Hawk Ripjaw
The following recap contains spoilers for Evil S4E14 “Fear of the End” (directed by Robert King and written by Rockne S. O’Bannon & Nialla LeBouef).
Here we are, my friends: the final episode in what has grown to be my favorite television series in recent memory. Evil has come to an end, and what an end it is. S4E14, “Fear of the End,” opens with Kristen (Katja Herbers) seeing patients in her newly renovated garage office, while Ben (Aasif Mandvi) gets acquainted with his own new office, with transparent glass cubicles and the word “RUN” disconcertingly carved into the inside of his desk drawer. David (Mike Colter), meanwhile, says one last prayer in his cleared-out living space. Before he can exit his room for the last time, Demon Kristen, still dressed in the schoolgirl outfit, begs him not to leave, screaming and holding onto his leg before he passes the threshold and closes the door, silencing her forever.
Giovanni (Denis O’Hare) informs David that The Entity determined where the 60 and Leland are going to gather, and they’re planning to make a move on them. He has intel that Leland will go after Ben or Kristen. Kristen’s last patient for the day is named Ernest Truman, but instead is revealed to be Leland (Michael Emerson). Kristen is having none of it, immediately calling 911 and reading off the restraining order she has on him. Leland, tenacious as ever, is unbothered by this, inviting Kristen to the meeting of the 60 the next night with the promise of leaving her alone forever, before Kristen hits him in the neck with her stun gun. Ben and David arrive to see Kristen patiently waiting with Leland at her feet, stunning him again every time he groggily wakes up. David easily loads him onto his shoulders to literally drop him off at his apartment.
Leland and Stick (John Carroll Lynch) are auditioning young women for how well they can scream. We get to see Jennifer (Emma Pvitzer Price)’s quite impressive scream, but Stick is unfazed. He finds all of this unnecessary, and tells Leland that he can’t keep protecting Kristen: she needs to be finished off so they can move onto the ne—”NEXT!” interrupts Leland, and in enters Sister Andrea (Andrea Martin). The Sister tells Leland she knows what they’re doing, and when Demon Stick (Fedor Steer) asks her how she found him, she coldly remarks that she just “followed the scent.” Sister Andrea looks downright tiny as Demon Stick stands up and attempts to intimidate her, but the Sister doesn’t even come close to flinching—on the contrary, she responds to his threats with a defiant and emasculating sarcastic “fear,” which leaves the demon stunned and speechless as Sister Andrea walks away.
Kristen, David and Ben make a night out of reminiscing about old cases before tossing the files into a bonfire. Later, they drink together in front of the bonfire. Kristen insists that her friends don’t need to stick around to protect her from Leland. David insists that he does, and Ben says he’s just there to drink. Kristen jokingly suggests that her canned margaritas influenced them to drink more, and, when asked by Ben how he influenced her, thinks for a moment before telling him that she’s now more humbled by other people’s knowledge. Kristen then asks David how she and Ben have impacted him, and David responds that he hasn’t, until now, had friends he can talk to about deeper things, before pulling them into a huge one-armed hug and telling them how much he’s going to miss them. Me too, David. Me too.
The Bouchard girls (Brooklyn Shuck, Skylar Grey, Maddy Crocco, and Dalya Knapp) manage to unearth the confiscated VR headsets from Kristen’s closet. Firing them up, they download an update and come across an app called “Mother Midnight,” which apparently will reveal the user’s future when they go into the closet. Lynn and Lila decide to venture into the closet. After reciting the phrase as instructed, a demonic hand reaches for Lynn, touching her before disappearing. The girls see a long hallway that has appeared in the closet, and decided to venture down it, grabbing a length of rope as a means of returning to safety. They emerge downstairs, seeing the core three talking. Behind them, Leland slowly sneaks up with a climbing axe raised. The girls try to warn their mother, but Leland buries the axe in Kristen’s head before turning on them. The girls, screaming, tumble out of the closet unharmed. Hearing the screaming, Kristen, David and Ben rush upstairs. Ben looks into the goggles and sees that a timer has started, counting down from 24 hours.
After the girls tell them that the Mother Midnight app reveals your fate, our trio decides to don the goggles themselves. Together, they say the trigger phrase, and Ben feels the demonic hand touch him and pull him towards the hallway in the closet. At the end, he sees the Bouchard daughters staring into their mother’s room, from which a bright light emits. Entering the room, he sees his sister, Karima (Sohina Sidhu), dying in a hospital bed. She begs him, a nonbeliever, to tell him where Allah is. She concedes that there’s nothing after death before flatlining.
Ben is weeping in his goggles, and next we see—which I now believe is the purpose of the Mother Midnight app—Kristen’s greatest fear. Dr. Kurt (Kurt Fuller) is orchestrating an intervention involving Kristen’s failure as a mother. She has no right being a mother, they say. Her sarcasm and treatment of her daughters as adults, Dr. Kurt says, have made her unfit to be a parent, and Kristen screams as her daughters are carried away by CPS.
Next, we get David’s experience in the goggles. He’s in the Bouchard home, hearing a banging coming from the basement. Sister Andrea is there, bracing herself against the newly sealed hole in the wall from “How to Survive a Storm.” The wall explodes, blowing both of them back, and Demon Stick steps out, bending down to take a bite out of David’s neck. As he bleeds out, Leland appears, leaning in to taunt David that he isn’t going to heaven—-that heaven doesn’t even exist. David manages to wrench himself free from the app and the goggles. As the trio try to parse out what exactly the f*ck is going on with this app and how it was able to generate a detailed, tangible render of the house, they look out of the back window to see several people wearing the same goggles looking in.
The three burst out of the back door, attempting to force the group away, but one of the intruders manages to get into the house before being tackled. He claims that he’s been in the house before in the game, and begs to go to the basement to save his daughter, mentioning the walled-off hole down there. They realize that the demon-tracking app that the girls use has been capturing interior footage of the house.
Back at Ben’s apartment, Ben has extracted the interface from the VR goggles that uses a less sophisticated form of the technology Taupin had in his brain from last week—works similarly, without an actual implant. And it’s been interfacing with the daughters’ demon tracking app released by, of course, DF. DF has used the data from the app to supply the Mother Midnight app with its data, which explains why the intruders came to the Bouchard house. Ben pulls up a map of the regions of the brain connected to the thalamus, with which the VR goggles interface. They then pull up the sigil map of the 60 they’ve been chasing this entire time, and realize that each of the 60 sigils correspond to one of the 60 regions of the brain. “Why go to the trouble of tempting when you can upload despair right to the brain?” asks David.
Leland and Stick walk through the newly-deconsecrated church as a site for their Black Mass, while the Entity’s agents listen in, preparing to move in on the 60. Also in the church is Sister Andrea, who is immediately doubtful. She goes to knock on the window of the conspicuous black fan sitting outside, and attempts to tell Giovanni that they’re wrong about the site for the Black Mass, but it falls on deaf ears. Instead, she calls David to warn him, just as Kristen and Ben wonder why there are these demonic houses when the Satan worshippers can just meet online.
Realizing that Sister Andrea is right, David speeds to the church, making a desperate call to Giovanni, but the Entity is already in place and moving in to exterminate the 60 that will not be there, having set a trap. They anticipated and wanted David to see the church in the painting and clone Leland’s phone, but Giovanni refuses to listen. Hearing Jennifer’s screams, the Entity rushes in, only to find a cathedral empty save for Jennifer, as noxious, deadly gas pours out of multiple cauldrons. Jennifer hands Giovanni a note reading “Meet the evil coming to New York…You,” and the remaining living members of the Entity flee as Jennifer begins singing “The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow” before a cut to black.
Stick and Leland celebrate the 18 of the Entity dead over a group call to the demonic houses, as well as the “new technology” heralding the evolution of the 60. “Still Families…in here,” Stick says, tapping his head. The 60 are planting Evil and despair right into the brain via the neural pathways. After the call, Stick turns to Leland. “No more f*cking around. You’ve been protecting Kristen for four years. It ends tonight.”
David arrives at the church just in time to drag a barely-alive Giovanni to safety. As Giovanni recovers with oxygen, David pushes back on the Entity’s war against the 60, telling him about their discovery of the 60 uploading to the brain. He doesn’t want to be part of the Entity, telling Giovanni that he feels less Godly every time he assists them. Giovanni asks David what he wants, and our priest shoots his shot, asking to run the assessor program. Giovanni scoffs, but relents. David can run the assessor program, but in Rome. Presented by this, Kristen and Ben both refuse. The Church can’t match Ben’s salary offer from his new job, and Kristen just wants a normal life. I love how the show keeps making cheeky parallels to being cancelled. David calls his friends effective. “Then why did they shut us down?” Kristen asks. “Because they don’t know what they’re doing!” David responds.
That night, Kristen checks her locks and checks in on the girls, who are all sleeping. After she leaves, the girls open their eyes, having faked slumber, and strap on the goggles. 15 minutes left on the timer. As Kristen watches her doppelganger, she translates the Dutch speaker to English to see that she’s saying, “A risk not taken is a life not lived.” The timer on the goggles counts down to zero, and it is revealed that the countdown was just for a free trial of the Mother Midnight app that DF is trying to use to infect its users’ minds.
Someone’s trying to break into the house, but the doors are locked. Down in the basement, the intruder pushes the bricks out of the covered hole in the wall—it’s Leland. Emerging from the hole, the villain pops in some earbuds to sing along to Roger Miller’s “Dang Me” to psych himself up, and climbs the stairs with a massive knife. He proceeds to Kristen’s room, and seeing the shower running, playfully calls out her name. But Kristen isn’t in the shower—she was hiding in the closet, and emerges with a length of the climbing rope between her hands. Throwing the rope around Leland’s neck, she tightens it and throws them both backwards onto the floor, tightening it around her enemy’s neck to strangle him. As she chokes the life out of Leland, David shows up, gently holding her arm. “Stop.” Ben appears as well. “We’re here.” Kristen begins crying as she loosens the rope. Leland doesn’t just get to leave, however; he gets stuffed into a bag, and, loudly protesting, put into the box in the monastery from “S is for Silence.” And Fenna (Alexandra Socha) is there!
In the final scene, we see that Kristen and the girls have moved to Rome. After a video call with Ben, Kristen sends the girls off. Looking down at Timothy, she sees his eyes suddenly flash, and his mouth opens with sharpened demonic teeth. David comes around the corner, and asks Kristen if something is wrong. Popping a pacifier in Timothy’s mouth, Kristen turns to David and says, “Nothing at all.” A joyful chorus plays as the camera pans out, and we cut to black for the final time.
This series finale, I predict, may be a divisive one. Leland didn’t die (which I personally don’t have a problem with), the “case of the week” was another “spooky technology” situation (again, not a problem for me given the thematic link), and four episodes, great as they were, just weren’t enough to tie everything up—especially the threads involving the 60, and Lexis heralding the apocalypse and starting a war with Timothy. I can also sort of see how a couple of doors were left deliberately open on the off chance that someone else picks it up. The Evil subreddit can barely go a day without someone posting the Netflix petition, and the series has been doing gangbusters on Paramount+ and streaming overall, so while it’s extremely unlikely, someone might just swoop in and capitalize on the rabid fanbase the show has generated in its last couple of seasons.
As for me, while my heart aches with the conclusion of my favorite show, I was mostly satisfied with this finale. My biggest complaint is Stick, and “The evil coming to New York” not really being buttoned up. John Carroll Lynch is a titan, and adding him to the show was a genius move that just didn’t have the time to fully pay off. That said, I’m so glad we got these last four episodes to conclude the series in a mostly satisfying way.
I have completely fallen in love with Evil over the course of four seasons. The anticipation of each new episode has been something I haven’t felt in years, and the storylines, lore, and especially the characters of Kristen, David, Ben, and Leland, are unforgettable. To the Kings, to the cast, the writers, and the entire crew…
Thank you.
Evil was streaming Thursdays on Paramount+.
