Evil: Fear of the End

“Actually kind of satisfying.”

Well, it ended. Not with a bang or a whimper, but with some cool Italian sunglasses and just enough possibility for the future that I’m going to hang onto hope. “Despair is Satan’s masterpiece,” after all.

I didn’t expect this episode to provide a climactic end to four seasons of demonic activity, and it didn’t. We did get some closure on the idea of the sixty demonic families: they’re moving into the digital realm, using apps to sow discord and strife and evil.

That the sigil map of the sixty families maps onto the regions of the human brain was…okay, I’ll admit, it’s the sort of pat answer that I find deeply unsatisfying. Especially because it’s not really an answer. It’s one more layer of meaning to the map, not an explanation of, for instance, how demons work or the nature of evil or the possibility of good winning out. It’s a graphic-overlay imitation of an answer.

But I’m not mad, because my expectations for plot closure were not high. This season never seemed headed toward a real end, and I like to think this isn’t the real end. Also, the Kings are great at many things, but they’re not genre people. They do legal dramas, with great, complicated characters, that demonstrate a willingness to focus on timely issues. They don’t seem to have a science-fiction/fantasy fan’s need for complex lore and systematic closure.

The best parts of the episode gave me what I needed. Kristen was willing to kill Leland, but her friends stopped her. He’s now in that demon cabinet from that silent monastery (“S is for Silence”), where Sister Andrea lives. (She’s making friends with Fenna from that same episode.) It’s a perfect resolution to the problem of Leland. If the show gets renewed, he can come back. And Kristen won’t have another murder on her conscience.

The last scene was pleasing. Although Ben is still in New York, he knows that he is loved. David and Kristen are now assessors in Rome. The girls have amazing Italian schoolgirl uniforms. David wasn’t wearing a clerical collar, which is either meaningless or meaningful. (Another example of leaving open some windows of possibility.) Baby Timothy just might be evil again, and of course Kristen isn’t mentioning it, because this show thrives on a lack of disclosure.

At the fireside scene, after a quick review of past cases, David said that he doesn’t have many friends: “Not many that I can talk to about things. Deeper things. Death.” Kristen responds: “I understand what you’re saying. Nobody talks like that anymore. About…real things. It’s all about, you know, influencers and TV.”

Kristen, Ben, and David have spent some time talking—theorizing, perhaps—the deeper things, but they’ve also spent the past four seasons caught up in life’s minutiae to the point that they’ve missed some crucial opportunities to understand the demonic world. (And/or the multiverse theory, which hasn’t actually been disproved, right?) But maybe that’s the point: we’re all distracted all the time, both by demonic apps and just regular life. It’s hard to see a bigger picture when you’re living in the middle of it.

The Mother Midnight goggles that pretended to show the future did a good job of helping us realize where our characters were and where they needed to go. David wanted to feel like he was saving the world from demons. Kristen worried about her parenting skills. And Ben needed to be there for his sister.

By the end of the episode, they’ve all resolved those issues. The goggles help explain why Ben couldn’t go to Rome. Why David wanted to continue the assessor program. (I think it matters that neither David nor Kristen had fears about each other.) And why Kristen needed to, somehow, recalibrate her relationship with her girls.

This episode did leave many questions unanswered. A few that occur to me: Did the screaming actress die? What’s up with Ben’s djinn? Why doesn’t he need tinfoil anymore? Is there really a portal to hell that runs under the particle accelerator and past Kristen’s house? Did she have to disclose that when she sold her house? Do Italian schoolgirls really wear awesome hats? Will David still wear his phenomenal sweaters in Italy?

We may never get answers to those questions. We may never get resolution to the big horror-movie concepts even if the show gets picked up by another streaming service. But I’m glad we got what we did. Here’s hoping it’s more of an arrivederci than a ciao.

Things that Made Me Laugh:

• Katja Herbers’ physical comedy as David’s succubus.
• Kristen tazing Leland over and over.
• Sister Andrea booping the demon.
• The combover-lawyer-demon asking “What else is in a Black Mass?”
• Sister Andrea telling David people will trust him because he’s tall.
• Norm, the goat demon, struggling with Zoom. “No, you’re still muted.”

By the way, the AVClub has a great article on the practical effects behind the demon costumes.

Four out of four cubicle farms.

Josie Kafka is a full-time cat servant and part-time rogue demon hunter. (What's a rogue demon?)

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