Evil Creators Robert and Michelle King on the Series Finale's Last Twist

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for the series finale of Evil, "Fear of the End."]

Evil has not been conquered on Evil, but it has at least been locked in a cabinet. 

The series finale of Robert and Michelle King's supernatural drama builds to a violent showdown between Kristen (Katja Herbers) and Leland (Michael Emerson) in the Bouchard home. In a bitter struggle, Kristen strangles Leland and nearly kills him — which would have been her second murder — only for David (Mike Colter) and Ben (Aasif Mandvi) to step in and find another way. 

They drag Leland upstate to the silent monastery from the standout Season 2 episode "S Is for Silence" and shove him in the old cabinet that, according to legend, once held a demon. He'll be watched over by Sister Andrea (Andrea Martin), whose "retirement" at the silent retreat just got a lot more exciting, and Fenna (Alexandra Socha), the young nun Kristen connected with on her last visit.  

"Fear of the End," written by Rockne S. O'Bannon and Nialla LeBouef and directed by Robert King, pays tribute to a few of Evil's most memorable hours. Earlier in the episode, Kristen, David, and Ben reminisce on past cases while they burn their files to keep them out of the Vatican's hands. Meanwhile, Kristen's daughters find their AR goggles from Season 1's "Rose390" and play a scary new game called Mother Midnight, which preys on their worst nightmares and calls it their fate. 

Everyone is met with haunting visions: David and Ben struggle with their beliefs or lack thereof, while Kristen sees her kids being taken away from her. But her girls can at least put their horror to good use; they see Leland killing their mother, which gives Kristen time to get ready to take him down. As usual, Leland and his demonic cohorts in The 60 are no match for the Bouchards.

The wild episode ends on a note of relative peace, as David, Kristen, and Kristen's kids — baby Timothy included — move to Rome to get the Vatican's assessor program off the ground. (Ben stays behind at his high-paying New York job, but he promises to visit.) But this Roman holiday comes with a twist: Timothy reveals that he might still have a little Antichrist in him after all when he shows his mother his glowing eyes and pointed teeth. In Evil's final moments, Kristen hides her son's demonic features from David and heads to work like everything's fine.

It's an ending that feels classically Evil. After the show's unexpected cancellation at Paramount+, the final season was extended by four episodes, giving the Kings, the cast, and rest of the team behind the show the chance to wrap up major cliffhangers. This conclusion leaves everyone in a good place while suggesting that there's more to the story. (On Aug. 19, Robert King wrote on social media, "We want to make more #Evil. If streamers are uninterested, Michelle and I have committed to do it with sock-puppets at home.") But for now, this is where Evil ends.

"It's very sad," Robert King told TV Guide. "We're still feeling nostalgic for the show." 

The Kings spoke to TV Guide about returning to the silent monastery, baby Timothy's new look, keeping the ending from being too "Pollyannaish," and what fans could have seen in Season 5.

More on Evil:

• Evil's Katja Herbers talks finding 'amusement within the horror of it all' in the series finale
• Series finale review: Evil said it all

I want to start with Leland ending up in the cabinet in the silent monastery. How long has that been the ending that you've had in mind for him?
Michelle King: It came together during the writers' room for the last four episodes.
Robert King: One of the ideas for when we thought we'd have a whole fifth season was to go back to the silent monastery and be with Fenna, and Sister Andrea would come, and there would be some shenanigans there with the supernatural. These cyber miners, Bitcoin miners, are creating massive amounts of machinery, and some of it's underground, and some of the towns near it are complaining because the sound, the hum of it, is kind of infecting their brains. So we were doing that with the silent monastery, and it was a really cool idea and really fun. We at least wanted to bow a little bit to one of all the room's favorite [episodes], which is the silent one, without obviously having a full episode for it.

It's almost hard to believe that it hasn't been the plan the whole time. Where else could Leland ever have ended up, as long as he lived?
Robert: That's the thing. You couldn't really have Kristen kill him, because the whole point of the show was for her to be forgiven for this killing she did in the first season. I can't even believe I'm talking that way; it makes me sound nuts. But she was forgiven, and so to repeat that felt like it was [not only] bad screenwriting, but also not really in the spirit of the show.

Katja mentioned that it wasn't scripted for Kristen to cry when David and Ben stop her from killing Leland. Robert, I'm curious what your experience was like directing that scene.
Robert: That was probably our most detail-oriented day, because it was all little inserts of the feet — it was more shot the way you might shoot a movie, where you were belaboring little details. And Katja was very engaged with this episode about wanting to create a stronger arc for Kristen, where she ends up. So she had a lot of input. I thought it was a great idea. During one of the stranglings we did, she started laughing like a demon. She just went really wild, and we pulled back on that. And I think then Katja had the feeling that the other direction was a good idea. 

Going into that scene, what were your priorities for it?
Robert: That it be sexual. The two have such a perverse relationship in many ways. Whenever she does the most violent thing, Leland says, "I've never been more attracted to you." This had to have the feeling, as awful as it would be, that there was almost something sexual about the way she wraps her feet around him, the way she kicks off from the wall and hits the floor.
Michelle: The twin priority to that, and these two [priorities] could fight each other, is that it had to seem real, because it had to be a surprise when, in fact, it's stopped.

You've used Roger Miller songs for Leland before. Did you have "Dang Me" in mind for the strangling scene early on in the process? Or did that come from the music supervisor?
Robert: No, that [came earlier]. We always thought the best thing about the demons in the show, and especially Leland, is it's not a baroque thing. It's not Beelzebub. They're all Dick, Mike, Jim, all very American names. The best thing to do with Leland was to make him kind of a dad with his dad jokes, and for me, Roger Miller always feels like dad music.
Michelle: No music supervisor keeps their job and suggests Roger Miller.

There are some suggestions in this episode that Leland has been protecting Kristen. Why was he protecting her?
Michelle: The ambivalence of that attraction.
Robert: And the second thing is, they're parents. As perverse as that was, he does think she's the mother of the Antichrist and is essential to the nurturing of a demonic presence in the world. It's not enough that you be born as the Antichrist. You need, as he said in one of the episodes, a mother that is corrupt, that is evil, and that's what he thinks he has in Kristen.

The finale reframes The 60 by connecting the sigils to the regions of the brain. Where did that idea come from?
Robert: As with most of our crazy stuff, it probably started with [writer] Aurin Squire — although he and Rockne [S. O'Bannon]…
Michelle: I was going to say, I remember Rockne. It could have been both of them.
Robert: I think Rockne was the one that was mentioning [this], because we were already talking about the neural links that were mentioned in the episode prior to this one, and how this bringing together of computers and humans was not only perverse, but also dangerous… We always thought we'd end someplace where social media is the true evil, and computers, so I think we knew we would try to find that region. But with the mention of the 60 regions of the brain, it was like, "Wait a minute." And then the MRI of a brain was kind of in the same shape, fortuitously, as the sigil map, so it was a happy coincidence. Although maybe it's Satanic in itself. Who knows?

I want to talk about Andrea Martin, because I can't imagine this show without her. What did Sister Andrea bring to Evil?
Michelle: She brought a very clear-eyed view that more or less aligns with the church. And she thinks there is evil. She thinks there is original sin. For the most part, she doesn't have doubts. She is there as a warrior.
Robert: My mother, because my mother and dad went to Catholic school too, would always talk about the nuns rolling their eyes at the priests. The nuns always thought [the priests] were kind of prima donnas and kind of lazy. So we wanted to give that to Andrea. And of course, Andrea Martin — we called her Sister Andrea because we wanted Andrea Martin. I don't know who we would have gotten if we didn't get her. But [she brings] this sense of someone who thinks the bureaucracy of the church has to be suffered through to actually do what is important to work for God. She has no doubts about God existing. You know, she is one of the more liked characters on the show, even though, if you met her in person, you would probably not like her, because she comes into your situation and says, "You're going to be damned if you keep down this path. You're going to hell." So it's funny that she's so beloved, because her beliefs are not, in theory, beloved.
Michelle: And that speaks to Andrea Martin. That speaks to her facility with comedy and drama.
Robert: We knew we had something when she was taking a shovel and killing all these demons throughout the [Bouchard] house while having this catechism with [Kristen's eldest daughter] Lynn about becoming a nun. That's one of my favorite parts of the show ever, because Andrea handles it so well, and so does Brooklyn [Shuck], who plays Lynn.

David mentioned last week that the monastery is not good to nuns, but can we take some comfort in the fact that Andrea will have very important work to do there, keeping an eye on the cabinet?
Michelle: We can.
Robert: One of our instincts was even to go there earlier to see what she would be like at the silent retreat, and that she would be knocking the demons out of that place. We pulled back for financial reasons, but we wanted to see that she was living a very full life in this silent monastery, but without words.

In the last scene, Robert, how did you and Katja figure out how Kristen would react to baby Timothy looking demonic?
Robert: In the script, Kristen sees the eyes of the baby change color, and then David comes around the corner and says, "Is everything all right?" And then the eyes stop. And she wonders, "Was that a trick of light?" That was what the script was, and that's the way we were going to perform it, and then on the day — which, by the way, was the last day of our shoot altogether — Katja had the idea, "Wouldn't it be more interesting if I see this and cover for it?" So there's no question it happened, and that it says something about her character that she doesn't want the baby to be found out. It felt comic to us that she plugs the pacifier in the mouth to hide the fact that he's got these sharp teeth, and turns to David and says, "Yeah, nothing's wrong. Nothing to see here." It felt like a more interesting way to play this relationship that also played into the idea that in many ways, Leland wins in the end, because Kristen is going to mother this child. Kristen can't get away from her mothering instinct, and that mothering instinct, if you believe in the supernatural part of the show, is bad for the world. And she's going to hide a lot from David.
Michelle: And I would argue Leland doesn't necessarily win, because Sheryl had that baby baptized. Yes, you see, perhaps, flashes of the demonic, but like a medication that has treated most of the symptoms, most of the time, that baby is pretty angelic.
Robert: So glass half full, glass half empty. You decide.

I understand that Ben is making quite a bit more money now, but I still could have seen him making the sentimental choice and going to Rome. Why did you decide to have Ben stay behind?
Michelle: It felt more realistic that he would take the money, perhaps a little less TV. Also, they can honor a friendship [while] not all taking the same job.
Robert: Our worry was that there were such Pollyannaish thoughts about this ending, which was part of the point of having the Antichrist thing come up as this last [twist], like, "Oh crap." But it was like the end of a Burt Reynolds movie where they all end up in the Bahamas sipping margaritas. It was supposed to not be 100 percent that. To have Ben there, and they're all kind of [mimes linking arms] — you might have a freeze frame of them jumping in the air and kicking their heels. And we just didn't want that spirit.

In these last few episodes, between Mother Midnight and Ellie [played by Anna Chlumsky], there were a lot of possible predictions for the future, but ultimately none of them wound up being set in stone. Why did you want to play with the idea of fate without nailing it down?
Robert: When we knew we only had four episodes, we thought the instinct for the audience, but also for us, is [to wonder] "What is the future about? Where are we going to be in the future?" So to start with this woman who's a nut coming here and saying she's from the future, that she's their daughter, felt [like] a way to get the audience thinking about the future. We knew we were never going to, like The Leftovers, cut to 20 years down the line and put age makeup on everybody. So you just need to get the audience focused on, "OK, what does this mean?" And it's the same thing with Mother Midnight, which was about fate but is probably about a demonic instinct to make people despair, because all those four visions you see are about despair, about their worst nightmare.

Did these final episodes resemble anything that you might have pictured for the eventual end of the show, before you knew that it would be happening now?
Michelle: I didn't have an ending in stone in my mind, so it's not as though this did or did not resemble it. I will say, yes, evil has not been conquered in the world. So there is certainly plenty of story to tell beyond where we ended it. But that said, I feel really good that we were able to get these last four episodes and end it in a way that I think is respectful to the characters and the storytelling.
Robert: The only thing I miss is, there were two threads we were going to weave throughout the fifth season. One was the doppelgängers themselves. They were going to be characters that we would follow, of course played by our same cast, and you would find that these other people were impacting each other's stories magically, or even less magically, and [you would be] worried about that moment where they might meet. The other one was the courtroom, which we wanted to satirize with the work we've done on Good Wife and Good Fight — seeing that it's demonic too, that the judges are demonic, because it seems like justice has been corrupted recently. 

I know you've spoken about how you miss having an outlet to explore political headlines on The Good Fight. I'm curious what you'll miss about writing Evil and what kind of outlet it was for you.
Michelle: Similar to Good Fight, it was a place to talk about things that outraged us. They might be less political, but they were still things that were happening in this world. We'll miss that. And the characters and the actors and the crew were all top notch, so selfishly, we'll miss that too.
Robert: I don't think we've ever driven ourselves to hysterics in the writers room as much as on this show… This show was just insane. I mean, the glass ceiling was a joke, and oh, let's make it real. I think the best thing for any writer is to be able to take metaphors and make them real and have a crew of amazing collaborators who can actually create them. And that's what the show was from the beginning — there's no dividing line between metaphor and reality, because the psychology of the show is the supernatural. 

The series finale of Evil is now streaming on Paramount+.