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Hey friends, just a quick poll here: If you were to come home to meet your mother’s new boyfriend for the first time and then learn that she’s dating a man that you’re pretty sure is an actual demon, would you think an appropriate reaction would be to take him out into your office and slice his neck in just the right manner so that he has 20 minutes to get to the hospital before bleeding out? Great! So, we’re all in agreement then: What Kristen Bouchard (Katja Herbers) did on Evil after walking in on Leland Townsend (Michael Emerson) playing a game with her daughters in which the lyrics to the accompanying song are “I like coffee! I like tea! I like the devil to dance with me!” was completely warranted.
Honestly, he’s lucky he only needed 20 stitches, that’s how furious Kristen is to see him standing there in her house. I mean, as she should be — he is evil incarnate. And evil incarnate is going to do what evil incarnate does, which is why it’s not a total surprise when Leland tells Kristen that her holding a knife to his neck and threatening him if he ever comes back turns him on. Super creepy and makes me want to peel my skin off, yes. Surprising, no.
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Sheryl (Christine Lahti) is angry and confused — she seems so in love (barf) — and so Kristen has to explain that he sabotaged her at work and even goes so far as playing that voicemail she has of him reveling in that fact that a minor might get assaulted in prison. Sheryl is still obviously confused after that — since the Leland Kristen is exposing seems nothing like the charming man she knows — but she’s also horrified. She knows she can’t stay with him. When he shows up at her apartment, she tells him that she has to put her family first. Leland understands, but asks for one last kiss. Which, hi ladies, is an extremely creepy thing for someone to ask once he’s been dumped, regardless of if he’s a psychopath or not. I’m not a doctor, but maybe that means a person is a psychopath? Can we get some research on that?
Anyway, she gives him one little peck goodbye, but then something takes over her… and they start smashing faces hardcore. As if she can’t get enough. As if, perhaps, she is consumed by him? And then something happens that I still cannot believe my peepers just peeped: While Leland and Sheryl are having sex, and from the looks of Sheryl’s face it is very good sex, um, well, HER BED GOES UP IN FLAMES. Like, just on fire. Everything. And I don’t think those flames appeared due to the power of their lovemaking. I think it was from the power of the devil.
In other news: WHAT IS THIS SHOW? Also: I love it.
Christine Lahti, Evil
On the bright side, while we may have just lost Sheryl to the dark side, we have possibly another member joining the good guys. The Monsignor (Boris McGiver) assigns the team to check out the validity of a possible prophet working out of a daycare in Queens.
Can I take one moment just to revel in the tone of Evil? It could easily be a horror show with a super dramatic, very serious mood informing everything, but instead Robert and Michelle King have continued to let this show be quirky and weird and honestly, that makes some of the creepy stuff that goes down even scarier. Plus, it’s entertaining as hell. There’s no better example of this unique tone the Kings have created and let fly than how we find our prophet, Grace (Li Jun Li). This woman is tossing out prophecies from a very tiny chair in the middle of an overcrowded daycare. Kids are everywhere. It is so incredibly loud, even as Kristen, David (Mike Colter), and Ben (Aasif Mandvi) arrive to question her. It is so jarring and quirky and just very Evil.
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What the team finds when they question Grace is a woman who is happy to talk about her direct line to God very matter-of-factly. He talks to her in a whisper, slowly, she says. Sometimes he reaches out to her, sometimes she asks him questions and he answers. When she can’t make out what he’s saying, she’ll blow up an inflatable toy and it helps her hear him. It sounds completely wack-a-doodle, but her calm demeanor as they question her makes her very believable. Some disconcerting things happen, too: When David asks her to ask God what he wants from him, she responds that David is in danger. That “they” know about his visions and want to stop him. If you’re keeping count, that’s the second person in a row whose told David he’s in danger. By now, I think it’s fair to quote esteemed psychic Oda Mae Brown: “you in danger, girl,” er, priest-in-training. Grace also tells Kristen that Laura’s heart defect will heal and also to avoid the color red this week. Of course then Kristen leaves and all she can see is red — the sweatshirt her daughter is wearing, the wrapping paper on the gifts (RED covered journals) Leland gives her daughters, Taylor Swift’s 2012 album. Okay, that last one doesn’t show up, but I’m assuming Kristen avoids Tay that week.
Skylar Gray, Katja Herbers, Maddy Crocco, Brooklyn Shuck, Dalya Knapp, Evil
The most compelling argument for Grace’s gift is that she warns a woman at the daycare to “leave her house before it falls into darkness” and then later that night, the building where the woman is falls into a sinkhole. It’s hard to explain something like that away, Ben, and the team wants to know why the Monsignor, and the Catholic Church, is so bent on figuring out if this one reported prophet is telling the truth. It turns out, it has to do with a secret ancient codex of prophecies the church has been keeping on lockdown since 1550. Apparently, some of the prophecies Grace has made are word-for-word prophecies from that codex. One of those prophecies, he says, foretells the end of the Catholic Church. It’s all very Indiana Jones, Da Vinci Code-level stuff.
Later, David questions Grace further. Eventually he asks her about what his visions mean, and when he shows her the three stars in the glass orb, she explains that they don’t relate to three coordinates on Earth — rather, they form a sort of pyramid (or, if you want to get technical, a Euler triangle). David wants to get back into those visions, so that evening he sips on his freaky-deaky tea and starts to hallucinate a Euler triangle… and then Kristen arrives at the door.
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You guys, in the midst of all the actual living prophet stuff and the devil sex bed stuff, I haven’t even told you about all of my dreams coming true. Or, rather, Kristen’s dream. Kristen and David are still a bit testy after everything that went down with the exorcism on Halloween. David thinks their differences are their strength, but only if Kristen trusts him enough to have discussions about it. We see them have this conversation in David’s room and Kristen leaves after acknowledging how weird her life has become. Then we see that same scene again, but instead of Kristen leaving, David grabs her AND THEY MAKE OUT. I mean, David’s shirt comes off entirely too fast for this to be real, but still, THEY ARE KISSING. But then David turns into George (Marti Matulis) and it is awful and Kristen wakes up. Kristen has the best dreams, until they become the worst dreams. So, yes, George is back, but Kurt gives her a coping mechanism to help her have lucid dreaming — dreaming in which she is aware she is dreaming — so that she can have control of George. It works, and she tells George off, but George isn’t going anywhere any time soon. Ah, weird green demons popping up in your sex dreams truly are your subconscious’s cold shower.
All of which is to say that when Kristen comes knocking at David’s door while he’s in the middle of hallucinating geometry (get better hallucinations, nerd!), their relationship is already in a weird place. As she tries to explain that she figured out that the drawings Grace handed them are actually pieces of the codex that have been missing, she realizes David is like, so, so high. It’s very charming and hopefully Kristen doesn’t feel so embarrassed to be around him after her sex dream.
Mike Colter, Katja Herbers, Evil
It’s very exciting that Kristen has figured out what Grace’s drawings are. But the party ends once they decipher the now more complete codex: It wasn’t just predicting the end of the Catholic Church — it was predicting the end of the world. David, et al. want to see Grace again to get as many prophecy codex drawings from her as possible, but when they arrive at the daycare, they learn she was detained by ICE. David talks to her at the detention center before she’s moved, and she basically draws her face off, completing the partial pages of the codex he has, but when a guard gets his hands on her papers, he tosses them in the trash and she is taken away.
Admittedly, that’s not great — we need to know what’s up with the impending apocalypse — but guys, we have Much! Bigger! Problems! We find Sheryl in bed with Leland post-fire sex, and when she gets up and goes to her closet to put on some clothes, in a sea of black options, she picks up the one bright red sweater hanging there. Yes, red, the color Grace warned Kristen to avoid. So, we should probably be concerned.
Evil airs Thursdays at 10/9c on CBS.
Previously on Evil…
Evil Season 1, Episode 1 Recap: “Pilot” |Evil Season 1, Episode 2 Recap: “177 Minutes” |Evil Season 1, Episode 3 Recap: “3 Stars” |Evil Season 1, Episode 4 Recap: “Rose390” | Evil Season 1, Episode 5 Recap: “October 31”
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