a wild ride, with Leland’s trial, Kristen’s adieu to Andy, and the painful dismantling of the assessor program and the sale of St. Joseph’s taking precedence over the show’s usual “spooky case of the week” structure. Moving forward, the people of New York City are going to have to turn elsewhere for help with their possessions, ghosts, and tech-spawned horrors. David, Kristen, and Ben will no longer be co-workers united against the forces of darkness. And speaking of the forces of darkness, Evil viewers have long been promised an impending apocalypse, which means: it’s now or never!
As the finale, poignantly titled “Fear of the End,” begins, everyone’s gingerly embracing the new normal. Kristen’s seeing patients in her newly reestablished psychology practice; Ben’s starting his lucrative but soul-sucking office job; David’s packing up for his reassignment to the Vatican. At the de-consecrated St. Joseph’s, Father De Vita and the rest of the Entity bros are buzzing around, smugly confident they’re about to take down “the 60.”
In fact, their intel has revealed an elaborate Black Mass is about to take place—and one of the Church’s (former) assessors is in danger. David immediately assumes that means Kristen, but at that very moment Kristen is handling her own business. Leland has barged into her home office, violating the restraining order she has out against him, and is soon met with the business end of her taser. She’s completely unruffled when David and Ben rush in, and tells them Leland pretended to be a patient as a way to invite her to meet the 60. “Oh god, we’re back,” Ben groans.
Meet the 60, eh? Sounds suspicious, like maybe they want her sacrifice to be the main attraction at their Satanic jamboree. After he dumps Leland at home, David snaps a few photos of the grotesque, apocalyptic painting that’s the main focus of Leland’s apartment. Could that be an image of St. Joseph’s? Is that a hint to the 60’s secret meeting location?
While De Vita takes in this information, the trio reconvenes in Kristen’s yard, tossing their old files on a bonfire—cheekily violating the Entity’s request to have all assessor files turned over to their custody. There’s a brief, fan-service-y moment to reminisce about the cannibal medical students, ghost truckers, werewolves, and murderous Christmas songs of Evil episodes past.
But if Kristen is earmarked for Black Mass duty, why are Leland and Henry Stick (his lawyer, who’s equally repulsive in human and demon form) holding auditions for young women with theatrically chilling screams? What are they up to? Whatever it is, Stick thinks it’s a waste of time. “We don’t need this,” he gripes. “We already have the mother of the Antichrist! You can’t protect Kristen anymore… I don’t know what your thing is with her!”
Their quarrel is interrupted when Sister Andrea walks in. “I know what you’re doing,” she tells the hulking demon, and as always refuses to be intimidated by his size, smell, or gruesome threats. She boops his nose! Or boops the crack in his face where a nose would be. Sister Andrea: an absolute legend.
Kristen’s daughters, meanwhile, decide to go one last round with those troublesome VR headsets, gifted by Kristen’s mother Sheryl (RIP) in her peak sneaky era before they were confiscated, but not hidden well enough, by Kristen. Though most of the girls’ internet entanglements have been shot through with peril, that has never discouraged them from logging on again—especially since they’re newly obsessed with Mother Midnight, a game supposedly able to predict the future.
The assessors are having a nice moment in the yard, drinking their beverages of choice (Kristen, as always, is never far from a canned margarita) and talking about how much they mean to each other; David admits they’re his best friends, and how much he’s going to miss them. The sweet moment is interrupted by high-pitched adolescent shrieks; the girls have just witnessed what they believe is Kristen’s death at the hands of Leland, courtesy of Mother Midnight. The game is startlingly life-life, hence their genuine fright.
Obviously, this means Ben, David, and Kristen will don the goggles and stroll through Mother Midnight themselves. There’s a newfound urgency; as Ben has noticed, the screen now contains what appears to be a 24-hour timer counting down to… something. The adults all have awful experiences, too: Ben sees his sister wasting away in a hospital bed (“This game is messed up,” he mutters, accurately); Kristen imagines that her children are being taken away because, as VR Dr. Boggs explains, she’s an “unfit parent;” David finds himself battling a demon alongside Sister Andrea, being horribly injured, and being taunted by Leland about how God doesn’t exist.
After emerging from their various VR hells, the team is just starting to puzzle together how all that was possible when they realize there’s a crowd of people, all wearing similar VR headsets, swarming around Kristen’s house. It seems the game shows everyone the same location. Though all who play it experience different scenarios, they all believe that to stop that clock from counting down—they’re convinced that whatever horrible thing they saw will come true when the timer hits zero—they’ll need to get into Kristen’s basement. If they can unbrick the wall (you know, the one covering the tunnel to hell), they’ll be spared.
That’s unnerving, but then Kristen realizes her house was thoroughly mapped by another bit of eerie tech: the “Find a Demon” app her daughters have been playing around with this season. Ben pokes around in one of the headsets and extracts some sort of high-tech interface. “This links the cloud to a person’s cerebrum,” he explains. Then he connects the dots to see who’s pulling the strings: of course, it’s DF—the sinister Satanic company run by the 60. It specializes in infusing evil online and into all sorts of technology.
While the trio is figuring this out, they also realize something even more important: the sigil map showing the 60 demonic houses exactly lines up with… all the various regions of the human brain. “Sixty evil families, 60 regions of the brain,” David says. “Why go to the trouble of tempting, when you can upload despair right into the brain?” In this moment, you can tell Evil really wants to tie off some of its long-dangling plot threads; understandable, and appreciated—but it does feel a little rushed.
At St. Joseph’s, Stick and Leland are swanning around with a party planner, figuring out the decor for their Black Mass. The Entity is certain they’ve got the bad guys right where they want them, but Sister Andrea—always the smartest person in the room—knows just how off the mark they are. For one thing, whatever’s going to happen isn’t going to be at St. Joseph’s; as she can uniquely confirm, all the resident demons have already left the building, presumably in search of new souls to torment.
But the Entity would never listen to a nun, so she tells David he needs to intervene. As he’s speaking to Sister Andrea on the phone, he overhears Ben say “What’s the use of all these Satan worshippers running around if you can just meet online?” Clearly, that’s what’s happening here—St. Joseph’s is a deliberate misdirect—but it’s too late, even if the Entity was capable of admitting they’d made a mistake. The church is actually a trap, set up to waft poisonous gas to take out as many priests as possible (and, presumably, that aspiring Broadway star Leland hired a “sacrifice victim”).
David arrives just in time to drag the leader to safety, but this round goes to Satan. The real meeting of the 60 takes the form of a Zoom call, complete with one demonic dude named Norm who can’t figure out how to un-mute himself. He’s clearly old-school, if not literally ancient, and asks for clarification about the group’s new technological advancements. “We’re still families,” Stick explains. “But we’re families in here [points to his head], where we can live forever—where we don’t have to battle every single day with the church.”
Leland butts in: “We’re using technology to implant evil and despair right in the human brain!”
Stick brings it home: “The next time we meet, we will welcome the apocalypse and a new Antichrist figure to rally around!”
Applause and smiles. Everyone’s happy. Except for one member, “Gray,” who’s elected not to turn his camera on, possibly because he’s video chatting from the actual depths of hell. He wants to know just what happened to that plan to kill Timothy and Kristen. It sounds like he was expecting it, maybe even looking forward to it. Stick and Leland exchange loaded glances, and Leland quickly assures “Gray” that the double sacrifice is still happening. Tonight! It’s gonna be tonight! Yeah!
When the call ends, Stick turns to Leland and scolds him: “You’ve protected Kristen for four years. It ends tonight.”
While that might make Evil fans do a double-take—Leland has pretty much single-mindedly devoted himself to making Kristen’s life a nightmare since the show started—it is true that he’s let her live his whole time. If he’d wanted to kill her, he easily could have, many times. Has he really been protecting her all along?
Back at St. Joseph’s, which is now a mass-murder scene, Father De Vita—who has just lost 18 men— sucks down oxygen and finally listens to what David has to say. “The world is changing. It’s not about the 16th century families anymore,” David explains. “It’s about the systemic. They’re bringing evil right into our brains, bypassing the middleman.”
At last, David makes it official: he doesn’t want to be part of the Entity, a “friend of the Vatican.” He doesn’t believe in or agree with their methods. But for everyone who thought he was about to give up being a priest, that’s a nope. David is keeping his collar, but he wants to be put in charge of the assessor program.
He asks for a New York posting even though a) the Vatican just shuttered that branch, and b) it’s “the lowest rung,” according to De Vita. However, in the next scene he’s telling Kristen and Ben he’s still going to Rome—but now he has a new assignment. He’ll be helping the Vatican rebuild its assessor program.
And, of course, he wants them to come too, in a very “let’s get the band back together” sort of way. He explains it’s just a six-month commitment, but Ben reminds him he’s making a shit-ton of money at his new job, more than the Catholic Church would ever pay him. And Kristen? She just wants a “normal life,” preferably far, far away from the sexist world of organized religion.
But Dr. Bouchard, we know you better than that. Clearly thinking the idea over despite turning David down, Kristen checks up on her Dutch doppelganger and realizes, as her free-thinking twin says, “a risk not taken is a life not lived.” In her dark bedroom, she changes her mind: “Ok.” She’s gonna do this!
Or is she? Remember, Leland’s been sent to kill her, and indeed there he is, clawing his way through the basement tunnel and into the house. (Because he’s Leland, he pops in earbuds and blasts Roger Miller’s “Dang Me” at top volume while he’s creeping. Maple surple!)
But Kristen is lying in wait for this late-night visitor—and she’s very nearly done strangling the life out of him when David and Ben show up and stop her. And that doom-laden countdown? As the girls realize, it was nothing to panic about; instead, it was marking the end of a trial period for the VR goggles, a clever ploy by DF to hook customers and take over more minds. “It was just a stupid ad,” the girls groan, before plotting to use Kristen’s credit card so they can subscribe for more.
So, Kristen doesn’t get to murder Leland—she already had an “I’m a killer” plot in season two, after all—but David reassures her that they’ll take care of him “our way.” With that, we journey to the silent monastery seen in standout season-two episode “S for Silence.” It’s where the Catholic Church has sent Sister Andrea for “retirement,” and it lets us check in on that young nun who (silently) befriended Kristen amid that episode’s alleged miracles and gruesome bot-fly outbreaks.
Turns out, the isolated retreat has just the right place for someone like Leland, whose angry protests echo through the eternally quiet hallways: that demon-containment cabinet! Closed, locked, see ya never, Leland.
Evil’s last scene takes us to St. Peter’s Square. The girls are in their snazzy new school uniforms; Kristen looks fabulous in her designer Italian sunglasses; and baby Timothy is cute as can be in his stroller. The gang excitedly chats with Ben over video chat, and he promises to come visit soon. Kristen tells the girls she’s got to go to work, just as David (also wearing cool sunglasses) approaches. It’s an unconventional family—sorry if you had “David and Kristen finally get together” on your Evil wish list—but everyone seems happy, relaxed, and full of positive energy.
But because Evil is Evil, a confirmed lover of playful mindfuckery, we realize, along with Kristen, that something’s not entirely right with Timothy. He’s adorable, yes, but gaze too long at his eyes and you’ll see something sinister flash behind them. A trick of the light, or something demonic? And is that a row of pointy monster teeth glinting out of his giggling little mouth?
Baptism be damned, Baby Tim has still got the devil in him. Kristen takes this in, waits a beat, and decides—nah. She’s not gonna tell David what she thinks she just saw.
Suffice to say, if Evil ever returns, we have a very good place to pick back up with the story. But if this truly is the end for these characters, “Fear of the End” feels like a perfectly Evil place to conclude: on a bright, sunny day, steps away from the heart of the Vatican, with the Antichrist chomping on a pacifier. And you know the 60 are also still out there, tentacle-deep in malevolent technology, excitedly plotting their next run at the apocalypse.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.