"Paul Levinson's It's Real Life is a page-turning exploration into that multiverse known as rock and roll. But it is much more than a marvelous adventure narrated by a master storyteller...it is also an exquisite meditation on the very nature of alternate history." -- Jack Dann, The Fiction Writer's Guide to Alternate History

Sunday, December 8, 2019

Evil 1.7-8: Sigils and Weight



Continuing with catching up on episodes of Evil, which I have to say is getting better, now up to 1.7 and 1.8.

Sigils aka symbols of daemons propel both episodes.  First, in episode 1.7, our team and we discover that they're not only enclosed in the 1550-AD codex we saw in the previous episode.  Everyone from Leland to David's father use them, or rather, it, the one sigil David is beginning to see everywhere.  Are all of these people somehow adherents or vassals to this evil daemon?   Certainly Leland could be, now fomenting hatred of women in an impressionable teenage boy.   But David's father?

We meet him in episode 1.8 - Leon, played by Vondie Curtis-Hall, a great actor that I first noticed on television in Chicago Hope in the mid-1990s, and we don't see enough of these days.   He's a painter in Evil, with two wives, one of whom is very pregnant, and that's the sanest part of the story.

Because before this hour over, the pregnant wife gives birth to a ghoul in the field before Kristen's horrified eyes.  While this is happening, David gets to dance with someone, one of his and therefore his father's ancestors, who came to America on a slave ship in the 1850s, but seems alive and well and smiling today.  David and Kristen are both slightly hallucinating on some drug slipped into their sangria, and that's the only explanation we (or at least, I) can find for these bizarre events.

On the bright side, Leon explains that he knew the sigil was evil, but he appropriated it as symbol in his paintings, so he cold be in control.  He did this as his way of "carrying the weight" of slavery.  All that was missing was Paul McCartney singing "Carry that Weight".   But speaking of recording, Ben almost has a good romp in bed with the woman from the TV show.  But it doesn't happen when Ben learns about her belief that her dead sister is embedded in her arm.  Crazy or possessed?  The point is that, in Evil, you just never know.

Just one more episode to catch up, so I'll be back here with another review soon.

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