Evil Season 3 Episode 4 Review: The Demon of the Road
Evil Season 3 Episode 4, “The Demon of the Road,” brings the rest of the series into context with a revelation on the road.
In a lot of respects, this feels the closest that Evil has ever come to be the successor for The X-Files. This isn’t the first time that it has operated in that vein and, of course, the latter has always strongly informed the former. In that sense, it isn’t surprising that the same general vibe is reached here.
Where this comes through is in two particular areas. The first is that the case of the week is very small town spooky, which is something that The X-Files often excelled in. The scenes in the car especially harken back to its series premiere where Mulder and Scully experience lost time.
To be fair, something like Supernatural operated similarly but the emphasis there was horror and this is creepiness or tension. The episode wants that to be where it lies and for our attention to be focused on that.
Like a lot of the cases on Evil, this doesn’t tie up with a bow that is neat and tidy. It addresses what happened in their car but it doesn’t really extend that to explain Jason’s behavior or how the drone could affect him on a scientific level.
This brings in the second part of The X-Files’ influence on the episode. It’s more on the way that the mythology is explored. Like the predecessor, we have a shadowy figure, Victor Leconte, explaining the overarching plot up to this point.
It’s this large and simple way to spell out what has been happening that can be used to easily define what has been happening. It’s an all-encompassing umbrella that we can put the entire show under.
As an answer, it’s fairly effective, especially if we can just point to demonic house and sigils fully in the future.
Like The X-Files, it’s also woefully imperfect. More often than not, the more a show attempts to explain itself, the less sense it will ultimately make. What the episode postulates is that all of their cases have been the results of the demonic houses, in one way or another.
During the first season, Evil explained some of its cases away by attributing it to an evil fertility clinic and now this new revelation doesn’t really square one with the other. A possible explanation is that the clinic is the product of one of the houses but that feels like too much of a leap at this rate.
What did you think of this episode of Evil? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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Evil airs Sundays on Paramount+.
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Drew Koenig
Drew has an ongoing, borderline unhealthy obsession with pop culture, but with television in particular. When he's not aggressively trying to get out of a perpetual state of catching up, he can be found passionately defending the ending of Lost. More of his online work can be found at The Lost Cause and he also co-hosts The Lost Cause Pod.