‘Evil’ Bosses on Andy’s Return & What You Almost Didn’t See in Kristen’s Bedroom
Spoiler Alert
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Evil Season 2, Episode 8 “B Is for Brain.”]
If you’ve watched the latest Evil episode, you know quite a bit happens. Kristen’s (Katja Herbers) husband, Andy (Patrick Brammall), comes home and gets a peek into just how much she’s changed. David (Mike Colter) isn’t getting any visions from God. Ben (Aasif Mandvi) faced his mom and his own disappointment in himself, thanks to a “God helmet,” said to induce heavenly (and hell-ish) visions. Sheryl (Christine Lahti) still has that creepy doll, Eddie, in the garage.
And at the beginning of the episode, as Kristen and Andy reunite and have sex with gags (“Why, are we kidnapping people now?” he asks) and animal masks, a slime goop melts from the bed, down through the floors, and to the basement. It almost didn’t make it into the final cut.
TV Insider found out from co-creators Michelle and Robert King why it was almost cut, what it was, and whether it will appear again. Plus, they discuss Andy’s return and Kristen’s latest surprising move.
What’s going on with the slime goop?
Robert King: I [almost] cut that bit from the episode. The worry, I guess, we were having is it was taking over too much of — the episode’s weird, as you know, but we didn’t want it to be weird and confusing. When we saw the visual effects for it, it was so real, the way it was burning through, that it just kind of raised all these questions, like, is there going to be a hole there in the morning? In our minds, it was more metaphoric, this idea of this luridness coming from the evil side and almost like an alien where the acid from the blood of the creature burns through the holes of the ship. We thought it would be funny and also metaphoric, but when you saw it and especially with the visual effect, it just took over too much.
Is it going to come up again this season at all or next season?
Robert: Possibly next season. One of the things that we’re playing with this year is the goop that comes off the devil’s cabinet.
Elizabeth Fisher/CBS
That’s what it reminded me of.
Robert and Michelle King: Yes.
Robert: And we were going to keep building up this goop that we don’t know what it is. It almost is like the ectoplasm from Ghostbusters, for the comic version of it. But you didn’t know, is it the slime that comes from a snail when it moves past you? So it’s not going to go away because it’s too much fun for us to do it. But I think in this episode, maybe it was one move too many.
I thought Kristen was drinking the bottle of liquor that she got from the monastery in the bath before, so I thought that was the connection.
Robert: Yeah. And we were all worried that it might be leading audiences down a puzzle route that is not as helpful to the show.
Elizabeth Fisher/CBS
I like Kristen and Andy together, though the poor guy is always so confused when he comes home and sees what she’s up to. How would you describe their relationship at this point, especially given everything she’s going through, and what can you tease about what’s next?
Michelle: It’s an interesting relationship because I do think there’s love there. But I also think that Kristen has changed partly because evil has invaded her life and also because she has really taken a left turn professionally. It’s interesting to watch a marriage try to find its equilibrium again. And the fact that he’s gone does not help.
Robert: I do think what is interesting is whether it’s evil or whether it’s a certain female empowerment — a man goes away and then comes back and the woman is probably now a breadwinner. [That] kind of throws off the man: Wait, all our functions have changed now because of that. And she’s so much more certain of herself, as we see what happens with the grocery store. So I think what we like is the idea of, you’re not sure what is this influence of evil and what is it about the empowerment that comes with being self-sufficient.
Speaking of the grocery store, it seems like Kristen’s doing things that people maybe think about doing but don’t — killing the guy who threatens her family, hitting the guy who cuts in line. And then there are the maps to kill people [she claims are from therapy as a way to deal with her anger].
Michelle: It’s fun to do something that a lot of movies or TV shows do straight. Yes, of course, the hero would beat somebody up, but typically they’re male. They’d beat somebody up in a grocery store or go and kill someone outside the law. It’s interesting to see it be a woman and also have one play with the idea of, yeah, that might not be actually what you’re supposed to be doing, even though it feels fun for the character or the audience.
Robert: Patrick Brammall and Katja have great chemistry. [Andy] is so wanting to get his relationship right with her that he’s worried about her partly because of their marriage and partly because he’s worried that her affections are falling in someone else’s direction. So it’s mostly about him wanting to straighten that out. We have such luck in Patty Brammall that we’re going to lean into that more and more over the next several episodes.
And those multiple people’s homes she may be going in for some murder?
Robert: In the cop episode, the ghost of LeRoux says, “once you’ve done one…” It is true. You’ve done one and gotten away with it because she got away with it scot-free because of white entitlement and white privilege. But the difficulty is that temptation comes back. That is the subject matter of the last several episodes.
Evil, Sundays, Paramount+
