[This story contains major spoilers from the tenth episode of Evil season four, “How to Survive a Storm.”]
There are few mother-daughter relationships in recent TV history as complicated as that the one played out between Christine Lahti and Katja Herbers during the last four seasons of Evil.
Lahti’s Sheryl, originally comic relief in the supernatural drama as the dippy babysitter to her grandchildren, became increasingly at odds with Herbers’ Kristen — on account of Sheryl’s personal and professional relationship with the series’ de facto villain: Leland Townsend (Michael Emerson). The shit really hit the fan when Kristen found out her mom was involved in a demonic IVF scheme, one in which Kristen’s stolen egg was fertilized with Leland’s sperm to bring forth the antichrist. (Ugh, moms!)
It would have been a lot to come back from, so, naturally, they never did. Sheryl died during the July 25 episode “How to Survive a Storm,” potentially earning some redemption for turning on Leland and trying to do right. But, as showrunners Michelle and Robert King explain, it wasn’t going to be enough that she could ever really share screen time with her daughter again. Things had just gotten too damn weird.
During a recent conversation about their series’ cancelation (and the bleak state of both Hollywood and democracy), the Kings got into detail on the choices made in this turning point of the final season and how it sets up the narrative engine for these last four episodes.
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Tell me about the decision to sunset Christine Lahti’s character.
MICHELLE It felt as though we couldn’t respect the characters and their histories and keep it going. It had to come to an end. For them to ignore everything that had happened up to that point and continue to interact with each other didn’t feel real to us.
ROBERT The problem with TV is the status quo — the feeling that on The Dick Van Dyke Show, they never can leave that house. That is an enemy of drama. And with drama, you always need to go bigger. When people clash and then come back together, it’s got to be a bigger clash than that one before. At a certain point, you run out of room for it to get bigger. You’ve got to end it. It gave Christine, for me, some of the best episodes this year. We could write the character as if tomorrow was the last day for her.
There’s been a great deal of tension this season, I’ve watched almost expecting a major death.
ROBERT What’s great with Christine is also that she does the comedy so well. I still think of that baptism episode, where she’s asked, “Do you reject satan?” She’s like, “Oh, fuck. Do I really?” Also that non-confession with David (Mike Colter). She’s so on the ball.
MICHELLE You couldn’t have had a better actress for the part or to film that scene.
ROBERT One last thing about the decision to kill that character… It would’ve been very hard to bring Kristen (Herbers) and Sheryl (Lahti) together again after the explosion in the first episode of this season.
Half of this episode was filmed after the strike, after you found out that there’d only be four more episodes. Was there anything that changed from the original script?
ROBERT We still had six days to shoot on the tenth episode, so the room did some rewriting. There’s a lovely moment of Kristen and David, waiting out the hurricane in an empty bathtub, and he says, “If I had two lives, I wish I had one for God, one for you.” That was written with the idea of looking towards those last four episodes, so we were able to tweak that scene.
Having only four episodes to wrap things up instead of a full season, are these final hours different than how you originally anticipated ending the show?
ROBERT Yes, it is different. The last four episodes are influenced by being canceled, too. (Laughs.) There’s a lot of content in there about this feeling of things closing down — of good being closed down and allowing evil to venture in. The very ending is different. And, actually, when Katya performed it with Mike, it got very different. She had some thoughts on it, which we can go into after you see it, but it didn’t end the way the way that I and I think Michelle anticipated because of some tweaks to her performance. We knew it was going to be in some region of where we end, but it all changes based on the day. If we shot three days later, it might even be different than that I don’t know if that’s consoling or worrisome.
I suppose it’s appropriate that these episodes touch on things closing down because it does often feel like the world is on the verge of cancelation.
ROBERT It’s the world. It’s post-strike. It’s what’s going on with politics. It all feels like we’re really in some end times shit.
