Hawk Ripjaw
The following recap contains spoilers for Evil S4E3 “How to Slaughter a Pig” (Directed by Yap Fong Yee and written by Dewayne Darian Jones).
Evil S4E3, “How to Slaughter a Pig,” opens with David (Mike Colter) back at last week’s weird facility. Father Dominic (Chukwudi Iwuji) enters the room, and it indeed seems that LeConte, sadly, and hopefully just for now, is out of the picture. David opens an envelope, containing coordinates to a “situation” the Church is seeking a window into, and David is that window. Father Dominic draws a line on the floor, in an exercise called “Stepping into the target,” stating that the mind is stimulated once the body steps over a threshold. The fates of eight Christian missionaries hinge on this exercise working. Once David steps over the line, however, he sees nothing.
Kristen (Katja Herbers), David, and Ben (Aasif Mandvi) have been assigned to investigate a pig farm which may be producing “possessed pork.” People consuming pork products originating from the farm have exhibited violent behavior, although this could, according to Kristen, also just be the newest online “challenge” trend.
At the farm, the trio meet Chet (Tony Plana), his son Anthony (Joshua de Jesus), and a lot of aggressive, squealing pigs. Kristen accidentally slices her leg on the pen door, something that causes the pigs to become even more manic. Adding to the drama, the farm’s neighbor has been monitoring both farms with drones because the pigs have been burrowing under the fence. At night, Anthony has been seen sprinting on all fours across the farm. The only slight resolution we get for this is Anthony visiting the Trio of God, a hack group of “exorcists” to which David has an extreme aversion.
It’s been a while since we’ve had a real, meaty Kurt Alert, so it was a welcome return this week. In a therapy session between Kristen and Dr. Kurt (Kurt Fuller), the (hopefully, but also kind of hopefully not, for the content) well-intentioned therapist apologizes to Kristen for his past behavior, explaining to Kristen that he was seeing someone—Leland (Michael Emerson)—about his back pain, and experiencing hallucinations from the medication given.
To his credit, Dr. Kurt seems to be invested in helping Kristen, as he encourages her to return to weekly sessions and throws out all of his weird stuff he was using to write his nonsense book after Kristen leaves, although his enthusiasm to continue their sessions could be either genuine care or malevolence. I’m trending towards the former, but Dr. Kurt has been one of the most excitingly unpredictable characters on the show. And if you’ve been reading my recaps for long enough you know that I have a fantastic track record for being wrong with my Evil predictions, so who actually knows what this will lead to. What we do learn is that Dr. Kurt’s receptionist is aligned with Leland, calling him to tell him that Kurt threw out the paraphernalia.
Ben has been taking Ziprasidone and recording himself to see to what degree he sees his djinn and whether he can stop it altogether. I love that Ben’s first instinct from the beginning has been to use science to banish his djinn. He’s still got the banners up, using them in conjunction with the antipsychotics to measure where and how clearly he sees the djinn.
Praying in his quarters, David once again sees the angel that gave him the 38 days warning, but also sees the Ethiopian flag and the bodies of multiple people, presumably from the situation Father Dominic spoke of. Meeting with Father Dominic later, David mentions his vision, and how he was filled with hatred upon seeing them. Father Dominc makes the Sign of the Cross and, knowing exactly what David was seeing, refers to the vision as PSI: Perfect Sight Illusion, and that the vision was of the barracks of a general, and that David became him during that vision, and only through this can they save those eight priests. A frustrated David tells Father Dominic that he sees visions of Hell and the apocalypse, and they’re just that and can’t depend on them. “They are if they’re all I’ve got!” a desperate Father Dominic says as David leaves.
Sheryl (Christine Lahti) is having a little pow-wow with the other women of the office, highlighting their successes and calling out the pregnant Leslie (Molly Brown), the surrogate mother for Leland and Kristen’s child, in particular for carrying the Antichrist. Sheryl is finally making some definitive moves towards taking down Leland after her vow to do so at the end of last week’s episode, but Sheryl is such an unpredictable character that there’s no telling what she’ll be doing in the coming weeks.
Suddenly, Leslie’s water breaks, and she is whisked to DF’s private facility, where Sheryl and Leslie notice some…concerning movement coming from her abdomen, something pushing up against her skin. Sheryl screams for a nurse, and—OH SH*T IT’S NURSE BLOCH (Tara Summers)! Nurse Bloch returns from the first season, in which she tormented David with drugs during a nightmarish extended stay in the hospital (one of my favorite arcs in the show). This woman is big-time trouble, and whenever she’s on-screen it’s time to start sweating for the well-being of anyone under her care. Nurse Bloch injects something into Leslie’s IV, sedating her almost immediately.
Waking up later, Leslie overhears Leland and Nurse Bloch talking. We don’t hear specifically what they say, but Leslie’s eyes widen in horror and she quickly feigns sleep as the curtain is pulled back. Sheryl emerges from the bathroom, and Leland and Nurse Bloch are suddenly gone. A frightened Leslie tells Sheryl that Leland and Nurse Bloch are going to kill her and use her as food for the Antichrist. When Sheryl confronts Bloch about this, the nurse doesn’t deny that she and Leland spoke, but of course brushes off the claim that they’re going to feed Leslie to the Antichrist. God, I hate Nurse Bloch and her creepy fake smile and stupid squeaky sneakers so much!
Leland, visiting Leslie, confirms that what Leslie overheard was true, but clarifies that it is the biological mother, Kristen, that will be source of food for the Antichrist, and he needs Leslie’s help. Leland is pulled away by Nurse Bloch, and after another quiet conversation, they both turn to smile at Leslie. That’s enough for Leslie to make a panicked call to Kristen after escaping from the facility, still believing that Leland and Nurse Bloch plan to kill her. It’s the Nurse Bloch name drop that finally causes Kristen to go to Leslie, and Leslie is finally, mercifully taken to an actual hospital to deliver the child.
In the delivery room, a terrified Leslie begs Kristen to stay with her, and despite wanting nothing to do with it and standing in the doorway for a beat, Kristen finally moves to Leslie’s side and coaches her through the birthing process. It’s an intense scene, made more so by a brief moment in which we’re led to believe in a stillbirth, but finally the baby starts crying. And then he won’t stop crying, until a reluctant Kristen picks him up, at which point he immediately stops. Is this because Kristen has mothered four children and knows what she’s doing, or because she’s the biological mother of this Antichrist?
In the car, Kristen and David argue about their respective truths. David is sticking to his guns on the spiritual side, and Kristen is sticking to hers on how things have gotten better for her since she stopped taking her kids to Mass. Things are starting to get heated until Ben interjects that he’s been seeing a djinn. David in turns admits that the Entity is back in his life, experimenting with remote viewing, and he’s been seeing visions of the slaughtered and feeling the emotions of the dictator and channeling that anger and hatred. Ben leans forward. “We are three f*cked up people,” he says. But that’s why we love them! Kristen demands that David pull over, because they all need to hug. They do, and it’s a nice little moment to dispel the tension of Kristen and David’s bickering, as well as reminder of how much these three profoundly different human beings love each other.
It turns out that the pigs’ aggressive behavior is due to “feedback,” or feeding the remains of dead pigs to the living ones. I don’t know if that necessarily explains the mutant/demonic-looking pig that nearly killed Ben when he investigated the field towards the end of the episode, but it’s enough for Ben and David to no longer want anything to do with the farm. They also rip up the nondisclosure agreements handed to them at the conclusion of their investigation.
“How to Slaughter a Pig” really checked all of the Evil boxes for me this week: a good mystery, some good lore, a little spooky, a little campy, and some sweetness. As much as I love to hate her, I also really enjoyed seeing Nurse Bloch again and I hope that points to some additional threads being connected and past characters returning in the coming weeks. Season 4 really seems to be heating up in a serious way, and I am really looking forward to what happens next.
