Season 3 of “Evil” ended on a typically funny but creepy, outlandish yet somehow understated note. With moments to go in the final episode, Kristen Bouchard, the show’s demon-investigating psychologist, found out that one of her eggs had been fertilized by the sperm of a possible demon. The last thing we saw was her dumbfounded face.
Coming into Thursday’s premiere of the show’s fourth and final season on Paramount+, she and we have had nearly two years to think about how to respond. Kristen’s choice? To laugh, like an only slightly crazy person. “I giggle at the thought of you waking up at 3 a.m.,” she tells her nemesis and baby daddy, Leland Townsend, “because the Antichrist needs changing.”
Like just about everything in “Evil,” her riposte works on both the human and the supernatural planes. (All babies can seem like the Antichrist, after all.) This is appropriate given that, with 14 episodes to go, the show’s central characters remain conflicted about whether the weird stuff they experience is a product of the devil or of human malevolence amplified by their own overactive imaginations.
Their indecisiveness goes to the heart of the show, whose fundamental message is that supernatural evil abets, hides behind and jealously competes with everyday human evil. It’s a continuum. You can’t have one without the other.
On the basis of the season’s first four episodes, “Evil” remains one of the smarter, more entertaining and more stylishly produced shows out there, and it continues to carry the hallmarks of its creators and showrunners, Michelle and Robert King.
The music cues are refreshingly offbeat; a character whispers the “Green Acres” theme during a nighttime stakeout in a corn field, and the show reprises its fondness for the novelty songs of Roger Miller. There is the somewhat self-conscious engagement with and critique of digital technology, as characters try to blame social media or rogue hackers for what look like demonic possessions.
The story lines are reflexively suspicious of those in power, whether in the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church or the boardrooms of corporate America. The struggles of women are prominent — in addition to the working mother Kristen (Katja Herbers), with her squalling quartet of daughters, there are the demon-battling nun Sister Andrea (Andrea Martin) and Kristen’s mother, Sheryl (Christine Lahti), who faces a literal, hilarious glass ceiling.
While the show is not as directly or specifically political in its approach as the Kings’ legal drama “The Good Fight,” its premise — three intelligent, liberal protagonists continually struggling to recognize and accept the obvious evil that confronts them and determine how to fight it — is pretty easy to read.
And even after its Season 2 move from CBS to the streamer Paramount+, “Evil” maintains the Kings’ preference for a traditional episodic structure. Kristen, the priest and exorcist David (Mike Colter) and the science-and-tech guy Ben (Aasif Mandvi) still get weekly assignments — now from a new handler-priest, Father Ignatius (Wallace Shawn) — to assess reports of possible possession.
Those assignments have gotten more baroque, however — and less focused on human beings. The scientists at a particle accelerator ask for help in proving that their machine won’t open the gates to hell. Eating pork from a Long Island farm sends people into thrashing fits, raising the question of whether the pigs are possessed.
If these weekly stories don’t have quite the same suspense or emotional heft as they did in past seasons, perhaps it’s because they are less personal, or perhaps it’s because more attention has to be paid to winding up the larger narrative, the battle royale between Kristen and Leland (Michael Emerson). (And while the investigators’ continuing skepticism is part of the fabric of the show, it makes increasingly less sense, after everything they have seen on the job.)
It is hard to imagine Kristen not vanquishing Leland in the end, though it is easy to imagine an ending in which the demons-or-not question is left unresolved and she does not get credit for saving the world from apocalypse. However things turn out, though, the show’s most original creation will have been the cringey, fussy, smug, alarming Leland, and its greatest strength Emerson’s wide-eyed, pursed-lips performance. He embodies the banality of evil while making Leland the furthest thing from banal.
