yet another disgusting baby on 'evil' season 3

are children mirrors of their parents?

I wanted to do recaps for Evil Season 3 but I fear that a lot of the super smart things in the show goes straight over my head and they won’t be very good. Off to Substack my dumb thoughts go and I humiliate myself to 15 subscribers. On that note, I don’t have a theme for this newsletter. 1 dyke’s thoughts on television is terribly vague. Anyways. Evil is created by Robert King and Michelle King and is one of the best things on television right now. I am still upset over Gentleman Jack. I just watched Evil Season 3 Episode 8 and cannot stop thinking about its portrayal of motherhood. So here’s my half-serious recap!

WHAT IS BRILLIANT | Kristen’s (Katja Herbers) continued struggle with single parenthood. As we recall, Kristen has many fears regarding her daughter Lexis, who was conceived via IVF at the RSM fertility clinic. This fertility clinic seems to be impregnating women with demonic babies and Kristen keeps trying to find out if Lexis (Maddy Crocco) is one of those babies. She is never quite sure if Lexis is a completely normal kid or that her anxieties are merely a part and parcel of motherhood. But Kristen also hacked a serial killer to death and cheated on her husband twice. Evil does not tell us if it thinks that what Kristen did was right. Orson LeRoux (Darren Pettie) threatened to kill her kids. She killed him. What matters is how Kristen feels about it. Season 3 is hence about Kristen reconciling her propensity for violence with her status as a parent.

Nothing is black and white in Evil. We don’t know if Lexis did actually grow a tail, have vampire fangs, or danced with Kristen’s night terror demon (yeah …). Kristen hesitates for a moment before asking Ben (Aasif Mandvi) if he thinks that Lexis is devoid of the empathy gene because of the IVF procedure. Katja Herbers is astonishing in this scene. We watch as Kristen wrestle with the horror of sincerely believing that her young daughter is inherently a screwed up kid, and the immediate guilt at even entertaining that thought. The ambiguity that surrounds Lexis’ birth origins serves to magnify the anxieties (or demons) of parenthood — does nurture always win? For Kristen, there is no clear-cut answer as to whether Lexis is normal, even if nurture is what she ultimately believes in. After all, Kristen did murder a man in cold blood and maybe she is projecting own feelings of guilt onto an easy target. In order for Lexis to turn out good because of nurture, Kristen has to believe that she has been a good mother.

And we know that Kristen is very, very far from that at the moment. The self-harm scars struck all across Kristen’s womb tells a tragically devastating story about the horrific way that Kristen continues to see herself. Kristen has been let off the hook for the murder because she is a respectable white woman and a renowned forensic psychologist. But Kristen craves the punishment that she thinks she deserves and so she punishes herself — be it physically or convincing herself that her very own daughter is incapable of empathy. What Kristen is trying to ask Ben, however, is whether he truly forgives her for what she has done. She wants him to see her as someone who is still capable of empathy so that she can go home and still look at Lexis in the eye. He reassures her that she is a good mother. In a very Ben way he is saying that he does forgive her.

In this episode, Kristen’s ongoing anxieties about motherhood is mirrored by the insane journey that her missing egg has taken. Yes. Her egg was stolen by that demonic fertility clinic and was MIA for a bit. Kristen finally finds out that her egg has been impregnated into another woman named Valerie without her consent. OK. I found that fucking horrifying and this episode already has Ben digging out a severed finger from a children’s toy (still tame on the list of gross things Evil has done). There is a larger commentary here going on about the exploitation of women’s bodies and reproductive rights and the ethics of surrogacy that I cannot unravel right now. So Valerie is already eight months pregnant and is the nicest woman ever, which makes Kristen feel very conflicted about her anger over RSM’s incorrigible actions. Valerie’s husband, Logan, however, is another can of demons waiting to be unleashed. He pulls Kristen aside and tells her how anxious he has been about the whole thing because Valerie’s pregnancy has been very difficult. He apparently hears growls coming from Valerie’s belly and feels like there is a demonic infestation going on in his wife’s womb.

We instantly recall episode 1x13 when Kristen & Co has to investigate a possible unborn fetus that is actually the devil’s incarnate or whatever. So Logan’s theory may very well be … real. But what attracts Kristen to Logan’s anxieties is that she has long been toying with the idea that Lexis is inherently abnormal in some shape or form. It all goes back to nature versus nurture. Kristen begins to suspect that her genetics are the problem and not the fertility clinic which literally kidnapped her unfertilized egg for jokes. The dream sequence that we see in which Kristen gently breastfeeds a disgusting looking demon baby further confirms her own anxieties over her own moral failures. I thought it was a beautiful scene even if it is gross as fuck. This is Kristen accepting that maybe she is capable of horrific acts but that does not negate all her hard fucking work as a single mother. There is always room for nurturing.

But in an act of self-deflection, Kristen attributes Logan’s anxieties to the ordinary perils of embarking on fatherhood for the first time. This is coming from the woman who works for the Vatican and has seen demonic horrors beyond her scientific beliefs. Her negligence ends up in the bloodbath that we see by the episode’s end.

LOOSE ENDS | So Evil does not pick up where it left off, which is frustrating. In the previous episode, Ben was tricked into fucking a crazy cult leader who then forced him to think about his atheism and how that hurt his mother up till her deathbed. Religion has always been a tricky topic for Ben, and his hyperbolic enthusiasm over finding a genius group of scientists to help explain supernatural occurrences is disturbing. He seems to using science to run away from faith instead of asking why his aversion to religion has left so many scars. Never mind, we won’t know more about it because this storyline was dropped abruptly and we never got to hear about how Ben coped with the cult kidnapping in this latest episode.

Also, am I the only one who is worrying about the absolute kidnapped state of Andy? He’s being tortured and kept in an underground chamber awaiting potential murder by his mother-in-law and we have not heard anything about him in this episode? I feel so bad for Kristen who believes he is fucking off in the Himalayas.

FRIENDS OF THE VATICAN | I am glossing over David’s (Mike Colter) crazy fiasco with his friends of the Vatican and Chinese politicians because I do not understand it. The labour camps arc reads as a little bit reductive because who are the ones commissioning these sweatshops? American companies. I digress. But it does tie in neatly with Kristen’s motherhood arc. The cute fluffy toys that contain severed fingers and cries of help from factory workers also imbue childhood innocence with very grisly ethics. It is difficult to sell the world to children. I still think it is one of the weaker connections made in the episode and a little bit flimsy but this is a crazily ambitious show so some fallout happens.

There is something to be said about how David thinks he is serving God but he is really serving a bunch of nutjobs who also think that they are serving God and they all end up serving nobody in particular. It is a very smart play on the old adage that God works in mysterious ways. Yes, so mysterious that David is running around waiting for people to say things like honky-tonk and looking like he has lost his mind from compromising his celibacy as a newly ordained priest.

That is all for today. Sorry I took a sidetrack off the usual reviews! I will be busy with a new semester so maybe this newsletter may take a hiatus …