Warning: This article contains spoilers for the Evil series finale, "Fear of the End."
And they lived happily ever after... with a little demon baby in tow.
After 5 years, four seasons, and 50 episodes, Evil — Robert and Michelle King's miraculous, impossible-to-define drama about human nature in all its technicolor weirdness — wrapped Thursday with the appropriately titled series finale, "Fear of the End."
Directed by Robert King, "End" found the core trio — forensic psychologist Dr. Kristen Bouchard (Katja Herbers), Roman Catholic priest David Acosta (Mike Colter), and atheist/technology expert Ben Shakir (Aasif Mandvi) — splitting up after the Catholic Church pulls the plug on their assessor program. They're all venturing out into new endeavors: Kristen is running her own practice from home, David is headed to Rome to work for the clandestine Vatican organization called the Entity, and Ben landed a job blending AI and quantum computing, paying $650,000 a year.
But the world's most sinister forces — led in the Evil universe by the mischievous and maleficent Dr. Leland Townsend (Michael Emerson) — pulls them back into the darkness (literally, this time) with a case involving those VR headsets Sheryl Luria (Christine Lahti), Kristen's mom, gave her granddaughters way back in season 1. After a new game called "Mother Midnight" convinces Lynn (Brooklyn Shuck), Lexis (Maddy Crocco), Lila (Skylar Gray), and Laura (Dalya Knapp) that Leland is going to kill their mother, Kristen and Co. strap on the headsets to investigate how — and why — the VR program created such vividly terrifying and personalized visions of each player's future.
Paramount+
In fact, Leland is planning to kill Kristen. It's all part of the nefarious plans of The 60, a cabal of demonic families whose mission is to unleash the Antichrist — a.k.a. little Timothy, who was created using Kristen's stolen egg and Leland's sperm — upon the world. The nefarious Dr. Townsend finally makes his move in "Fear of the End," only to be nearly strangled to death himself by Kristen.
Don't worry, though — Leland ended his Evil journey by being locked up in the demon box at the Sacred Trinity Silent Monastery. And Kristen? Well, she and David headed to Rome together — just as friends and colleagues! — to pilot a new assessor program at the Vatican. It seems like everything is going to work out just fine until Kristen glances down at little Timothy, and the sweet, chubby baby smiles back... revealing glowing demon eyes and razor sharp teeth.
What in the holy Hell? That's just what Entertainment Weekly asked Evil creators Robert and Michelle King to explain in our extensive series finale debrief. The Kings indulged all of our burning questions, from their decision to keep Leland alive while killing Sheryl, the behind-the-scenes reason for Kristen's split from Andy (Patrick Brammall), and why tiny-but-tough demon fighter Sister Andrea (Andrea Martin) should get her own spinoff.
Paramount+
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY; Just when it seems like Kristen and David will get their platonic happily ever after in Vatican City, we got a little Rosemary’s Baby action with Timothy at the end! So, Sheryl's last-minute baptism didn’t work?
ROBERT KING: There are two ways to look at it. One, yes. The other is, there's a New Yorker article now out about how people see demonic faces in people. [Maybe] Kristen has gone over to that side, she's not been seeing [those demons] and now she does. But I think it all flies under the heading of “nature verse nurture.” Can magic water, as Leland called it, really cure [possession], or does it come down to the work of the mother and father — or in this case, the mother and the siblings?
MICHELLE KING: And by the way, if you are leaning into the supernatural, you could say that the baptism did work — just like a medication that can arrest many symptoms but can't entirely eradicate it.
RK: But our reaction to the world is that evil's in the world and it's very hard to beat. I guess that would be the underlining thought. [Laughs]
Paramount+
What do you think was going through Kristen’s mind before she tells David that everything’s fine?
RK: It’s interesting question because originally in the script she looks down and sees that Timothy has something wrong with his eyes, but she's not sure if it's a trick of the light. She looks twice at it and decides, “Okay, just ignore that and move on.” On the set, Katja suggested, “No, I should probably see it and cover up for it.” So, I do think she’s very much in the mode of a mother defending a kid who the teacher at school says, “He’s behaving badly.” Like, “No, he's a good kid. He's a good boy.” I think it's Katja’s character saying, “He’s being misunderstood. He's going to be fine, but I better not tell this priest who will think something’s evil about it.”
Why did you decide not to have Ben go to the Vatican with Kristen and David? Sure, he’s making over $650k a year now, but from the glimpse we got of his new job, it does not seem very appealing.
MK: In reality, most folks are not going to pass up that particular paycheck. So, we like the idea of, okay, in reality you might truly value your work friends, but you're also going to take the paycheck.
RK: It’d be almost too much like the end of those Burt Reynolds movies where it ends with everybody with nice drinks on some beach in Bahamas or something. [Laughs] It just felt like it would been too much. Even though we're trying for a little of that happy ending brightness — and then here's the Antichrist in the stroller.
Paramount+
Earlier in the season, we had written off Ellie (Anna Chlumsky) — who claimed to be Kristen’s daughter Laura, from the future — as a crazy person. But now after seeing Timothy’s devilish appearance in the finale, we’re left wondering if her warning (that Timothy will grow up and will bring about a battle that will destroy the world) was true. Why you gotta leave us with this ambiguity, guys?
RK: [Laughs] Now, we have warned you. This show has always been truth in advertising, in that the show has never wanted to say, “This is the definite answer.” And part of that I think is the way Michelle and I come from different sides, and it's left that, well, we want our cake and eat it too. And the cake being, I don't know, theism and having it too is atheism. How much are those both playing into the concept of the series?
MK: You’re picking up on the ambivalence of the folks that are creating it — but also believing that nothing is completely evil or completely good. Those two are always working in concert.
Kristen's on the verge of killing Leland in the finale, and then David and Ben stop her. Was part of your thinking behind not having him die because you can’t fully eradicate evil?
MK: Yeah, that would've been more optimism than we typically allow ourselves.
RK: Also, Katja’s character had killed someone in the first season and had been forgiven. There was always the talk of killing Leland over the course of the season. It felt like that would fall into the trap of taking us out of that arc, that she’s now a different person.
Paramount+
“Fear of the End” included some satisfying callbacks — first when Ben, Kristen, and David are burning the old case files, and then of course the VR headsets from season 1, and the Sacred Trinity Silent Monastery and Fenna from season 2. Were there other callbacks you wanted to include but just couldn’t fit in?
RK: We wanted to see more of those cases in the fire. Actually, our prop department did a great job creating those cases and seeing them in the fire. And then the stupid director did it wrong, so we didn't shoot it right. But the one we always felt bad about not getting in there again was the Demon of Grief. The Demon of Grief was such a cool character, that puppet voiced by Fisher Stevens. We were thinking that these scenes in the VR headsets would bring about grief and that we would see it again. But then it suddenly became this carnival of too many things, it started to get baroque.
MK: It turns into a clip show.
Is it fair to assume that the futures Kristen, Ben, and David saw in their headsets were just their deepest fears of what their future could be, and not necessarily their actual futures?
RK: Completely. That was our hope, that each has this unique fear and that they would face it in this last episode.
Paramount+
How did you guys decide that poor Sheryl was going to have to pay the ultimate price for collaborating with Leland?
MK: Well, it felt like we had done so many permutations of the Sheryl-Kristen relationship, that it was hard to think of a way to reset it that was honest.
RK: From almost the second season, the room had devised this idea that Sheryl redeems herself by in some way by going head-to-head with Leland and losing. That was always there. And then it was always like Christine Lahti, who wants to lose her? She’s so much fun. One of the great turns in the show was turning her into a femme fatale. She was always a gift that kept on giving.
Then at the end of the fourth season, it felt like “Okay, if we want to get Kristen back together with her mom, even for a moment to move on to the next stage, we have to do it now at the end of the fourth season.” That was before we knew that we wouldn't really have a fifth season. It was just an instinct on our part to end it then, to get Kristen to the next level and to show a new side of Sheryl. Otherwise, it's very difficult to get Sheryl and Leland back into a situation where their story would take a new turn.
In her final video message to Andy and Kristen, she explains that in the secret room Leland drained Andy and his other victims of blood and brain matter. But what was the gross-looking liquid he infused back into them?
MK: I think that's Leland's secret recipe. I think it's trademarked and we'd be stepping on that. [Laughs]
RK: Creatively what we wanted was the idea of vampires, but a modern version of vampires. The fear out of Rosemary's Baby was always of injection, of IVs, of medical practices gone awry. So, I think that was the start. And then it was like, well, if you take something out, you have to put something back in. And that was the stuff in the jars.
And Leland’s goal was to make the victims susceptible to his control?
RK: Correct. Kind of like zombies. I mean the real idea of zombies, that these are susceptible to suggestion and that's why he calls up people and plays that song [as a trigger]. It was all just trying to find different ways to play the tropes of horror movies.
Speaking of Andy, how did you decide that his marriage to Kristen wasn't going to survive?
RK: I’m thinking it was because we knew we were only going to get four more episodes. And that also Patrick Brammall, who's been so amazing for us, has this other show and we knew we could only get him for one episode. So, it was a mix of the practical and the creative, I guess.
MK: And that's typical. That's every show. That's how you end up making it. If you don't have access to the actor, suddenly you need to find an organic way that the character is not going to be as present.
RK: One of the things we liked is that there are two things that keep David and Kristen from getting together. One is his vows, and the other is her marriage. So, we thought we'd knock out one of those just to make it all about David having to stick with his commitment [to the Church], which led to that monologue about, “I can't break this even if it breaks me.”
Also, deep down, you guys want Kristen and David together, right?
RK: Oh yeah. In every episode there's a yearning for that. I mean, we keep doing dream scenes of them sleeping with each other, or demon Kristen screwing David. I’m sorry, Michelle — you looked like you're going to say no?
MK: I think that there's the yearning, but that it is balanced by the fact that there are vows, and that's what makes them characters we love — that they're not willing to overlook vows.
Paramount+
The series ends with David and the Entity continuing their battle against evil. But now, they’re fighting an evil that is using technology to essentially upload despair directly into our brains. How has telling this story changed your own relationship in real life to the internet?
MK: I wish I were deep enough to say my relationship had been changed. I don't think it has. I guess I've always been a little arm’s length from things [online]. I am not really on social media, et cetera, but I certainly am constantly refreshing the news sites and keeping in touch via email.
RK: I think we use it more pragmatically than for entertainment. I didn't join Twitter until 2021, I think. And it was more because our agent was suggesting that I do that to advertise our shows. So, I kind of stayed away from the way that it can make people angry. I see it. I see it whenever something goes political and that people are making up facts and everything, there's such poison there that it seems like better to keep it at arm's length.
There is a way to do that, which is a hopeful thing. With TikTok, there are people on there that indulge in that, and there are people that just come in and go, “Woah, that’s a fight. I’m going away from that — I want to look at puppies.” There's a sweet scene in episode 13 when Leland has taken on some of David's goodness, and he’s watching this video of dogs hugging. [Laughs]
The worry is of course, generative AI, which is I think the bigger worry of what's coming. Where a computer is trying to sell you something and you're not having real relationships. Gen AI is something that is just basically always sucking up to you and always giving you a version of what you want.
Paramount+
The girls had so many good moments this season. If you had to highlight your favorite scene, what would it be?
MK: I get a kick out of the girls trying to save the family [after Kristen loses her job]. Their mother has ideas but for the girls it’s, “Let’s figure out a way to sell photos of her feet.” [Laughs]
RK: I also liked that mom says when a storm comes the first thing that goes is toilet paper, so they just all buy toilet paper. They are like when the Marx Brothers enter the scene, you don't know what's going to come next. We are great fans, not only with how they're used in the show, but the actresses themselves are just these powerhouses. They’re a really good unit on the set. They're always working with each other, helping each other, which doesn't have to be that way. You think over the course of five years or whatever, they’d turn into pills, but they haven't at all. If anything, we love them more.
I know we’re here to talk about the series finale, but I’m not ready to let go yet, so let’s talk about some spinoff ideas. Sister Andrea spinoff — go!
RK: That is the one that seems like it pops in your mind, just the way Elsbeth popped in our mind. Elsbeth was just an obvious character [to spin off], and Sister Andrea is that way. She's in this silent retreat with Fenna. We love that actress, Alexandra Socha, who plays Fenna. Here's the thing: Ideas that seem like no-brainers to us, our real hurdles are with the people with money. But horror is not going away. It's very profitable. So, would be the one for me.
Are you board with that, Michelle?
MK: I am. We just now need to produce it and write it.
Great! Also, CBS and Paramount+ love a brand extension and a show with a colon in the title. Now that Kristen and David are in Rome, could we do Evil: Rome?
MK: We could indeed.
RK: Especially if it's by Taylor Sheridan — we’ll have it on the air. [Laughs]
All four seasons of Evil are streaming now on Paramount+.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Sign up for Entertainment Weekly's free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.
