Evil Recap: The Demonic Call Is Coming From Inside the House!
The lesson of this week’s Evil: If you want something done, get a diminutive-yet-feisty nun on the case.
Case in point: That very unnerving, dark, scary and bat-filled hole that has been sitting in Kristen’s basement for years is bricked-over by the end of the hour, less than a day after Sister Andrea first became aware of it and its otherworldly connection. Kristen, are you sure you don’t want Lynn learning everything this marvelous woman might be able to teach her?
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THIS MEANS WAR | The hour rewinds, but just a little, to Leland’s return to his apartment. Sheryl watches from the dark, and when he notices her there, she says, “I had one rule: Don’t ever touch my granddaughters. And if you did, I would cut off your d—k.” He starts to deny it, but she throws Laura’s sachet at him. He bends to pick it up, surreptitiously grabbing a large shard of glass off the floor at the same time, then stands and maintains that he was only trying to plant the idea with Andy that he needed a son. “Sheryl, what did you think we were doing here from the very beginning?”
She’s undeterred, so he switches tack, threatening to cut off her transfusions. “Can’t wait to see you age 20 years in 20 days,” he sneers. “Right back atcha, bud,” she says… and he runs to his creepy cabinet to see that she’s smashed all the jars. As he freaks, she reveals that she took half of the jars home, which causes him to rush at her with the glass and shove it into her shoulder. She, in turn, jams her knife into his crotch; with the ruckus they raise, Timothy starts crying. They threaten each other a little more, then she leaves, bleeding copiously.
Sheryl drives away but passes out from blood loss just as her car rolls to a stop and hits a One Way sign. Meanwhile, Leland tries to calm the baby by playing his audio files of Kristen’s sessions with Dr. Boggs, only to find out that Sheryl has deleted all of them.
As Sheryl’s next of kin, Kristen gets the call that brings her to the hospital and Sheryl’s bedside. Once she confirms that her mother is awake, she goes to leave, but Sheryl pulls her close and whispers “Watch out.” When Sheryl’s phone rings, Kristen answers it and exchanges threats with Leland until she has a revelation: “I just realized what you’re most afraid of: unity.”
TRACK RECORD | When Kristen learns that Lila passed off an AI-written school essay as her own, she confronts her daughter. In order to deflect her mother’s wrath, Lila rats out Laura (who chewed tobacco at school on a dare) and Laura busts Lynn for not ever having dated Ren — despite leading Kristen to believe that’s who she was sneaking out to see. So Kristen runs to the rectory to confront Sister Andrea about Lynn’s actual late-night activities, and she’s only slightly chagrined when she realizes that Lynn forged her mother’s signature on a permission slip allowing the nun to counsel her. Sister Andrea says of course she’ll comply with Kristen’s wishes, but advises her not to keep any information from the very-sharp Lynn. Kristen isn’t having it and politely asks her to stay the heck away. “So you’re angry because Lynn is sneaking out to become a nun instead of getting pregnant,” Ben sums up, and then Kristen yells at him, too.
The Bouchard family drama is interrupted by our trio’s meeting with a train engineer who is in charge of an overnight route on which people routinely kill themselves by deliberately getting in the train’s path. It’s happened to him so often — he says in a very disturbing monologue, delivered beautifully by Yellowstone’s Jefferson White — “now you’re feeling haunted,” David finishes for him. The engineer recalls running over a girl in a white prom dress; now, every time he drives the route, he sees her but there’s something “scary” dragging her away. When he stops the train to investigate, though, there’s nothing there.
While Kristen is helping out Sheryl, Ben and David accompany the train engineer on his nightly route. They don’t see the apparition he claims to just before he hits the train’s brakes; when the locomotive has screeched to a stop, the engineer laments that he must be losing his mind, given that David and Ben didn’t see what he saw. While he walks back to confirm that he didn’t hit anything, David and Ben step out and start walking toward a signal light, where David now thinks he sees something.
That something — which Ben can see, as well — turns out to be a red, horned demon that does a backflip off the elevated trestle as David approaches. Father Acosta and Ben rush to the railing but don’t see anything below… except for Kristen’s house: Yep, the haunted railroad runs right over her home in Queens.
THERE’S AN APP FOR THAT? | I adore Kristen’s response to learning that she lives underneath a demonic depot: “I have to deal with this now?!” David is quick to say that it might not be her house that’s the problem; remember when they did the exorcism at her neighbor’s place? Kristen reports that that woman moved out two weeks ago. And then Ben notices that there are claw marks down the trestle’s support beams.
The Bouchard girls watch and listen from an upstairs window and decide that they need to use a app that allegedly can detect supernatural entities via a device’s camera. The app seems to see an apparition that leads the girls downstairs, though they can’t see anything with their eyes. Lilah repeatedly asks (via the app) whether the creature will hurt them; it finally answers with a demonic-sounding “YES!” just as Kristen comes back inside, freaked because the girls are screaming.
Lynn quickly demands an exorcism for the home, but Kristen says no. They get into a long conversation about how Kristen doesn’t believe in ghosts and demons — and thinks her daughters shouldn’t either — but does think that exorcism is a “healthy ritual” that can help people, even if just via the placebo effect. So she eventually agrees to ask David to come in and do an exorcism-lite in each room
IN WHICH BEN QUESTIONS EVERYTHING (BUT, LIKE, MORE THAN HE NORMALLY DOES) | Ben returns to his apartment to find it very different than he left it. Namely, there’s women’s clothing all over the place. A call to Karima confirms it’s not hers. And when he realizes that there’s someone in his bathroom, and that person turns out to be Renee (aka cult blood woman), he has no idea what’s going on. “Did I ask you to move in?” he wonders. “Yes,” she replies, smiling.
A rattled Ben tells Karima he’s seeing a djinn and making decisions he doesn’t remember making, such as asking Renee to be roomies, which both worries and intrigues his sister. Of course, she has a theory: “You’re so stuck in your atheistic ways you won’t even acknowledge the overlap you represent… religion and science.” Ben brings up how their father used to get migraines, and notes that after the jinn’s appearance, he gets migraine symptoms, too. Karima gets a little quiet as she admits that their dad’s migraines came during an unhappy time in their parents’ marriage; their father was cheating on their mom, and their mom was sure he was using the migraines as an excuse to get out of the house. “Talk to Dad,” she counsels.
TIME FOR A DEEP CLEAN | Sister Andrea accompanies David to the house (with Kristen’s blessing) and they begin in Kristen and Andy’s bedroom; she immediately goes to the bathroom and splashes holy water all over the bathtub. In her view, it sizzles where it lands — and where the grief demon was toddling about in a previous episode — but to everyone else, it just looks like regular old water.
In the living room, Kristen finds Ben having an existential crisis at the foot of the stairs. He tells her what he’s learned about his dad; she rubs his back in sympathy, but they’re interrupted by Sister Andrea & Co., who are heading down to the basement. The nun follows a trail of slime down the steps and climbs into the hole in the wall that the bats came from. She eventually finds the demon from the train tracks, who is named Lou and who says he’s not haunting the house, just resting. She douses him with holy water and brandishes her cross, but he informs her she can’t hurt him down there — “but I can you.”He grabs her wrist, resulting in a burn.
When she’s safely out of the hole, she advises that Kristen fill it in ASAP. Kristen makes some noise about a contractor, but that’s not soon enough for Sister Andrea, who tells Ben to get some bricks from the churchyard and start the work ASAP. In the meantime, the nun sits in the Bouchard’s basement all night, flicking holy water at Lou any time he pops his head out of the hole.
Kristen joins her during the evening to plead her case for Lynn’s not becoming a nun. “There’s a nun I met in a silent monastery, Fenna, and she was so young and so full of life. And everything that made her fun, God seemed to want her to turn off,” Kristen says, growing teary as she imagines the same thing happening to Lynn. Sister Andrea says a life of service can be its own type of fun, but she promises not to sway Lynn one way or the other.
ON THE RIGHT TRACK | Once the demon hole is plugged, the engineer returns to the rectory to let them know that he hasn’t seen anything on the tracks in the past three nights. Yay! But a downtrodden Ben — who got broken up with by Renee the night before, despite never having remembered inviting her to move in in the first place — just doesn’t have it in him to celebrate. He gets home to find her packing her things and stridently saying she won’t give in to his pleas to get back together. When he looks baffled, she pulls out her phone and plays a video he sent earlier that day: He’s singing “Baby Come Back” and begging her to stay — he’s even wearing the same clothes — but he has no recollection of making the video. He thinks he’s losing his mind. She thinks she’s fed up. And when he makes one more attempt at getting her to unpack her suitcases, she turns him down and walks out.
At the end of the hour, Lexis gets up in the middle of the night and takes the tablet outside, firing up the demonic-detection app. Suddenly, multiple apparitions pop up on the screen, and she screams as the train rattles by overhead.
Now it’s your turn. What did you think of the episode? Sound off in the comments below.
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