Evil Series Finale Recap: Did #TeamGood Prevail? — Plus, Grade It!
Don’t cry because Evil is over. Smile with a mouthful of supernaturally sharp baby teeth because it happened.
The day we’ve been dreading is here, Evil fans: the Paramount+ series’ finale. The hour answers the show’s two biggest looming questions: Can The 60 be stopped? And what will become of our favorite assessors now that the Church has shut them down?
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The short answers: No, and they’re gonna be fine.
Want more detail? Read on for the highlights of “Fear of the End.” Then make sure to check out our post-episode chat with series creators Robert and Michelle King.
MOVING ON | At the top of the hour, #TeamGood is getting acclimated to their post-assessing lives. Kristen is seeing patients in her newly painted garage/office. Ben, in a suit and no tinfoil, gets acclimated at his high-paying tech gig. When he pulls open the top desk drawer in his very sterile cubicle, someone has scratched a message into the pressboard: “RUN.” And David is about to leave his now-empty room when Demon Kristen, wearing her Catholic schoolgirl outfit and pigtails, begs him to take her with him. He gently cups her face and tells her no, then extricates himself when she holds onto his leg and cries.
He heads to the shadowy dome of shadowiness, where Giovanna Di Vita says that the info he snatched from Leland’s phone has proven very helpful: They’re about to close in on The 60. “You’re killing them,” David says. “Not everything is so melodramatic, David,” the other priest replies… before explaining that the meeting will include a black Mass that will sacrifice a young woman, and they need to stop it. Oh, and Leland is going to attack one of the assessors before the ceremony. Then Father Di Vita has the gall to look surprised when David takes off after hearing that last bit.
THIS DAMSEL IS NOT IN DISTRESS | David and Ben both converge on Kristen’s place, where they find that Leland has, indeed, made contact… and is out cold on the floor of her office after she tazed him multiple times. She explains that Leland pretended to be a patient to gain access, then invited her to come meet The 60 the next evening. As she calmly called 911 to report his violating of the order of protection she filed, she zapped him.
David hauls an unconscious Leland back to his apartment, where the highly disturbing painting on Leland’s wall makes it look as though the black Mass is going to take place at the church and sacrifice Kristen. David shares that info with The Entity but isn’t inclined to submit to their request that he turn over all of the assessor program’s notes. In fact, he, Ben and Kristen burn them in a bonfire in her backyard that evening. Cannibal medical student! Ghost truckers! Demonic elevator! The Christmas song! It’s all there.
After the files are burned — and the assessors, who’ve been drinking, are toasty — they get all snuggly and talk about how they’ve affected each other’s lives. “I think I’m more humbled by other’s people knowledge now,” Kristen says to Ben. Then she asks David how she and Ben have made an impact on him. “I don’t have many friends. I haven’t, up ‘til now, had friends that I could talk to about things. Deeper things,” he says. Kristen nods. “Nobody talks like that anymore, about real things,” she agrees, noting that she talks about reverence more in therapy these days. “You’ve ruined me,” she jokes. David stretches out his arm so he’s hugging them both, and the sweetness of this scene makes me ridiculously happy.
PLAY EVIL GAMES, YOU WIN EVIL PRIZES | Meanwhile, upstairs, Kristen’s daughters find the VR goggles from Season 1’s “Rose398” episode in the back of their mom’s closet. They download the latest update, then Lilah and Lynn put the headsets on to play a game called Mother Midnight that is supposed to reveal players’ fates. The sisters are bored, until a creepy hand grabs Lynn’s shoulder, and then things get really weird.
The girls crawl through the closet until they wind up in a space that looks like their living room, where David, Kristen and Ben are talking. As the girls watch, Leland sneaks in through the kitchen, brandishing a climbing ax. Lynn and Lilah scream, but the adults don’t hear them. And so they’re powerless to stop Leland from burying the ax in the back of Kristen’s head.
THE ADULTS’ TURN | The girls’ screams bring (the real) Kristen, Ben and David running in from the backyard. As Kristen simultaneously admonishes her daughters for digging the goggles out and comforts them that she’s actually not dead, Ben sees 24-hour countdown clock ticking away in the visors. So the adults all don the apparatus and sit crosslegged in the closet, feeling vaguely dumb but wanting to check it out for themselves.
Ben gets sucked in first, winding up in a hospital room where Karima is dying and demanding that he engage with her about whether or not Allah is real. “You’re right,” she says feebly, “there’s nothing.” Then she dies, and he sobs as he hugs her.
Kristen’s goggle nightmare is that she’s being reviewed, by a team led by Dr. Boggs, for being an unfit parent. When Boggs finds that she isn’t a good mother, Kristen screams in horror as Child Protective Services agents remove her kids from the house.
Onto David’s Mother Midnight-induced hallucination! He hears a thudding and finds Sister Andrea braced against a wall. They don’t know what’s knocking about inside, but it can’t be good. When it breaks through, knocking them down, we see that it’s the demon version of Henry Stick, and it bites into David’s neck. As he bleeds out, Leland appears to mock David for believing in an afterlife. “You were a fool, David,” Leland says, laughing about the “false hope” into which the priest bought.
In the closet, David rips off the headset at the exact moment that Ben and Kristen do. “That was not a game,” Kristen says, gasping. “I don’t know what that was, but that was not a game.”
Over tequila downstairs, Ben searches online to find that the game is in beta, but that’s about all he can suss out. Also: The countdown clock is still going. But the most disturbing? A horde of goggle-wearers has gathered outside, and they’re peering in the windows.
GET OUT! | The assessors run outside and chase them away, but one guy makes his way into the kitchen before David can tackle him. He knows the layout of the house, he tells them, because the game has showed him. The game also has shown him his daughter’s death — but if he can get into the heart of the home, the distraught man says, he can stop it. We learn that Kristen’s address is listed on Reddit as a haunted house “with a tunnel to Hell in the basement,” per the guy, and he’ll do anything to get downstairs. After they’ve kicked him out and called the police, they realize that the app has photorealistic reproductions of Kristen’s house because the girls inadvertently mapped it when they used the Demon Finder app.
Ben finds a cerebral path — similar to the one Prof. Johan Taupin had in the previous episode, though not subcutaneous — in the VR goggles; the device allows the game to tap into players’ brains. He also learns that DF Industries is behind the Demon Tracker app. There are a few more steps in between, but eventually the trio realizes that the sigil map looks a lot like a cross-section of the mind. “Why go to the trouble of tempting when you an upload despair right into the brain?” David wonders.
MASS-IVE FAIL | As Sister Andrea is cleaning the deconsecrated church, she overhears Leland and Stick talking to a party planner (ha!) about what they’ll need for the black Mass. Also in the room: Vatican operatives, disguised as workers for Merry Time events company. The 60 are “not as obvious as you think. You have this wrong,” Sister Andrea tells Father Di Vita when she finds him in an unmarked, surveillance van outside. He thanks her, then dismisses her.
The nun calls David with her suspicions: The demons all have left the building, she tells him, which makes her suspect that The 60 are planning a meet-up elsewhere. David calls Father Di Vita just as his team is about to descend upon the infernal meeting. David hurriedly tells him that The 60 wanted him to see the church in the painting and wanted him to clone Leland’s phone: “You’re being set up!” But Di Vita ignores him… only to have his team storm in and find an actress chained to the altar. Yep, this whole thing is a charade.
The woman hands the priest a note that reads: “Meet the evil coming to New York: You.” Then some poisonous smoke billows from various cauldrons, and the Catholic team hustles out of the sanctuary (but leaves the actress there? Rude.) David arrives to find a bunch of the team killed. He drags Father Di Vita outside, where the priest gasps, “We’re dead.”
‘YOU’RE ON MUTE’ | Turns out, the real meeting of The 60 is taking place at the most hellish spot of all: Zoom. Leland and Stick gloat about the technology Ben discovered, as well as the deaths of 18 Entity workers. But a member of The 60 known as Gray, who doesn’t have his camera on, demands to know when Kristen and her son will be killed — as they were promised. So Leland improvises and says it’s happening that evening.
David tries to make Father Di Vita see that the new evil is systemic. Also: He doesn’t want to be part of The Entity. “Every time I help you, I feel less godly,” he says. “It’s eating away at me.” Instead, he wants to run the assessor program again.
Father Acosta pitches the idea to Kristen and Ben — but they’d have to relocate to Rome. Kristen brings up how she’s got five kids. Ben brings up how he makes a ton more now. David gives Kristen puppy-dog eyes and makes his voice all soft as he talks about doing the job for six months, then making up her mind. “David, I’m sorry. I need a normal life,” she says, turning him down.
That night, though, she logs into Find My Doppel to see what her double is up to. When she translates what the woman is saying in a video, it reads: “A risk not taken is a life not lived” and “Never give up a chance to f—k or travel.” She takes a deep breath, then says, “OK” to herself.
THE FINAL SHOWDOWN | Downstairs, Leland breaks into the house by busting through the brick wall in the basement from the other side.He puts airpods in his ears to listen to Roger Miller’s “Dang Me,” carrying a dagger as he makes his way upstairs to Kristen’s bedroom.
It looks like Kristen is in the shower as he approaches, but she’s actually behind him with rope in her hands. She uses the element of surprise to get the cord around his neck, pulling with all her might as they fall to the ground. She grips him as tight as she can, her legs locking around his middle, and she doesn’t let up until Ben and David suddenly appear, telling her she can let go.
In the girls’ visors, the clock ticks down to zero, then a commercial for the subscription service to go with the visor appears. “It was just a stupid ad,” Lynn says incredulously. “I know,” Lilah responds. Then: “Do you have Mom’s credit card number?”
SHHHH FOREVER | Leland’s not dead, and a spent Kristen wearily notes that he’ll just come back. “Let us take care of it,” Ben whispers. “But our way,” David qualifies, “not his.” So they drag him to the silent retreat upstate and stuff him in the demonic cabinet, which — like the TARDIS — must be a lot bigger on the inside. The best part of this scene, by the way? Fenna the Delightful Young Nun swings by to bump shoulders with Kristen as David hugs Sister Andrea goodbye.
ARRIVEDERCI! | Then, we move forward a bit in time. Kristen and the girls call Ben from Italy. As he rolls up the anti-djinn backdrop in his apartment, they talk about how he’ll come visit soon. Then she hangs up and sends the girls home so she can get back to work. As Kristen glances at Timothy in his stroller, his eyes get all white and demonic. Then he grins a smile full of evil-looking, sharp teeth. David meets her and, off her perplexed look, asks if anything is wrong. She smiles, pops a pacifier in the kid’s mouth as she says everything’s great, and they stroll together in Vatican City.
Now it’s your turn. What did you think of the final Evil ever? Grade it — and the season as a whole — via the polls below, then hit the comments with your thoughts!
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