Evil Creators Robert and Michelle King Always Planned To Collect on That Debt From Season 1

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for Thursday's episode of Evil, "How To Build a Coffin."]

Evil's heroes are at a loss for words this week — and at the end of the hour, viewers might be as well. The fourth season's haunting fourth episode, "How To Build a Coffin," brings Kristen Bouchard's (Katja Herbers) family to the brink of tragedy, as Kristen's husband, Andy (Patrick Brammall), is nearly brainwashed into killing their youngest daughter, Laura (Dalya Knapp).

Since the Bouchard daughters foiled Leland's (Michael Emerson) attempt to kill Andy at the end of last season, Leland has been busy programming Andy to do his bidding. Reasoning that Kristen's grief at losing Laura will drive her to care for her biological son — the baby Leland is raising to be the Antichrist — Leland instructs Andy to inject Laura with a drug that will bring on cardiac arrest. Andy sneaks into his daughters' room in the middle of the night and nearly goes through with it, only to resist at the last second and stab himself with the needle instead.

The horrifying scene has its roots in Evil's first season. When Laura was rushed into surgery for her heart condition in the Season 1 episode "Justice x 2," Andy dabbled in Tibetan Buddhist meditation to pray for her healing. He offered up his own life in exchange for his youngest daughter's, and Laura's heart miraculously healed itself. Series creators Robert and Michelle King have kept Andy's exchange with the universe on their minds ever since. "Even in that moment, I think everyone in the audience was going, 'Oh sh--, don't do that. This is TV. That'll come back,'" Robert King told TV Guide. "But you wanted to wait some seasons before, 'Here it is.'"

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Although the drugs stop Andy's heart, they don't kill him, but it seems like the reckoning is just beginning. Insisting that he needs to get away from his wife and the girls for their own safety, Andy tells Kristen that he plans to check himself in to a psychiatric hospital in upstate New York. In a teary conversation, they struggle with a situation neither one of them understands; Kristen believes he needs treatment for addiction, but Andy is sure that whatever is happening to him is "something worse." 

"It was a very tough scene to play," Katja Herbers said. "I love working with Patty, and I think we're similar types of actors. We both don't really know what we're going to do beforehand and then meet, and we're able to surprise each other. He's always very present for me, and I am for him, and I think there's easy access to emotion because we're so present for each other."

"I know a lot of people don't like Andy very much," Herbers continued, "but I always try to find the moments of 'Why are these people actually together?' And I do think there's something good about that marriage — maybe the freedom that these two people give each other and the understanding of each other's desires."

In the episode's final moments, the couple promise to keep talking to each other, a fitting end to an hour about the way grief robs people of language. "How To Build a Coffin," written by Aurin Squire and directed by Darren Grant, introduces two new demons to Evil's spiritual ecosystem. One is a large demon of words, who grows in size as he takes away people's ability to speak clearly; as Kristen, David (Mike Colter), and Ben (Aasif Mandvi) investigate, they begin fumbling for the right words to communicate with each other. The other is a tiny demon of grief, though he prefers to be called Tommy, who burrows his way into Father Ignatius' (Wallace Shawn) side.

"In the writers room, we were all talking about loss and grief, and what was the physical sensation," Robert King said. "And somebody was saying it felt like [being] weighed down. There was no lightness in your life; you felt dragged down. Why not make the metaphor real: that there's this demon of grief who digs into your body, pulls out these organs, and stuffs in rocks to weigh you down?"

"And it's matched with the demon of words that rips your words away," Michelle King added.

The look of the unlikely pair came from creature designer Joel Harlow. For the demon of words, Robert said the Kings were drawn to the "comic" visual of inflating the character as he fed on people's language. As for the demon of grief, his design grew out of the performance of his voice actor, Fisher Stevens. The Oscar-winning producer, director, and Succession alum gives Tommy a hilariously scrappy, slimy personality.

"[He's] a little scrawny guy who's like, 'I'm ready to make a deal for you,'" Robert said. "He's always lying about what he's about. It felt like a funnier way to go for a demon."

Making a funny character out of the demon of grief lightens up a heavy story, but there's plenty more to Tommy than comic relief. The demon provokes Sister Andrea (Andrea Martin) by exposing her own insecurities, all while claiming that he's doing Father Ignatius a kindness, giving the priest the comfort of his pain as he mourns the death of Monsignor Korecki (Boris McGiver). At the same time, the concept of the funny little grief demon embodies one of the episode's points: that laughter is a part of the grieving process.

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As the only person at the church capable of seeing demons, Sister Andrea can see the wound in Father Ignatius' side, and she rankles him before finally convincing him to open up. In a terrific scene, the nun and the priest reminisce about their late friend — who also, according to the third season, shared an unspoken love with Father Ignatius, which he only confessed with his dying breath. "Very few people want to talk about people that died," Sister Andrea says, connecting the dots between the episode's two demons. 

Finding a voice for his grief frees Father Ignatius from Tommy, who climbs out of his side and gives Sister Andrea the finger. But while Sister Andrea stomps Tommy to death, it seems there's more than one of him out there: The last shot of the episode lingers on a little demon watching Kristen and Andy from the doorway of his hospital room. It looks like grief isn't done with them yet.

New episodes of Evil Season 4 stream Thursdays on Paramount+.