The Kings Will Never Give Up on Evil
After four seasons of demonic possessions, sexual encounters with beastly entities, and Sister Andrea beating the hell out of some succubi, Evil finally ended its run.
Or has it?
After the writers strike concluded, the cast and crew learned Paramount+ was not renewing the series for a fifth season. Instead, it added four episodes to season four’s initial run of ten, allowing creators Robert and Michelle King to wrap things up on their own terms.
That finale, “Fear of the End,” dropped this week on Paramount+ and revealed that the work started in New York by the demonic assessment team of Father David Acosta (Mike Colter), psychologist Kristen Bouchard (Katja Herbers), and technology guru (and deep skeptic) Ben Shakir (Aasif Mandvi) will move to Italy, where David and Kristen are stationed at the Vatican. It also finally showed us a meeting of the 60, the shadowy organization that represents the various demonic houses attempting to destroy the world (admittedly without much luck), over Zoom.
“Fear of the End” resolves the supernatural drama’s major dangling story lines with its signature sense of humor; only on this show would a nun stand face-to-face with a hairy demon and boop him on the nose. There’s just enough ambiguity to suggest Evil could return in some form, something the Kings, the husband-and-wife duo responsible for an astonishing amount of great television (The Good Wife, The Good Fight, Elsbeth), are hopeful for. “We keep telling Paramount+, we’re here, we would love to do more,” says Robert.
Perhaps Evil can’t be so easily defeated. It can, however, be analyzed and discussed, starting with what in the holy hell (literally) is going on with Kristen’s son Timothy, a.k.a. maybe, possibly, the Anti-Christ.
There’s a moment in the final scene of the series when Timothy displays sharp teeth and a weird glint in his eye. Up until now, we thought he was fine because Sheryl got him baptized. What can you say about that?
Robert King: He’s not fine. There’s this New Yorker article about people who see demonic faces. So much of the show is about what’s in the eye of the beholder. If Kristen starts seeing her baby as demonic but is covering up for him, is that going to lead in a bad direction?
Everything’s pleasant there in Rome. The kids are in these beautiful outfits. It all seems happy and sweet, and maybe there is even a future for Kristen and David. Then there’s this poison pill at the end that the baby is probably exactly what Leland was saying: the Anti-Christ.
Michelle King: I do think there’s also a question at the end of, how much can love make a difference? Unlike, I would imagine, the average Anti-Christ, this one has a truly loving mother. How much can that help?
That question alone opens up so many storytelling possibilities. Did you end the show with that in mind, that there is a possibility to pick this up again?
RK: Yes. You can put in parentheses before that: firmly.
Do you see it being a movie later, or —
RK: I just don’t know. What we enjoyed was all the relationships and characters. What we wanted was not to kill them off and put a period on the end of a sentence. It was an ellipsis of what could happen. There’s a way to do it as a series. There’s a way to do it as a movie. There’s a way to do it where Michelle and I create sock puppets and do it for each other late at night. But there is a way to make it work.
MK: We wanted something that would feel satisfying to folks that have watched these characters for four-and-change seasons, yet still leave an opportunity for more stories to tell if we should have that opportunity.
At what point did you know you were only getting four episodes as opposed to another season?
RK: We came back from the strike and found out there wasn’t going to be another season. George Cheeks, CEO of Paramount Global, and David Stapf, president of CBS Studio, told us, “We want to do four more because you weren’t given the chance to close out the series.” We shot the last six days of episode ten — that’s the one where Christine Lahti dies — in December, then brought the writers’ room back together in January with the idea that we’d start shooting the last four episodes at the beginning of February.
MK: It was a nod to how much they liked the series that they made sure to give it a proper ending.
Did you already have an arc for a longer season in your mind that you pared down?
RK: You saw the episode where Denis O’Hare comes in as the security expert for the Vatican. We were going to go down that route. There’s a really good series of thrusts and parries between Leland and David where David goes over and pretends — or maybe doesn’t pretend — that he’s having doubts about the church and Leland starts exploiting that. But you realize David is being a double agent, pretending so they can feed this information to Denis O’Hare’s character. David isn’t sure how much he trusts the Vatican security. He’s being manipulated, but he also realizes there’s a seed of something evil inside him which was possibly left by Leland.
We were going to go a little longer with the court case against Leland. We were going to satirize what we’ve done in Good Wife and Good Fight, but in a universe where Trump gets off, everybody gets off, because there’s easy ways to exploit the court.
You still got a lot of those elements in there, just —
RK: We just shrunk it down. I mean, we always thought we’d get one of the fun Good Wife, Good Fight judges — in this case, Richard Kind — and have him turn full hog on Evil.
He’s not supposed to be the same character, right? Because the name is different.
MK: Yeah, totally different.
The moment he beheaded Leslie, the witness in Leland’s murder trial, I gasped so loudly.
MK: But when you gasped, was it with comedy? Was it funny to you?
I gasped and then I laughed.
MK: Yeah, it’s meant to be funny, too.
I wasn’t expecting Richard Kind to do that.
MK: And he didn’t expect it. He got the first episode and — “Why are they wanting me for this? I don’t do anything.” Then he got the second episode: “Oh, I get it. That’s great.”
Were you always looking for moments to make the viewer gasp?
RK: There’s that movie American Werewolf in London that mixes horror and comedy well. You’re always looking for that sweet spot, the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down. Horror being the medicine and the spoonful of sugar being the comedy is, I think, the best way of looking at what Evil was trying to do.
Can you explain why the Vatican felt it was important to bring back the assessor program after eliminating it?
RK: Denis O’Hare’s character becomes very aware of how important David is to them and wants to satisfy him. I’m also fascinated by Pope Francis because he’s kind of a radical administrator. The one thing he required of his cardinals is that they hear confessions. The cardinals were above it all; they didn’t sully themselves with getting into a confessional booth and listening to workaday people and their problems. But the assessor program is the workaday problems. It’s the way you see what’s happening with people where they live. That’s the only way you could find what’s wrong with the world, what’s wrong even with the institution of Roman Catholicism.
In The Good Fight, when Audra tells Christine, “Don’t think about all the things we’ve done that have resulted in bad ends. Think of the people you helped on an individual basis.” Here, it’s David and the church realizing, Okay, you need to see people on the ground.
Remind me, where are you both on religion?
MK: Robert is a devout churchgoing Catholic, and I’m a secular Jew.
RK: I’ve been reading a lot about Flannery O’Connor and how, as devout of a woman as she was, her stories deal with great evil and villainy and oddballness. We’re not a hundred-millionth of that creativity or brilliance, but if there are ways your show can be honest about looking at both sides of questions, I think that advances entertainment.
Even right to the very end on Evil, you’re not sure where it stands. I imagine that was deliberate on your part.
RK: The show is as much an indictment of the modern Catholic church and its scandals. The scandals were always there, but now they’re exposed. Where does the church go from here? Does it try to sweep it further under the carpet, or does it pull it out into the open?
Evil also feels like a cautionary tale about technology. You start in the pilot with David saying evil’s no longer isolated because of social media. In the finale, you’ve got Leland saying, “We’re using technology to implant evil and despair right into the human brain.” Was that the core theme of the show?
RK: For us it was always, what is new about evil? What separates evil now from the time of Dante or after World War II? There are probably fewer deaths in the world. But it does feel, on the heels of Elon Musk interviewing Trump, that evil is in communication with each other and provoking each other. Even virtual reality — even if it’s not used, the threat of it being used makes you question all reality. That was always fun to us. The show makes the demons part of our world. But are the demons part of our world because of something psychological? Or is something technological allowing demons to be in our world metaphorically now?
How did the current political culture inform the direction in which you took the show?
MK: This show has more of a magazine feel as opposed to a newspaper-headline feel. It would’ve been relevant under any administration. It’s not as though evil is only around for certain parties.
RK: It’s constantly about us being on screens. It’s a little Black Mirror in that sense. The added element is the exploitation of innocence. The show is very much informed by what’s happening with those daughters and what the evil part of the world wants. Kristen is trying to keep them innocent in a world that doesn’t want to allow them to be.
All four of them are real liars, by the way. That’s different from the actresses, who are adorable, but we wanted the kids to be real, and kids lie. There’s no reason to sit them down and say, “Don’t lie,” because the brain isn’t functioning like that yet. As soon as Kristen sits them down: “Don’t talk to Leland.” And they’re immediately on Bumblebee Valley with Leland.
In the finale, you did a bunch of callbacks to previous episodes, especially in the bonfire scene where they burn all the assessment files. Were there references you wanted to put in that you didn’t have the time for?
RK: Not that I recall. In the editing room, we cut that very tight. It was a fairly loose scene, and it seemed to work best when it had some pace to it. It was very hard to shoot those things. The prop department gathered all the photos from those episodes and then we wanted to see them burn. Because it was night and it was hard with the lighting and the fake fire we had going, it was hard to get that working. So I think the only thing we lost was the physical content of it — “Pudsy’s Christmas,” photos of that as they burn it. I think we even got all the guest stars we wanted. The nun Fenna, for example. We got her in there, which was very important to us.
Why was it important to have Fenna, the nun who befriended Kristen in season two, in the finale?
RK: Originally, it was supposed to show that Sister Andrea was not going to be alone at the church, even though she couldn’t talk. But then it was weird: Well, why isn’t Kristen here? So we asked Katja to stay late that night so we could shoot it. It did feel like there was always this attraction between Kristen and Fenna. Attraction in the modern world means sexual, but I don’t think you have to go there. It was an attraction of two compatriots who, if they could talk, would have a lot to say. It felt like that was important. Maybe we were nostalgic for that episode.
The Doppel app is a big running thread in these last episodes. Is that based on something that exists or you think may exist in the future?
RK: There’s a Freudian obsession with doppelgängers that we were always obsessing over in the room — if this was a full season, these doppelgängers were going to be more involved in the “path not taken” sense. When something happened to them, our characters would find themselves impacted both psychologically and physically, like voodoo dolls. We had a longer plot built out for the doppelgängers, but then we decided when we had four episodes, it was actually a good way to decompress our leads, because their doppelgängers are more like the actors in real life. Katja is Dutch. That is Asif with his real wife and his real son. They had a lot of fun doing that.
When you talk about the longer arcs you had in mind, how much of a fuller season had you written?
RK: Going into a new season, you get an instinct of the four or five things you want to pursue. Then they become mixed in with the thoughts of the writers’ room. You start to build cases that hide that premise. We always thought the premise of the fourth season was about the arrogance of science that allows it to become villainous and evil. Then the writers came in with the particle accelerator, and then Dwayne had the one about the slaughtering of pigs. Everybody finds a way to play off the premise.
MK: And their own obsessions.
RK: We did know we were going to a place where the institutions are shutting down as evil is growing. It felt like you could only taunt the audience with the 60 meeting for so long and then you actually had to get it to happen.
MK: I do not feel that the four-episode season is in some way less than. We did the episodes we wanted to do. Yes, there were other possibilities, but I don’t feel cheated and I don’t think the audience will feel cheated.
RK: The only problem in general for the streaming universe we’ve all jumped into with both feet is it’s a compacted way of looking at creativity. You’re collapsing down and not allowing yourself to more intuitively explore the subjects. When you were doing 22 episodes a year, you could create whole universes. And then knowing you are going to have more seasons, you could play. I am a little worried there’s like, No, no, don’t play. Focus, focus, focus.
On a lot of shows, a movement like the 60 would have been defeated in the finale. Why was it important to convey that it would still exist?
MK: Well, that’s our vision of evil: that it doesn’t go away.
RK: The sadness of the ending, if you want to think of it that way, is that evil is getting much more technologically savvy than the good. Good is very hard work, and evil finds easy ways to slip into people’s minds. People are feeling a little more hope now politically, but when we were writing these, it was a very dark time and it still is. It felt a little bit Pollyanna-ish if you said, “Yeah, the team was able to take a bomb and blow ’em up.”
The real telling part for me is when they go to the church and are handed that note: “Welcome, let me introduce you to the evil coming to New York.” Then you open it up and it says, “you.” Because the entity or the friends of the Vatican doing this assault are just turning into the villainy they’re trying to defeat.
Since Evil showed up on Netflix, it seems like more and more people are discovering it. Has that changed the calculus about whether there is a potential future for the show?
MK: As far as we were concerned creatively, yes, there’s more story to tell. Does the great increase in viewership change the calculus for somebody buying the next season? That’s a great question for a top executive at one of these platforms.
RK: All we know is it’s doing massively better since it went on Netflix, and for Paramount+ too. We keep telling Paramount+, we’re here, we would love to do more. The actors would love to do more, and we think these are actors you should hold onto. Not only that, it was a very good crew.
What’s never mentioned enough by showrunners is how important the crew is to the collaborative process. Whenever you do a good movie, everybody goes their own way when it’s over. With a series, you become much more of a traveling family. To have the strike hit these people and then do four more — it was a great reunion, but you’re really going to miss them. You miss what everybody brought to it, because we do make up stuff on the set quite a bit, and every crew member has the ability to throw in something, a lighting effect that changes. I think it was the end of the second episode of the last four where they play the heavenly chord and then the whole scene lights up and the camera moves away. A lot of that was devised on the set. I can’t tell you how much we’re going to miss this.
Related