‘Evil’ Season 4 Review: There’s No Stopping This Weird, Amazing Show
There’s never been a show like Evil before, and when the Paramount+ horror series bows out this year, it’ll leave a distinctive mark on the TV landscape that may well never be replicated again. That’s fitting, as the show’s latest episodes seem to be obsessed with the haunting, uncanny marks we leave and that are left on us. It features mysterious injection bruises, images burned into retinas, claw marks on the ground from some unseen beast, and even a gaping hole in the side of one character. As always, the show is clever, strange, scary, and darkly funny in its assessment of the horror-filled present moment.
Like Robert and Michelle King’s surreal law firm show The Good Fight, Evil has always been a story that makes more emotional and ethical sense than literal sense. That’s truer than ever in the fourth season, which finally pulls some long-running story threads together but refuses to assemble its many timely themes and ideas into anything resembling a single unified thesis. In a show this bold and offbeat, that’s a good thing. At one point in the new episodes, previously skeptical supernatural investigator Dr. Kristen Bouchard (Katja Herbers) admits that she got a lot happier when she stopped worrying about whether or not God and demons were real. You could say the same about watching the show: Evil has always rocked, but it’s even better when you relax into its surreality, and let every weird thing it tries to wash over you like water (or blood).
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And Evil tries—and pulls off—a lot of weird stuff with its last hoorah. The four episodes available for review (the season will have fourteen) continue brewing up an intriguing, conspiratorial, off-the-wall story. Satan’s minion Leland (Michael Emerson) and Kristen’s mother Sheryl (Christine Lahti) are still planning to birth the Antichrist using Kristen’s frozen eggs, while Kristen’s husband Andy (Patrick Brammell), has miraculously returned to the family after being kidnapped, brainwashed, and presumed dead on a hiking trip. Meanwhile, newly ordained priest David (Mike Colter) is still embroiled in some top-secret metaphysical hijinks, true skeptic Ben (Aasif Mandvi) is busy denying his own supernatural experiences, and nun Andrea (Andrea Martin) continues to beat the snot out of invisible demons with everyday household items.
On a filmmaking level, Evil continues to impress. The show packs a lot of visual cleverness into its procedural storylines, making great use of frame space and editing to bring its more surreal elements to life. When it does show off its monsters, they’re always totally unique and darkly hilarious, as are its incredible, ever-changing title screens. The cast, too, continues to stun. Martin gets lots of deserved credit for her turn as unapologetically wacky Sister Andrea, but Mandvi is the show’s secret weapon. Ben’s plotlines often seem slighter than other characters, but the actor grounds them with his always-great performance. Herbers also continues to stun. She makes Kristen feel like a real person, with a performance so precise and lived-in that by now, we often understand everything we need to about a scene simply by looking at her eyes.
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After an especially enigmatic third season, the Evil writers’ room works deftly in these new episodes to streamline the show’s more enjoyably muddled elements. Plots that were confusing or hazy before are now pared down or explained away, while a specific endgame—the possible end of the world—adds structure to the show’s semi-case of the week format. The first four episodes of the season see Kristen, David, and Ben investigate possessed pork chops, rogue robot dogs, and a controversial particle accelerator around which much of the season’s uncanny activity seems poised to coalesce. Yet importantly, for all its narrative tidying, Evil never lets go of its central ambiguity.
Some of the best moments in Evil are also the most jarring and disorienting. Viewers are often shown a plotline from its most terrifying angle first, only for a later perspective shift to suddenly reveal the scary thing as a potential trick of the light, hallucination, or human manipulation. Sometimes it also does the opposite. The show often brushes up against the borders of magical realism, but it’s also about personal demons in a very literal way. Characters are haunted by their own experiences of reality, which turn out to be much more malleable than they, as rational people, are comfortable with accepting.
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Still, the show rarely goes full dark. There’s a lot of humor in the juxtaposition between its creative horror elements and the people whose everyday lives must continue despite them. Evil subscribes to the universal truth that once you talk about your nightmares out loud, they start to seem funny.
Premiering in 2019, Evil was born into a world of insidious misinformation, tech dependency, institutionalized racism, and seemingly near-constant societal collapse. The show doesn’t just comment on these things, but makes itself about them at every possible opportunity. Every season, literal forces of evil attempt to infiltrate Kristen’s home and get to her daughters, usually in the form of web games, Tiktok trends, and other cutting-edge technology. The daughters, capable Zoomers and Gen Alpha kids that they are, drive out the bad guys with no problem. But they simply keep coming again and again, popping up in new forms and at astonishing speeds like so many bots or deepfakes. There’s no respite from the show’s deeply modern vision of evil, nor any single, cohesive explanation for it. Like many of the problems facing us today, it can’t be outpaced. That, more than anything else in the show, is truly scary.
Summary
The last season of Evil is clever, strange, scary, and darkly funny in its assessment of the horror-filled present moment.
Categorized:Reviews Television
