Hawk Ripjaw
The following recap contains spoilers for Evil S4E13 “Fear of the Unholy” (directed by John Dahl and written by Aurin Squire & Sarah Acosta).
Evil S4E13, “Fear of the Unholy,” opens with David speaking at the final Mass at his church, where he announces the building’s imminent deconsecration and sale. He steps behind the altar, and finds a note directing him to go to the “sacred place” at 8PM.
Father Rodrigo Katagas (Anthony DeSando) has one final case for our heroes, involving Professor Johann Taupin (John Christopher Jones), whose expertise the Vatican hopes to utilizes in the Pontificia Accademia delle Scienze, the Vatican’s scientific council. Taupin is a wheelchair-bound Stephen Hawking insert who uses an electronic voice box to communicate. They are tasked with ensuring that Taupin has no ties with the occult.
Neil (Christian Borle), Taupin’s private secretary, immediately comes across as slimy. From the way he steps in front of Kristen, David, and Ben, to how he almost derisively calls them “The Church people,” I don’t like the guy at all. He also refuses to even look Kristen in the eye, something she picks up on immediately. Kristen also doesn’t take well to Professor Taupin. He refers to her psychology profession as “soft science” and, more troublingly, makes sexual comments at her.
After storming into the room with the Five, graduate students that work with the Professor, Kristen notes there are only four of them, all males. The fifth is a female grad student, Beverly (Sarah Lyddan), in her own tiny closet-sized office, who also notes that Taupin makes sexual comments about female colleagues and students. She glances at a crucifix hanging on her wall before telling Kristen that if she were Vaitcan, she wouldn’t let Taupin anywhere near the committee.
Following the deconsecration of the church, the Archbishop (Paul Guilfoyle) attempts to recover the relic, a fragment of a saint’s thigh bone, but doesn’t find it. He shrugs, not seeming to care, and exits. Sister Andrea immediately begins to see spirits around the worship space: twerking on statues, pole dancing on chandelier chains, and urinating and fornicating on the pews. Sister Andrea insists that the relic cannot be left here, and must be found.
Going to the sacred place, David finds not Victor LeConte or Father Dominic, but a new handler, Giovanni De Vita (Denis O’Hare), of Vatican security. When David asks where LeConte and Father Dominic are, he’s told they’ve been reassigned, but Giovanni later admits that LeConte has passed away. Giovanni gets David to admit that he’s angry with the Church, but calls out David’s “traitorous acts,” calling in the blind (?) Father Augusta (Paco Lozano) for an interrogation.
The interrogation scene involves David and Father Augusta holding onto a glass of water, and David’s answers to the questions being met with the Father holding his hand in a certain way to indicate a truth or falsehood. There are a number of questions, but the most important one comes at the end of the scene: would David lie for Kristen Bouchard? After hesitation, David answers in the affirmative.
Ben is sitting at home, listening to music and working on his computer with his literal tinfoil hat on, when he receives a call from Professor Taupin. The Professor tells Ben that there is something in the room with him, something that he can feel and see. Taupin’s voice then turns demonic, growling, “It’s inside me.” Despite the tinfoil, Ben’s djinn finally breaks through the line of defense, clutching his head from behind as a pipe organ plays and the title card flashes across the screen.
Father Ignatius (Wallace Shawn) is awoken late at night by a loud booming sound coming from somewhere in the church. It turns out to be Sister Andrea, who is taking a hammer and crowbar to the walls behind the worship space and insists that the archives place the relic behind the wall. Surprisingly, after brief indignation, Father Ignatius is game to help her. He reaches into the newly-created hole and, despite being bitten by a rat in the walls, recovers the reliquary. Unfortunately, there is no relic inside. “I guess the rat got it,” Father Ignatius laments. I will never stop loving Wallace Shawn and the way he delivers lines.
Is it at all surprising that Leland (Michael Emerson) would listen to Roger Miller’s “Do-Wacka-Do?” It’s what’s playing in his apartment when David breaks in and sees a painting covered by a tarp, which he removes. This painting, given the red hue it reflects off of David’s face, is the same painting suggested at the end of S4E8 “How to Save a Life” when the baby Antichrist was in the manger. The painting is one of apocalyptic war, fire and destruction—a goat demon ripping apart a screaming woman; bodies hanging from power lines; and at the center, the face of a woman with her eyes closed. As David looks closer, the face’s eyes suddenly spring open. David is initially shocked, but quickly recovers and hides when he hears Leland coming in.
Leland’s singing along to Roger Miller is quickly interrupted by a surprise, violent gut shot from the beefcake priest, sending the man to the floor gasping for breath, and once again it is wonderful to see the architect of so much pain for David, Kristen and others be in a position of vulnerability. “Take your time,” David says casually. “It’ll take a minute.” He asks Leland if his “billionaire friend” got him this new apartment, and Leland nods before telling David, “People are coming here.” David then comments on the painting, to which Leland responds, “You shouldn’t have looked.”
David asks Leland why he left the Entity, and Leland gets over the initial surprise of David knowing this before explaining that in learning to remote view, he stepped into “the worst of the worst” for the Church, and left because the Church was no better than the horrible people he was stepping into. David asks why Leland didn’t just leave the Church, but joined the opposition. Leland states that he believes in the “Great Unseeable Truth,” as does David, something beyond the material world, a cross they both bear. “You don’t bear sh*t,” David says. “You chose evil.” Leland responds there is no evil, but there is free will: the only gift God gives amidst the suffering, uncertainty, and death, and Leland has used that free will to cause strife and misery because it amuses him.
Leland then states that when they remote viewed into each other, they left traces of each other behind: David now has some of Leland’s wickedness, and Leland now has some of David’s virtue. David immediately refutes this, but Leland’s next words make me feel like he may be telling the truth: he asks David why the Church was so against David remote viewing into him. He says that they were afraid of David learning the same things Leland does. In one of the best moments of the episode, the moment where we realize that Leland is indeed speaking the truth, he mentions the “Vatican lie detector test, some a**hole monk”—the very test David was subjected to earlier in the episode. And we see the realization on David’s face that the villain is finally being absolutely frank with him. David, Leland says, is marked by the Entity; if they can’t trust him, they’ll get rid of him. Leland lets this revelation sit for a second before starting to softly sing “Do-Wacka-Do” again.
Maybe there is some truth to Leland’s assertion that he and David now share some pieces of each other, or maybe it’s just a repressed part of Leland himself. Watching an adorable video of two dogs hugging with an emotional song, Leland catches himself getting emotional. He quickly redirects by clicking into a video of a street fight. Michael Emerson truly is one of the most entertaining actors of our time.
When David brings his concern that he may now have part of Leland in him to Sister Andrea, the Sister tells him that if that is the case, faith is the only cure. David says that sometimes, he gets sick of faith, and turns to leave. Sister Andrea notices a spot of blood on the back of his sweater, and instructs him to lift it up. There, Sister Andrea finds a demonic slug latched on his lower back. After removing it, she refers to it as “sin” and crushes it beneath her shoe, though of course David cannot see the demon.
Following this, David has an idea, and has Sister Andrea join them when they next meet Taupin and Neil. Unfortunately, Sister Andrea is unable to detect any demonic presence on Taupin. However, when Neil turns his head, Sister Andrea spots a seam on the back of his neck. She reaches for it and pulls, revealing a scaly dermis, and Neil snarls and snaps at her. Sister Andrea quickly retreats and chalks it up to tucking Neil’s clothing label back in.
Sister Andrea goes to the kitchen to grab a knife, and hides. Neil follows her and the Sister catches him by surprise, slashing at his face and tripping him. Their fight scene is interrupted by Ben calling for help, as Taupin has begun bleeding from his eye, nose and mouth. At the hospital, Neil painfully staples his cheek back together and dons a face mask just in time to tell the doctors that Taupin cannot have an MRI because of a microchip implant that allows him to use his voice box. The team surmises that his erratic behavior, and the bleeding, could be the source. Ben visits Taupin, who is unconcerned that the implant could be killing him, as his death results in his knowledge being uploaded to the cloud. He’ll live forever there, making Heaven “irrelevant.”
Father Ignatius is once again awoken from slumber by a booming noise. He goes downstairs to find Sister Andrea listening closely at a wall, sans hammer. She has him help her move an armoire, behind which is a large hole. Sister Andrea has him sit down in a chair with a bowl of candy as “bait.” Before she climbs in, Father Ignatius asks her if she really believes she sees demons. She responds confidently in the affirmative, but admits she has never seen God. Ignatius asks if there’s a chace that there is only evil, with no good, citing the fact that while the Sister can see evil, she’s never seen God. He goes on to admit that he’s never seen either, and doesn’t even know what to think: he’s a priest at the behest of his parents. He also mentions that churchgoing has fallen off sharply, nonbelievers comprise the majority of the population, and you can’t talk to anyone about God without being seen as a fool.
One of the most profound conversations in the show is interrupted by a demon emerging from the hole. Sister Andrea pins its hand down with a kitchen knife and begins to interrogate it, while Father Ignatius just sees Sister Andrea plunging a knife into the floor and talking to no one. Later, in her room, the Sister continues to question the demon, who reveals that he ate the relic. No problem: Sister Andrea carves the demon open, finally retrieving the relic, which dazzlingly glistens in a way that reminded me of Indiana Jones.
David once again visits Leland in the middle of him requesting a room for 60 people. When David asks him why he thinks the Entity is worse than the opposition, Leland immediately assumes that his handlers have been disappearing. LeConte is dead, Father Dominic has been reassigned—how, Leland asks, does David think the Church maintains its mysteries? David ignores a message from Kristen and sets his phone on the desk next to Leland’s. Leland asks if David has met Giovanni yet, tells him he’ll need protection, and asks David what he really wants. David asks for Kristen’s safety from Leland, forever. In return, Leland wants David to leave the priesthood. He extends his hand for David to shake, but David refuses, picking his phone back up and leaving.
During the conversation, David cloned Leland’s phone and got all of the information the Vatican was looking for: the names of the 60, as well as the date, time, and location of their meeting. David finally tenders his resignation with the Entity, until Giovanni informs him that his reassignment has come through: Vatican security, in Rome. Kristen is understandably flustered and visibly distraught when David shares this, and is later seen reading a book called Surviving Separation.
Sister Andrea joins David in the church, before it gets fully gutted of its artwork and furniture in the next couple of days. She instructs David to go to Confession after each time he assists the Entity, and tells him to not let them pervert his gifts. When he asks her how she knows he was helping them, she tells him to stand up, and cuts yet another, much larger, sin slug off of his back. “I’m not going to be here with you David…this thing gets bigger and bigger with every infraction.”
With one week left until the series finale (unless all of us Evil fans crossing fingers we didn’t even know we had hoping for someone else to pick it up get our wish), “Fear of the Unholy” made some big moves towards tying up some of the bigger character arcs the series has been building towards. I’m not confident we’ll get all of the answers we wanted, but hopefully the ones we get are satisfying. I’m confident that they will be, but either way I’ll see you next week as it all comes to a close.
Evil streams Thursdays on Paramount+.
