EVIL (the TV show, not the concept) (also here be spoilers)

I'm not really expecting "coherent," but as long as it continues to deliver on "entertainingly batshit," I'm cool with it. 

If they ever start revealing that all the apparently dropped threads actually add up to something, though, I'll be genuinely impressed.

This show is so silly and I love it.

First episode was pretty good.

- Cool new opening titles - not sure if this'll be a regular thing now or if it was just a "let's get cinematic for the start of the season" thing.
- Wallace Shawn was a pleasant surprise, but an even more pleasant surprise was Ruthie Ann Miles, all better now!!
- Was Leland's Not-Club-Penguin game really the endgame of the whole "daffodil" thing? After the Cheryl plot I was worried there was some sinister Manchurian Candidate crap going on.
- Andy is not long for this world. Poor, poor Andy.
- "Kristen has a forked tongue" would land a lot better if these scenes weren't color graded towards complete darkness, just sayin'
- Every character has a distinct and delightful mode of being mean to Leland and I kind of love it.
- No "next time on" bumpers? (I'll admit I skipped those.) Next week's episode is called "The Demon of Memes" though which sounds extremely good.

I kind of love the show's gleeful ineptness with technology. (Which I assume is deliberate, on account of The Good Wife's fairly sophisticated-for-network-TV understanding of internet law.) Everytime Michael Emerson says "doomscrolling" or "deepfake" with the cadence of a five-year-old who just learned a new swear word it sends me. That and when the show splices in random rapidfire PowerPointing of relevant imagery, which has a similar vibe. They really do a great job channeling the paranoid nonsensical mode of over-50 Internet consumption. So I guess I am generously going to say that this episode's half-baked take on Slenderman mythos sort of works as a pastiche of any number of hysterical news stories about how YOUR CHILDREN ARE DOING THE DEVIOUS LICKS!!!, and ignore that this whole top-down thing isn't really how internet mythmaking works and that even if it was this could be definitely be more compelling in the same way "E is for Elevator" managed to make a viral horror thing genuinely scary.

I'll withhold judgment on the The Dave Vinci Code B-plot for now, which I guess has a nice parallel with whatever Cheryl's up to and is maybe going to give us a way to tie up some loose ends from the earlier seasons?

So Andy is definitely definitely definitely going to ""fall off a cliff"" in Nepal, which means he is probably not going to ""fall off a cliff"" in Nepal - maybe Eddie will use the opportunity to load him up with de-aging brainwash fluid or something? I dunno. I'm always bemused when white couples on TV are like "no, we couldn't possibly send our four children to public school." LOL.

Well, if you're just going to answer your own question...

But he's there so we can make pools on when and how he's finally going to die.

I actually laughed out loud at the daughters' reaction to Kristen's "NEVER lie to mom" rule being "what if we have Jews in the basement? Or immigrants, because of Trump?" I think this show is astonishingly adept at walking a razor's edge with this sort of thing, by having this sort of comment happen in obvious bad faith (see also, Leland pressuring David re: the Catholic Church and race during last season) so it reads as funny rather than preachy or stupid. Which is probably why this Sheryl B-plot with cryptocurrency and generational warfare in corporate America reads as funny rather than really stupid.

Bit of a negligible A-plot; other episodes this season have given me the impression that the writers are checking the show's subreddit (e.g. turning all the girls talking over each other into a plot point) but this is the first episode that seems first and foremost responding to fan demands. So the sex demon thing is mostly an excuse to have an episode about Sister Andrea, which, like, fine, Andrea Martin's always great, but I don't think she's nearly as compelling a character as the show seems to think she is (to say nothing of the fandom whose love of her always confused me, she's fun but not really a deep character). Ben's sister by contrast returns by fan demand and I'm glad she has, because she rocks and gives Aasif Mandvi something to do other than occasional snarking.

So is Andy dead already or only about to die?

It's pretty obvious from this episode (and I'm sure someone on Reddit has confirmed this) that the video of Andy on that Zoom call is pre-recorded and being played back. I think he's dead (or worse) and the footage is a deepfake? But it could be a really funny fakeout, like, he just waltzes home and absolutely nothing weird happened.

This is also a great example of the way the show uses race to further plots - you think the plot is going to be about racism in the church, and it kind of is, but that's also an in to David's internal question of "if my visions are shaped by my experiences then are they *really* divinely received?" Really smart writing there. The "you're losing" speech is also great writing, or it would be if it wasn't so thoroughly spoiled by every promo for this season. Kurt Fuller is being underutilized this season - I think this is a consequence of the show having a 10 episode run rather than a 13 one. Maybe even that's too few - the Kings are creatures of the 22-episode network TV season, and I think he'd play really great as a supporting character who has time to have his arc play out in monster-of-the-week episode C-plots.

Kristen's incongruous sexy leather sofa getups continue to vex me, lol.

Yeah, it definitely seems like Sheryl is getting pulled further into the whole demonic megacorporation. The Andy thing is ...well, not "acceptable" but character-appropriate since it's clear they both hate each other. But she's okay with Leland fucking with her granddaughters apparently too, which...eurgh.

This was the best episode of the season so far, and the one that's convinced me that there *is* a plan on this show - I was worried initially that the reduced episode run would make this season feel kind of rushed, but we've crossed the halfway point and now everything seems to be, in hindsight, perfectly placed for maximum effect. The Andy plot, for instance: LMAO!! Perfect comedic timing here: episode 4, he's zooming in with the kids, there's looming danger but he's presumably alive. Episode 5, he's zooming with Kristen, wait, something's fishy here - is he already dead? Episode 6, he's zooming with Kristen but it's really REALLY obvious something's wrong here... here's the punchline, he's dead and Leland is using a soundboard! Except DOUBLE punchline, he's not actually dead, he's paralyzed in Sheryl's apartment!! Perfect plotting.

Re: Sheryl, it's a bit hard to say what her deal is. Not that hard - she broke bad but it was only her relative powerlessness as a divorcee wine grandma that prevented her from killing people, and Leland's talent in season 1 was finding these people and giving them power (see also mass shooting incel kid). The difficulty here is gauging how much agency she herself has had in this transformation, having been just a little brainwashed (figuratively by Leland's cult and possibly literally depending on what was in that goop), and whether she's actively trying to undermine Leland, which there's some evidence she is here (see her not-so-subtly guiding Andy through Leland's interrogation). She's a good metonym for the show itself - I'm willing to forgive her incoherence as a character on account her being so fun and so vividly acted, but I'm still holding out hope that she's genuinely good and not just campy fun. But campy fun is good in its own way, you know.

Really fun ostensible A-plot too - I think a lot of people are mad that the answer is always clout chasing this season but the show couldn't do the X-Files "was it supernatural or scientifically grounded!?!?" thing in season 3 without straining credulity, so them eyerolling when the A-plots are perpetually Scooby-Doo is probably the best storytelling decision they could have made.

If you watch on the app, at the beginning it tells you "skip intro and you will be haunted".

It did that on the site for me only on the last episode, The Demon of Algorithms! I laughed and did not skip the intro.

This episode repeated the frequent problem I have with this show, which is

I am amused by Ben's complete lack of concern at the end. "Yeah, they did dumb cult stuff, but I'm okay!"