In its third season, Robert and Michelle King’s supernatural Paramount+ drama Evil has finally added a much-needed amenity to its bathroom: a toilet.
Actress Katja Herbers told The Daily Beast that she and her TV daughters actually had an inside joke about the omission until now. “Me and my girls would always joke that we poop in a bucket and then we take it across the street and flush it down the toilet at the pizzeria,” she said, letting out a small chuckle.
Our favorite forensic psychologist and her four girls might not need a man in their lives, but it’s always nice to have a john—that is, until you find a rotting eyeball bobbing around in the bowl.
Consider the possessed latrine a warning sign: The scares hit closer to home this season. The bonkers cases are still here—including a haunted highway and a mysterious apparition that appears to save countless people during a deadly fire. But the real drama continues to come from our core three characters slowly losing their grips.
When Mike Colter’s hot priest-in-training David Acosta first commissioned Kristen Bouchard to help him investigate alleged supernatural occurrences for the Catholic Church, she became the Dana Scully to his Fox Mulder alongside her fellow skeptic, tech expert Ben Shakir (Aasif Mandvi). In Season 3, however, everyone’s a little turned around.
Devout empiricist Ben is having a crisis of faith and leans on his sister, Karima (Sohina Sidhu), who sees her passion for science as inextricable from her Muslim faith. David, now an ordained priest, is growing more skeptical of the Church with each passing day even before Brian d’Arcy James shows up to ask if he’s interested in becoming a “friend” of the Vatican by joining the papal spy service known as “The Entity.”
And Kristen? Well, she might have a new toilet, but she also ended last season by making out with “Father David” moments after confessing to him that she once killed a guy.
The Evil Season 2 finale was one for the books even before Kristen finally told David that she offed serial killer Orson LeRoux (Darren Pettie) with an ice pick in Season 1 after he threatened her family. That gasping revelation soon gave way to another intimate act, as the two locked eyes and finally, finally! went for it.
Michelle King joked that she and Robert went ahead and let the characters kiss last season “with the idea that we were just making life difficult for ourselves in Season 3.” Half the fun this season, she teased, will come from watching these two navigate their newfound discomfort. It’s not a spoiler to say that post-snog, David is still haunted by an increasingly demonic version of Kristen—and that, yes, its forked tongue is back.
But there’s also a deeper inspiration for the show’s exploration of sex and spirituality. One of Evil’s writers, Aurin Squire, is Buddhist, Robert noted, and has studied meditation and taught at silent retreats. “What he found interesting is, the more religious or spiritual things got, the more sexualized things got,” he said. “Whenever we were exploring something spiritual within the season, we wanted it to be sexualized.”
As gratifying as Kristen and David’s steamy scene might’ve been on a fan-service level, the closing image also triumphs on a thematic level.
“The moment moves me,” Herbers said. When Kristen confesses to David during the Season 2 finale, the actress said, “she lays herself completely bare with all her ugliness—the worst of her, of what she’s done. And he accepts that.” The distance that arises between the two as they try and find a new normal sparks a unique brand of loneliness.
Still, social awkwardness is the least of this group’s worries. Leland Townsend, the psychologist played by Michael Emerson, is once again using his position to corrupt his patients while hanging around with demons. And he’s still very interested in making David, Kristen, and Ben’s lives a living hell.
This season, Emerson told The Daily Beast, his character’s agenda is a little more diffuse: “He’s trying to work a number on not just David, but the church—not just Kristen, but her entire extended family.”
Kristen’s daughters remain the fastest route to her psyche, so Leland remains fixated on spying and ingratiating himself at every opportunity. And although he’s no longer dating Kristen’s mother, he might’ve found an even more evil option: getting her into crypto. (“It’s terrible, isn’t it?” Emerson said with a laugh.)
That’s what’s so consistently satisfying about Evil, a show that’s as inventive with its laughs as it is with its scares—often because they are one and the same.
It’s no coincidence that even at its creepiest, the series can still feel like a twisted family comedy—complete with the handyman, the family priest, and the (admittedly evil) nosy neighbor. As Robert pointed out, some of the best scares are the ones that meet their audiences where they are on the ground. But Mandvi also identified a broader philosophy behind that approach—one that speaks to why performers like he and Herbers, whose roots are in comedy, so enjoy working with the Kings.
Katja Herbers as Kristen Bouchard and Michael Emerson as Leland Townsend in Evil Season 3.
Elizabeth Fisher/Paramount+“One of Robert King’s mantras, I’ll often hear him say, ‘Let’s do that because it's fun,’” Mandvi said. “We move toward what we think is the most fun way to explore something or to tell the story.”
Speaking of which—it seems unlikely that the Kings need inspiration for Evil Season 4, but they could do worse than this idea, courtesy of their very own actor Mike Colter. When asked how long he believes David can realistically last in the church, given his rapidly diminishing faith in its leadership, the actor admitted he has a little research to do on the subject—but he’s pretty sure priests are hard to fire. And besides, David is one of the few Black priests in the world—which makes the prospect of firing him even more fraught for the godly higher-ups.
“I can mess up a bit, you know? I might start throwing parties in the community room. I might start having a few friends over,” Colter said with a laugh. “What are you gonna do to David?”
We’ll leave that one to Kristen—once she finishes unclogging that demonic toilet.
