Evil: How to Build a Coffin

June 15, 2024 8:34 AM - Season 4, Episode 4

A priest, a skeptic, and a psychiatrist (who is also a skeptic) walk into an utterly bonkers TV show. And this TV show asks: did you know certain kinds of demons LOVE mini marshmallows?

Guys, this might be the most emotionally heavy episode of Evil I've ever seen, so while we had our usual bonkers quota, there were so many feels!

* Leland learns that even the infant Antichrist poops, pees, and barfs like every other baby -- Kristen's laughter at the end of S4 E1 is delicious as she was right

* Speaking of Leland, I gotta admit his discovery that only Kristen's voice soothes Lil Baby Antichrist and his subsequent plot to murder her youngest daughter so Lil Baby Antichrist can be the replacement child? Now THAT was straight up the worst shit Leland has done, imo

* I usually don't have much use for Andy but the internal horror when Leland laid out the plan and his struggle when it came time to enact the plan was well done

* I am very confused by how the embalming fluid is the elixir of youth, but this is Evil, so I'll roll with it

* Tommy, the Demon of Grief with his Noo Yawk accent and weakness for mini marshmallows, was delightfully Little Bunny Foo-Foo'd with Sister Andrea's wooden spoon

* The Demon of Words, however, should know that Sister Andrea will kick ass and take names in the name of Our Lord and Saviour

* I love being reminded that Sister Andrea is really the GOAT in this show

* Ben Shakir continues to put himself Through It by somehow inviting Sciencey yet Culty Goat Blood Lady over and getting it on

* I am intrigued by her multiverse theory and at least someone--even if she is Sciencey yet Culty--expresses irritation at a laser getting shot through his eye

*David is sort of backseat this episode, imo, but I have to ask: I thought he saw demons too? Which is why Sister Andrea told him he was special? And yet he sees no demons that she sees?

* Sister Andrea drawing out the grief of Father Ignatius in re: to Father Korecki was so lovely and heartbreaking

*When Kristen finds out Leland tried to kill her youngest? All I am saying, buddy, you better leave the city. The ice pick axe is coming for ya

*I too would like to be described as "reverent but occasionally unbalanced"

posted by Kitteh (6 comments total)

One of the hardest things to do is sit with someone in their grief. So many people try and make you "feel better" or distract you from it instead of just being there with you. I imagine it would be even harder amongst a group of people who presumably aren't supposed to have those feelings so Ignatius just escapes the only way he can, sleep. (My mother is the same way. When she's emotionally overwhelmed, she escapes into sleep.) Andrea consciously choosing to be part of his grief was really touching. It's a lesson I wish more people learned.

I'm not sure how I feel about Ben suddenly experiencing intense desire for Kristen. Kind of reminds of Torchwood where everyone wanted Gwen (which was weird with Captain Everything that Moves hanging about). Something about it irks me.

Kristen's "prophecy" about Leland's inability to cope with a baby coming true is hilarious. It reminds me a bit of the joke about why there aren't any stories about Jesus growing up in the Bible. No one wants to read about the Messiah having a swadling blowout or going through the terrible twos.

But I'd add that Leland is going through all of that to get Kristen to accept the anti-christ as her child definitely makes it clear that feeding her to the baby is not part of the plan if it ever was. He wants her to be the baby's mother.

And again WTF SHERYL? Does this woman ever think at all? Does it occur to her what the discovery of Kristen's voice being calming to the anti-christ actually means for Kristen? Like I just don't believe all of this is an elaborate act on her part because if it is she found the murder of one of Kristen's kids by their own father an acceptable risk. I just feel like the writers want her to be more comic relief than she actually is.
posted by miss-lapin at 9:08 AM on June 15 [1 favorite]

Did I miss something or did they skip an episode here. At the end of the previous, the baby was with the birth mom, and the birth mom was with Kristen in a regular hospital, no?
posted by nobody at 9:54 AM on June 15

Forget it, nobody, it's Evil-town.

miss-lapin, Shepherd and I once again took the time to razz on Sheryl. She talks the talk about missing her daughter and grandddaughters but she throws them under the bus for her own ends every time.
posted by Kitteh at 1:05 PM on June 15 [2 favorites]

At the end of the previous, the baby was with the birth mom, and the birth mom was with Kristen in a regular hospital, no?

Evil has a tendency, that I waver between finding obnoxious and admirable, to just... forget anything that's inconvenient to the story. Sometimes threads come back, sometimes they don't. Woman turning into salt, Stigmata Nun, David being see-demons psychic sometimes and other times not, Andy seeing a horde of demons in the house at the end of S3... there's a lot that happens that just seems to not really matter in service of the main plot.

I just roll with it, personally.
posted by Shepherd at 5:01 AM on June 16 [2 favorites]

Babies don’t stay in the hospital forever. (I was sent home after 24 hours.) The birth mom was a surrogate, who typically don’t stick around after they’ve given birth. I don’t disgree with Evil forgetting elements that don’t serve the story they want to tell. But Leland taking care of the baby at home isn’t one of them.
posted by emkelley at 3:14 PM on June 17

Ah, okay -- I think I'd just fully taken the birth mother to have run violently away from Leland and co., fearing for her life no less, so it hadn't crossed my mind that the show's intention might be for us to assume she -- in between episodes -- changed her mind and met with Leland to voluntarily hand the baby over after all, or called him up to tell him which hospital they'd run off to. (I guess, when it comes down to it, she was just that much of a pro at fulfilling her surrogacy contract, threats at her life be damned?)

And I get that there are other options for how the baby could get from A to B, but to my eye none of them are pro forma enough to represent a gap a story could usually get away with, because they'd all take some amount of...scheming.

But it looks like I might be the only one here who felt that so strongly (like, it feels to me like a much greater storytelling sin than quietly dropping something from a season back), so maybe I'm having an idiosyncratic reaction. (It's probably telling that I've been calling her the "birth mom" instead of the "surrogate." I wasn't imagining the hospital at that point (and Kristen, I guess) possibly taking it at face value that this surrogacy baby should belong with the contract-holders, but maybe the writers were assuming since that's just the natural way for a surrogacy to play out it's not such a swerve to go there directly.)

Or Kitteh had it right and I shouldn't have bothered thinking any of this through in the first place. Too late!
posted by nobody at 4:54 PM on June 17 [1 favorite]