Evil 1.11: Hospital Horror

Evil was back tonight with episode 1.11 - an almost standalone episode, exploring the aftermath of David's mugging, in a hospital where he encounters, well, a hospital horror story.

Let's face it.  With the exception of bringing babies into the world, a hospital is not the place any patient wants to be.  By its very nature and purpose, a hospital is always on the verge of being a horror show.  However well-run and compassionate and effective a hospital is, it understandably can bring out our worst fears.

Except, in David's case, these fears may be more than fears.  They may be real.  And, significantly, in this episode, they - the dangers - don't seem to be the workings of a devil or evil spirit.  They seem to be to be the workings of a demented nurse.

This makes this episode of Evil a very different kind of story.   The usual tug between science and spirit has been replaced a tug between sound medical treatment and a psycho nurse.  The killer nurse or killer doctor or killer hospital has of course been well explored in our fiction.  See, for example, the 1978 movie Coma based on the 1977 movie of the same name.  In stories like that, there's not even a hint of the supernatural.  Why did Evil choose to explore this theme with barely a mention of the supernatural that is Evil's stock-in-trade?

Who knows.  There is an excellent side story, a spinoff from David's sojourn in the hospital, in which Kristin and Ben meet Judy, who did what Kristin does for David before Kristin came into the story, that is, before the beginning of this series.  Judy has spunk and a sense of humor, just like Kristin.  Apparently she doesn't have a bunch of daughters, though, who all like to talk at the same time.

Anyway, good to see Evil back on.  Stay out of hospitals, if you can, and see you here next week, when maybe we'll find out more about David's attacker.

See also: Evil: Incubus Mystery ... Evil 1.2: Miracles and Racism ... Evil 1.3: Possessed Alexa ... Evil 1.4: Raising the Ante ... Evil 1.5-6: Seeing Red ... Evil 1.7-8: Sigils and Weight ... Evil 1.9: The Deposition ... Evil 1.10: The Influencer

Evil 1.10: The Influencer

A powerful, frightening Evil 1.10 - befitting the Fall finale of the new series - and an episode that really lifted Evil into a higher, more harrowing level of story, which of course also befits a series with this name.

Two members of our team - Kristen and David - are afflicted with different, but likely related perils.  Likely, because I'd say Leland the neo-devil is probably behind both of them, though at this point we know that for sure only with Kristen.

The episode begins with an ear-worm of a Christmas song, so annoying that I was thinking of turning off the sound and reading just the transcript on the screen, lest I be affected, too.  But annoyance is not the real danger or the worst possible effect of the initial conveyor of the song, a young woman influencer who makes a make-up (as in powder) video for young teenagers.  The danger is a male voice talking on a frequency that only teenagers hear, urging them to commit suicide.  (I'm wondering if there is such a frequency. Yahoo says there is.  But I don't have time to further research this, and, anyway, I'm in television-drama review, not research, mood.)

But the frequency makes a good evil plot point, and the real kicker is that Leland gave the influencer the video souped up with the sub-rosa male voice.  And it worked - the video increased her followers from two thousand to two million.  Leland, as I noted in an earlier review, is turning out to be a real devil in Evil.  And, in this episode, he also, somehow, influences Kristen's mother Sheryl to influence granddaughter Lexi to hit another girl with a rock in Lexi's fist, after said girl pushes Lexi down and she scrapped her knee.  It's becoming more clear, with every episode, that Leland deserves the title of The Influencer, with the capital "I". and this Influencer is the Devil.

Meanwhile, David is also experiencing some problems, mostly connected to the sister of his late beloved, whom he slept with last week (that is, the sister).  In the last scene, these weirdnesses culminate with David being badly stabbed. Here, I'll offer again my principle that if we don't see someone's head chopped off or blown up, and he or she is the star of the show, chances are he or she will survive.

We don't know, though, exactly how Leland is connected with this.  If he isn't, what else is going on?  We'll no doubt find out when the show returns in 2020.

See also: Evil: Incubus Mystery ... Evil 1.2: Miracles and Racism ... Evil 1.3: Possessed Alexa ... Evil 1.4: Raising the Ante ... Evil 1.5-6: Seeing Red ... Evil 1.7-8: Sigils and Weight ... Evil 1.9: The Deposition

Evil 1.9: The Deposition

As is well known, the creators of Evil - Robert King and Michelle King - achieved their greatest previous success with The Good Wife, which would be up there on any all-time Top 20 network television series list, maybe higher.  For that matter, Mike Colter, who plays the leading role of David in Evil, played a leading role in The Good Wife, too.  In episode 1.9 of Evil, we get the most explicitly legal episode.  It had the least amount of logically inexplicable demons and supernatural about it - little more than a cat, and even that is debatable.  That was one reason I liked it the best of any episode of Evil so far (though, actually, I admit to liking the supernatural at least a little).

David and the Church are being sued by the woman that David, against Kristen's best advice, performed an exorcism on a few episodes back. In 1.9, she must figure out a way to outwit the sharp attorney - Ms. Lemonhead - played by Jennifer Ferrin, a fine actress who had a great role in Hell on Wheels, in case you remember.   (By the way, giving characters crazy but suitable names was another characteristic of The Good Wife.)  Kristen succeeds (always well played by Katja Herbers, but I don't think she was in The Good Wife), with the help of the Church's attorney, Renée (played by Renée Elise Goldsberry, who also was in The Good Wife), who, guess what, has the hots for David (another characteristic of The Good Wife, but I'll stop doing this).  But most of these scenes do take place in a series of legal depositions.

And, then, in a very nice wrap-up, Renée not only gets David and the Church off the hook, but her desire for David would have kept him from being killed.  She seduces him when he has a meeting at his church.  That meeting would've been shot up by the sicko that Leland has been training to do this.  Fortunately for everyone - except Leland, who's infuriated by this result - the sicko kills himself rather than opening fire in the church.

This leaves open the question of who, exactly, is Leland?  He has some connection to the 60 daemons - he gets one of them, apparently, to train the kid to kill.   So this makes Leland, what?  The Devil?

We'll just have to see.  And now that I'm all caught up, I'll try to review each new episode of Evil on a more timely basis.

See also: Evil: Incubus Mystery ... Evil 1.2: Miracles and Racism ... Evil 1.3: Possessed Alexa ... Evil 1.4: Raising the Ante ... Evil 1.5-6: Seeing Red ... Evil 1.7-8: Sigils and Weight

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.

See also: Evil: Incubus Mystery ... Evil 1.2: Miracles and Racism ... Evil 1.3: Possessed Alexa ... Evil 1.4: Raising the Ante ... Evil 1.5-6: Seeing Red

Evil 1.5-6: Seeing Red

I've been remiss in watching and reviewing Evil because, how much evil can anyone take?  But I've resolved to start making up for that, so here's a review of Evils 1.5 and 1.6 (the last one I reviewed was 1.4), with reviews of the rest of to follow soon.

The two episodes have completely different but always related stories.  Episode 1.5 was about an exorcism and 1.6 about a prophetess.  The series continues to carefully balance supernatural which may be real, and pseudo-supernatural which turns out to explicable by science.  And due to Leland's continued presence, which escalates in these two episodes in a, well, romantic way, there's also a suitably unsettling psychopathic element throughout.

Kristen doesn't believe that Caroline's ills can't be helped or cured by exorcism in episode 1.5 - she and a psychiatrist are sure they're ills of the mind not the soul - and she substitutes tap water for holy water to prove it.  When the tap water has the same effect, when presumed to be holy water, it seems that she has proved her case.  But at the end of the episode, David's exorcism does the job.  Score one for religion.

But, in other matters, Ben demonstrates the very real-world tricks that a psychic-investigating TV show is up to, and Kristen's daughters are frightened by a girl with a really-burned burned face that they but we never see.   Score two for the non-supernatural.

In episode 1.6, our team investigates a woman whose prophecies are identical to a codex from 1550 that, according to the Church, very few people have seen.  ICE deports her before David's investigation is complete - another justified shot at the unacceptable state of our immigration policies in the Trump regime.  Ben's explanation that, for all we know, many more people saw the codex, seems as good as any.  But the woman also tells Kristen to beware of red and ....

Back to Leland and Kristen's mother Sheryl - she winds up sleeping with Leland even after Kristen tells her he's a psycho, and in the last scene, Sheryl gets up in the morning, looks at Leland asleep in her bed, and picks out something nice to wear in her closet - which is red.   (And, just for good measure in this Evil conundrum, she earlier foresaw a woman's house being destroyed.)

So there you have it, this continuing, razor-sharp balance of natural and supernatural.  And I'll be back soon with more reviews on the edge.

See also: Evil: Incubus Mystery ... Evil 1.2: Miracles and Racism ... Evil 1.3: Possessed Alexa ... Evil 1.4: Raising the Ante

Evil 1.4: Raising the Ante

I generally don't like or review TV series in which children and babies are endangered - actually take away the word "generally," I don't like them at all.  But I'm making an exception for Evil 1.4, because the child and baby endangerment was part of a much larger, crucial story in the series.

As I've indicated earlier in these reviews, the central tension in Evil is the conflict between science and religion - which one provides the better explanation of evil, and with it the means of best dealing with it?  Up until episode 1.4, science was pretty much the victor.   But that changed.

In the main story, we encounter what science would call a sociopathic boy, who is a danger to his family, especially the new baby.  Our intrepid team comes to the conclusion that an exorcism might help, but before the exorcist is able to do his thing - or attempt to do it - well, if you've seen the episode you know what I'm talking about, and I won't be talking any more about that here.

But there is also a secondary story, which is powerful and frightening, and that concerns Kristen's four talkative and delightful daughters.   The virtual reality game they're playing is supposed to be disconcerting - for adults.  Ben gets this, and assuredly makes the game childproof.  But ... of course, that doesn't work.  Ben's too good to have made a mistake in his lock-out programming.  So, either someone else is removing the lock, or there's a real, evil something in that game.

Before we can see what damage it can do, the episode ends.  But this leaves the story wide open in the next and subsequent episodes to see what kind of evil has invested that otherwise well-designed virtual game.

I'll be watching.

See also: Evil: Incubus Mystery ... Evil 1.2: Miracles and Racism ... Evil 1.3: Possessed Alexa

Evil 1.3: Possessed Alexa

A good Evil 1.3 last night, which pits hacking vs. possession as the reason a victim's Alexa-like device is plaguing him.

Digital technology vs. demon is a logical and appealing variation on the general science vs. religion central tension of this series, and it provides a good spotlight for Ben (well played by Aasif Mandvi), the techie third leg of the powerful David-Kristen-Ben triad.   Demons have a great history of being in machines, and even in the popular parlance, as the phrase "ghost in the machine" amply demonstrates.

The digital addition to this ancient tradition is crucial, and brings these devices into the robotic/android realm, which, coincidentally, began to be explored in another new network series this week, Emergence.  If we assume we human beings have souls, the displacement or occlusion of our soul by a demon is a bigger deal than the demonic infestation of a digital assistant, since such an assistant presumably had no soul in the first place.  So such possessions presumably would be easier to achieve?

But the possibilities of digital possession are nonetheless intriguing and dizzying.  Imagine a self-driving vehicle that gets possessed by a demon.  Such a vehicle could do a lot of damage.  (Check out David Walton's Three Laws Lethal for a mostly non-demonic, riveting novel about self-driving vehicles.)

Back to Evil, I'd say this excellent new series is now at a crossroads.   So far, it has told mostly new stories, with a continuing thread of deeper stories, mostly separate, involving David and Kristen.  I'm enjoying this kind of narrative, but I'd like to see a little more development of those deeper stories, that go beyond the quick glimpses we've been seeing.

See you here next week.

See also: Evil: Incubus Mystery ... Evil 1.2: Miracles and Racism

Evil 1.2: Miracles and Racism

A really excellent second episode of Evil on CBS last night, confirming what I thought after the debut of this series last week: it's the best new series I've seen so far this season on network television.

The subject of the episode was miracles, in particular the miracle of a young woman declared dead coming back to life.  As we saw last week, our characters are unafraid to confront the most profound problems.  Kristen Bouchard (very well played by Katja Herbers) spotlights perhaps the key problem with belief in miracles: why do they "happen to some people and not to others".  This an especially crucial problem for her, and not just professionally: we learn in the same conversation with David Acosta (also very well played by Mike Colter) that Kristen's young daughter may have a heart valve condition that could kill her before she reaches the age of twenty.

Meanwhile, the pendulum between spirit and science swings back and forth, just as it did last week. Kristen's daughter sees George the demon!  Evidence, then, that he's real?  It might seem so, until Kristen learns that he's a character in a horror narrative that is streaming ("streaming," her daughter corrects Kirstin, not on television) and that Kristen has seen and her daughter and the other kids regularly watch.  This pendulum between occult and mundane keeps us on our toes about what is really going on.  In the centerpiece story, the young woman who comes back to life is African American, and our investigators discover that she was pronounced dead too soon, because the hospital tends to do that with African Americans.  Her coming back to life was not a miracle, but "implicit racism," as David aptly puts it.

Speaking of good acting, Evil also features Michael Emerson (from Lost and all kinds of sometimes great series) as Leland Townsend, who is a fit evil antagonist for Kristen and David.  He's a psycho, David explains, who "wants to kill hope".

I noticed something else about Evil last night.  Its creators are Michelle King and Robert King.  They were the creators of The Good Wife.  This makes me hope that Evil will be even better than just sometimes great.   I won't let Leland kill that hope.  Indeed, his complex character enhances the possibility that this hope will be fulfilled.

See also: Evil: Incubus Mystery

Evil: Incubus Mystery

I caught up with Evil, which debuted on CBS last week.  Or maybe evil caught up with me.  No, I could up with Evil.

And though I'm not much of a fan of demonic possession stories - same as the lead character, Dr. Kristen Bouchard, the forensic psychologist with a sharp brain who needs money - I thought the first episode was really good.  In fact, it's the best new show on network TV I've seen so far this season.

The most interesting and best handled thread in this episode involves Bouchard being visited by an incubus (a male demon with sex on his mind).  She vividly dreams or sees the demon (George) look under her nightgown at her Caesarian scar and panties.  And then (of course, because this is still network TV) she wakes up screaming.  And mostly believing that all she had was a bad dream.  And when George visits her again, she realizes that she can't read the writing on the paper she taped to the ceiling, which proves that she's dreaming since you can't read in your dream.  Or so she says - I have no idea if that's true - but it makes a good plot point.

But when Bouchard pays a call on a psychotic serial killer who claims he's possessed, he knows what George the incubus said to Bouchard, all about her scar and those panties.  How could this be?  Is George really a demon that the psycho had access to?

I won't tell you the way that Bouchard refutes this and figures out the truth - in case you haven't seen this show - but it's clever and original.  And you should see Evil.  It's not only a good science vs. spirituality show - or better, science and spirituality working hand in hand - but it looks like it has the makings of a good mystery narrative as well.