Evil Recap: The Dog Days Are (Far From) Over
Robotic dogs may be a huge advance for humankind, but they feel like harbingers of the apocalypse, which makes them perfect fodder for the second episode of Evil’s final season.
At the top of the hour, Team Good sets up for a graveyard stakeout. Their quarry? A werewolf that’s allegedly showing up at a graveyard next to a church in the middle of nowhere. Things just get weirder from there. Read on for the highlights of “How to Train a Werewolf.”
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HEEL! | David, Kristen and Ben hang out in the back of a pickup truck, drinking and telling ghost stories. During a quiet moment when Ben has stepped away to pee, David asks Kristen if she was kidding about Leland stealing her egg. She says no, that there’s really a woman who’s having a baby in 30 days, and who even knows whether anything Leland says is real? “I’ve given up on being horrified,” she says calmly. “The world’s a crazy place and there are people who are trying to make it even crazier so they can control us.” David marvels at her newfound calm, but soon they’re interrupted by a) the return of Ben, and b) some noises from the graveyard.
Soon, a pair of red eyes appear among the headstones. David inches closer, his cell phone light leading the way, and winds up getting jumped by… a robot dog.
Back at the rectory, the trio explains to Father Ignatius that the dogs are used mainly for security, though the one that came at David doesn’t belong to the church. Sister Andrea notes that a similar robot attacked another nun, Sister Agnes, last week. David quickly puts it together: Sister Agnes is Black, he is Black, and since the robot ignored other people in favor of charging them, it looks like maybe someone is programming these artificial creatures to do bad things to Black people.
Ben calls in his friend who used to work at VidTap (we met her in Season 3) but now works for the company that makes the robodogs. She says the dogs weren’t made to attack, so if they did, it’s because someone is “jailbreaking,” or tampering with, the code. She says she’ll give them a new model so they can compare it to the one that jumped David. It’ll stay at Kristen’s place, because Ben gets all squirrelly when they suggest he should keep it at his.
ARE YOU DJINN OR ARE YOU OUT? | And why is that? Because he’s rigged his whole apartment as an experiment to test the conditions under which the djinn shows up in his periphery. “If I’m a trick of the eye, how do you explain the voice in your head?” it taunts him. “Face it, Ben: You can’t science your way out of this.” That phrase piques Ben’s interest, because it sounds more like something he would say than something an otherworldly being would say. In response, it grabs his head from behind with its spindly fingers.
(By the end of the episode, with the djinn still hanging around in the corners of his vision, Ben visits Dr. Boggs. When the therapist asks what he can do for him, Ben answers, “I don’t know.”)
BEYOND THE ENTITY | David returns to his room that night to find Victor LeConte skulking there. “The Vatican needs your help again,” he says, adding that Grace has become depressed since the monsignor’s murder. Then he gives David an address and some highly specific, ridiculous-sounding instructions on what to wear when he goes there. “You are needed now more than ever,” he adds gravely.
There’s a lot of weirdness when David shows up at the address LeConte gave him, but let’s cut to what’s actually happening: He’s tested and found to have remote-viewing abilities, or the power to see things far from where he physically is. “Are we the CIA now?” David asks his new handler, Dominic, the priest who is taking over from Victor. Dominic says Grace told them to test David, but David is kinda creeped out by the entire endeavor.
ROBODOGS GONE WILD | At Kristen’s, everyone is sleeping when Lexis hears a noise at the back door. She investigates, and it’s the robot dog, which somehow got activated and was scratching to be let in. She sees absolutely nothing weird about this and pets it on the head as she invites it inside. By the time Kristen and Andy come down the next morning, the girls have fallen in love with the robodog.
Ben manages to trace the first dog’s GPS back to one of the properties bordering the graveyard and gets in touch with the owner, Harley. Ben demands to know what he changed in the operating system, or else he’ll dump the dog in a landfill.
That night, the second dog somehow breaks into Kristen’s house and seems like it’s growling at her… but it turns out it’s just detected what it thinks is an intruder, but is really just Lynn sneaking in from her latest session with Sister Andrea.
David, Ben and Kristen meet up with Harley, who they’re surprised to see is Black, himself. He says he only messed with his robodog’s programming to try to extend the battery life, and he got the idea from some links in a Reddit thread. Ben deduces that the malware introduced into the dog’s programming isn’t racist… but it can tell what religion people are based on the apps on their phones, particularly GPS ones.
Soon, yet another robodog gets into Kristen’s house and is poised to attack Lynn — who’s listening to religious music on a Catholic app — when Kristen bludgeons it to death. That dog also belonged to Harley, who denies any wrongdoing. But Ben’s former VidTap friend announces that his messing with the software puts him in breach of contract, and that the company’s lawyers will be in touch.
SHERYL LEANS IN | Leland is giving an update to his company’s big bosses when Sheryl interrupts him and learns that the Board of Directors doesn’t like women. “You want to prove yourself… really prove yourself?” he asks. He shows her video of a very bellicose man named Greg (“one of ours”) whose demon is starting to peek through a little too much. Sheryl’s task: Bring him back in line. That’ll show the Powers That Be how well a woman can do the job, Leland purrs.
The man nearly breaks Sheryl’s foot the first time she tries to reign him in. So she regroups, goes back and cuts off his finger to make him heel. Then she brings it back to the company where she is praised and celebrated. She even gets a new office… which has a literal glass ceiling that is so low, she can’t stand up straight in the room. To add insult to infernal injury, the ceiling gives her a direct view of the wood-paneled room where Leland and the men of the company smoke cigars and bask in the patriarchy.
ANDY ARE YOU OK? ARE YOU OK? ARE YOU OK, ANDY? | After Kristen wakes up one morning to find Andy sleeping under the bed instead of in it, she suggests another visit to the doctor. The good news: There’s no sign of traumatic brain injury or anything like that. The bad news: His doctor thinks he’s been using intravenous drugs, based on the needle marks she found between his toes. Andy says that’s insane. Kristen demands to see his toes. “We tried a lot of things on our climbs, before the girls,” she reasons. And when she finds the marks there, too, she wonders if maybe something happened to him at the hospital in Tibet. (Which we know was really the closet at Leland’s.) He says he’ll ask Edward, and he demands a drug test.
Later, the girls find Andy shaking and burning up in the empty bathtub as he ignores the ringing of his phone. Laura picks up the call even though he begs her not to; Leland and the singing chihuahua toy are on the other end. After she hangs up, the girls sing They Might Be Giants’ “No” — a song Andy always sang to them when they were little — to help him calm down.
Now it’s your turn. What did you think of the episode? Sound off in the comments!
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