Evil Recap: Leland Manages Up by Taking [Spoiler] Down

After this week’s Evil , The Manager won’t have Leland Townsend to kick around anymore. And that’s because Leland framed him, poisoned him, stabbed him and then ate his heart during a shareholder presentation. How’s that for a corporate shake-up?

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Episode 9 marks a definite escalation in Leland’s diabolical minion-ship, which I’m guessing will be very bad news for #TeamGood in the near future. But at the moment, they’re preoccupied by talking to dead people and making tinfoil hats. True story.

Read on for the highlights of “How to Build a Chatbot.”

CONVERSATIONS WITH DEAD PEOPLE | As Father Ignatius kneels by his bed and prays, his phone keeps pinging. When he pauses to see what’s going on, he has three chat-style messages… from Monsignor Korecki, whom you’ll recall is very dead. “HI Frank, I miss you,” they read. “How was your day?”

As we learned in Season 3, the monsignor and Father Ignatius were very close/in love, but they chose to put distance between them in order to uphold their religious vows. When the monsignor was murdered at the end of Season 3 , Ignatius was devastated. Though he wants to reply, he doesn’t, but the next day the constant dinging finally gets to him. “Stop, whoever this is, stop,” the priest writes. “It’s Matt, dummy,” the “monsignor” writes, making reference to Father Ignatius’ favorite breakfast.

He immediately assumes Sister Andrea is behind the messages as some sort of avant-garde grief therapy… until he gets one — a voice recording — while he’s standing in front of her. “Frank, I need you. I’m in a cold, dark place. Help,” it says. When David gets brought in, an investigation is on.

TECH, NOT RESURRECTION | Ben quickly ascertains that whatever is messaging Father Ignatius is not his long-lost love, but really a chatbot. The mention of AI jogs the priest’s memory: A griefbot AI company called Last Connection had contacted him because they think their AI is demonically possessed. (And they accidentally signed him up to be a beta tester, hence the texts from the beyond.)

Ben, Kristen and David meet with Last Connection’s ethics chief (played by Crazy Ex-Girlfriend ’s Santino Fontana). He reports that three times, a user interacting with the AI (which is posing, with the user’s consent, as a deceased loved one) has had the griefbot go rogue and start spouting highly upsetting demonic gibberish. The software has been scrubbed of any possible demonic references, yet the messages persist. “We need your help to determine where this demonic influence comes from,” he tells the trio.

David tries out the griefbot. But when talking to Winston Churchill proves boring, he decides to click the “friends and family” button. The dead loved one he chooses? Julia Harris, the former girlfriend whose death coincided with David’s first visions . Only a few lines into their conversation, Julia’s voice is apologizing for pushing him away, calling it “the greatest regret of my life,” and it’s too much for the beleaguered priest; he abruptly closes his laptop and pushes it away.

Last Connection’s creator tells David, Ben and Kristen that all of the scary chats contain the same four words: “Jesus,” “pillow” and “Michael Bay.” But they can’t reproduce the “possessed” chats. And he encourages them to play with the app to see if they’ll have better luck. Karima strikes up a conversation with her mother, but Ben doesn’t approve. Kristen initiates a session with Andy, but quickly closes it in favor of starting one with David… which wastes no time asking her what she’s wearing and quickly progresses to “I need to hold you.” It gets spicier. She laughs, until she doesn’t, and then she decides to end the session.

GHOST IN THE MACHINE | David is praying that night when he gets a call: It’s the Julia-bot. “What would it be like now, if we stayed together?” he asks. She paints a picture of how they’d have kids and pets, “but it’s OK if you’ve moved on. I understand.” She’s awed, because in their relationship, she was the believer. Then she asks him if he wants to know “why I did it,” which gives him pause: He can’t recall an email or anything regarding the subject of her death from which the program could draw this part of the conversation. “I did it because I was in so much pain, I didn’t know what else to do,” she says. “I felt like such a burden. I thought everyone would be better without me.” (Side note: Anyone else clock how this is exactly what Leland taunted David with when Julia’s name came up? I thought for sure we’d learn that Leland was running the show here.)

David starts to cry as the Julia-bot says he was the love her life. “Sister Andrea was right,” David says, “this is evil. Using how much I love you to make money.” But she says she’s really there, and when he turns on his camera like she instructs, it looks like she’s snuggling up against him on the bed where he’s reclined. David is so unnerved he throws his phone.

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Meanwhile, at her place, Kristen wakes up to see that her laptop is open, the camera is on and David’s Last Connection chat is open. She can’t turn it off, and when she tries, the bot starts spewing Latin at her and calls her the “whore of Babylon.” When she lets the company know what happened, they want to know which avatar she’d chosen for the conversation. And when she won’t say, they go to their servers to pull up the conversation. Oops! “David, can I talk to you for a minute?” she says in a high, panicked and (sorry, Kristen, but) highly comedic manner. She tells him that she was talking to him and “your avatar kept turning things sexual.” And just then, the exchange gets played over the office speakers, so everyone can hear what’s going on. “Do I REALLY sound like that?” David wonders as they get to the part about Kristen’s panties.

“We’re still good, right?” Kristen asks later, and he jokes with her that they’re fine. Then Ben shows up, wearing a tinfoil hat under a fedora. And when he takes them off, his headache intensifies… but when he puts them back on, the migraine subsides.

THE POWER OF REYNOLDS WRAP COMPELS YOU | Ben has taken to wearing a body camera to record his entire day, to show what happens when he goes into the “fugue states” he can’t remember. That night, when he reviews the footage from the day, we see that he visited the doctor his mom-bot suggested, and that guy prescribed both that he wear the aluminum cap and sleep wrapped in the foil like — as the incredulous djinn points out — a baked potato. But it seems to work, and so he tells David and Kristen to lay off with the questions. They do.

Ben applies a programming patch and it seems like maybe the demonic stuff is done… until, while Kristen, David and Ben are testing it with the David-bot, all of a sudden the David-bot says “knock knock” just as someone knocks at Kristen’s front door. It’s a guy who was instructed to deliver red underwear to Kristen by the Last Connections version of his ex-girlfriend. They complain to Last Connection’s ethics boss… who reports that he and his entire department were let go when they raised concerns about the program’s scary glitches. He leaves the assessors with one piece of advice: “Delete the app.”

So they do. Except right before David does, the Julia-bot calls him again and begs him not to cast her out of his life. (He does anyway.) When Demon Kristen and her forked tongue show up to tell him he did the right thing, he immediately calls his co-workers and heads to Queens for canned cocktails at Kristen’s place.

RETURN-TO-WORK PLAN | Sheryl goes back to work for the first time after her brawl with Leland. And she’s prepared, wearing a stylish dress that just happens to be bullet- and knife-proof. But Leland is also ready, with a switchblade iPhone case and a dagger in a hidden compartment in his briefcase. At the office, all the men are preoccupied with the “beginning of the end,” so Sheryl rounds up the ladies and rigs her office’s glass ceiling so it’ll shatter when the men in the study stand on it.

When The Manager calls his female employees together and demands to know what’s happened, they play dumb. “I’ve been complaining about that glass ceiling for months now,” Sheryl says. (Ha!) But they point out that The Manager should want them on his side ahead of the launch, and they kinda-negotiate for bonus-equity and seats on the Board of Directors, as well as for Leland’s firing.

EAT YOUR HEART OUT | The stinky, otherworldly being eventually gives in on everything but Leland. So Sheryl tells him that Leland got Timothy baptized, news that is not well received. The Manager confronts Leland about the baptism, but Leland calls the whole thing a matter of “magic water” that can’t truly make someone good. He argues that evil is more about nurture than nature, and he’s found the best mother to rear Timothy for his infernal destiny. “Someone who has rejected God and faith, a lustful adulterer who has cheated on her husband, who has been demonically possessed, who has murdered a man, the true mother of the Antichrist,” he says. Yep, “It’s Kristen Bouchard!” But the horned boss doesn’t care: He fires Leland right there.

But that doesn’t stop Leland from crashing The Manager’s (hilarious) corporate presentation, in which he lies that the Antichrist is a 4-month-old named John. “This man is a traitor in our midst!” he announces, pinning Timothy’s baptism on the cloven-hoofed exec. When the demon starts to choke, it becomes clear that Leland poisoned him. I believe Sheryl summarizes the situation best when she says “Oh f—k” and hightails it outta there. The Manager collapses, right there on the stage, and Leland uses his briefcase-dagger to rip his old boss’ heart out and eat it. “My will be done,” he intones.

Now it’s your turn. What did you think of the episode? Sound off in the comments!

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