Evil

Season 3 picks up where Season 2 left off, where David and Kristen kiss, despite the fact that he's a newly-minted priest.

When she died, she ended up weighing more; he speculated to Kristen and Ben that a demon left Father Ignatius and entered the nun. But we also packed in Andy’s return, Sheryl cursing him out to whomever she prays to, Dr. Boggs (Kurt Fuller) getting a lecture on the demons that possess him from Sister Andrea (Andrea Martin), Kristen and David sorting out what happened when she confessed, David’s sexy demonic dreams, and we’re sure one or two other things. It was a funny way to see the creepy Leland get a little comeuppance, even if it’s only temporary. Our Take: There’s a reason why we liked Evil when it debuted on CBS in 2019; it was the rare network drama that wasn’t stupid, which is saying a lot. Kristen, David and Ben (Aasif Mandvi) are assigned to supervise Dr. Beverly Swan (Ruthie Ann Miles) and her experiment to see if the body weighs less right after death. With Evil, that was necessary as the demons in the lives of its characters get more bold and, frankly, sexier.

Now fully in its streaming era, this show has a full handle on tone while putting each main character through their own true test of faith.

The longer “Evil” has gone on, the more that it’s fully entrenched the idea that its characters are fighting fundamentally undefinable forces. It also helps to have Michael Emerson (as the conniving subverter Leland Townsend) continuing to move through this series with a devilish smirk, delivering lines like “Trolls are the knights of The Father’s chessboard” with an effortless, eerie charm. The depth of this season also extends out to the characters who have gone from feeling like bonus cast additions to integral parts of the makeup of this world. In the early going, “Evil” also mines the strain Ben feels having to take on job after job, many with images that cut deep enough to leave a psychological scar. Even with a few extra words that don’t have to be slipped by Standards and Practices, the core “Evil” mission remains the same. One of the consistent strengths of “ Evil” has been its constant acknowledgment that faith exists in an untold number of forms.

Dr. Kristen Bouchard (Katja Herbers), who is married, confessed she got away with murder to the newly ordained priest, Father David Acosta (Mike Colter). This ...

“The Demon of Death” is a brilliant opening to Evil season 3. Kristen is a mass of contradictions, who has a nasty habit of speaking the language of love in forked tongues. Ben sees the whole experiment as a crutch for the church, and the commitment the actor brings to it is palpable. The scene is remarkably versatile, mixing a lukewarm undercurrent of sexual energy into the tide of cold vengeance, forever teetering on subtle slapstick, until Ben kicks it over with a fifth of Beethoven. Kristen’s home life continues to be a drag, especially her husband Andy (Patrick Brammall), but perhaps this is all part of Kristen’s mother Sheryl’s (Christine Lahti) most insidious plan: making the audience want to push him out of the house as much as she does. Yet, the creative team still finds a way to keep the uncertainty of the romance brimming. The too-short introductory scene between Kristen and Sister Andrea (Andrea Martin) is illuminating and comforting. The actual experiment is captured with the cold clinical distance of the researchers, in the midst of deep emotional expressions between Father Frank and Monsignor Matthew Korecki (Boris McGiver). The most cutting contradiction comes when the team applauds as the priest dies. Last season started in the aftermath of a killing; this one picks up the pieces of broken vows. Evil’s season 3 opener, “The Demon of Death,” faces the same problem which hung over the second season: a cliff-hanging, game-changing event occurs, and the characters have to deal with the consequences. A scientific team is measuring body mass against consciousness at the moment of death. Ben Shakir is at his most academic on this case, and Aasif Mandvi brings real gravitas to the argument.

Spoiler Alert. Elizabeth Fisher/Paramount+. [Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the Evil Season 3 premiere “The Demon of Death.”].

“As someone who did additions to our house, they say one of the worst things for a marriage is going on vacation together or doing work on your kitchen. Everything has to be explained in my head so I understand how to play it, but I don’t think that David understands what’s happening and once he realizes that was not exactly Kristen in there and he sort of completely, 100 percent thought that it was, he doesn’t know what that means. Elsewhere in the episode, Kristen takes a restraining order out against Leland Townsend ( Michael Emerson) after he approached her daughter, Lexis (Maddy Crocco), at school, and so he tries to get to Lexis by posing as a kid on the game Bumblebee Valley. But she knows who he really is, and her sisters join her in bombarding him with questions on the game, to the point that it drives him to throw his phone down, breaking it. “And so this tenderness between them and the respect of each other’s boundaries, although they were crossed for that moment, I think is quite caring and probably will make their love stronger and who knows what’ll happen in the future, but for now, he’s gonna marry God.” The next night, David’s in bed when Kristen returns to him — but her long tongue clues him in on the fact that this is not Kristen. It’s not until he talks to Kristen that he finds out that they did actually stop before having sex and she never returned to his room. Not everything is as it seems in the Season 3 premiere, at least for one of the pair.

Did they, or didn't they? That's the Kristen-and-David-related question of the hour at the top of Evil's Season 3 premiere. And we don't have to wait long ...

When the time comes and he’s actively dying, Frank is wheeled into the experiment; he’s placed in a container that kinda looks like a coffin with a window in it, and everyone scrambles out of the hangar to await the actual moment that Frank shuffles off this mortal coil. When he returns and can’t get in, because Kristen changed the locks and the girls are watching a loud horror movie upstairs and can’t hear him knock, he tries Sheryl’s room out back. He tells her he must’ve just been tired and confused, and then she says she doesn’t want them to be awkward together, and then they are both e awkward before she leaves. And the grave nature of her warning really resonates with the girls, who HAHAHAHAHA JK THEY DO WHAT THEY WANT ANYWAY. One day after school, Lexis is tooling around on her tablet when she clicks on an ad for Bumblebee Valley, an Animal Crossing-type online game. And it turns out that the cancer that was killing Frank is basically gone. We kept going.” She looks at him like he’s a little nuts as she points out that she went home, and he starts to realize that something’s not right. At a building that looks like a massive airplane hangar, a scientific team is looking into the notion that the human soul weighs 21 grams, and that the difference in mass can be measured by weighing a body at the moment of death. And she doesn’t even put her shirt back on before she gathers up her things and leaves the room. As David & Co. are discussing this with the monsignor, Leland is in the office, owing to his new position of looking into liabilities for the diocese. His hesitance seems to bring her back to her senses, and she starts apologizing. They take the action to the bed, where Kristen pulls her shirt off, and David is momentarily taken aback by the cross-shaped burn scars on her abdomen. The Paramount+ drama handles David and Kristen’s kiss and its aftermath in the cheekiest way possible, and we’re here for it.