‘Evil’ Season 2 Episode 6 Recap: “C Is For Cop”

While it has all the trappings of a procedural, Evil has been able to mostly avoid the larger reckoning the genre is going through… because, well, they’re demon hunters and not cops. Yes, the Catholic Church has plenty of institutional evils of its own that the show is increasingly picking away at. Aside from Kristen’s cop friend Mira (Kristen Connolly), though, it’s been able to sidestep any controversy surrounding its portrayals of the police, while adhering to a TV structure that exists almost exclusively to prop up cop narratives. But by exploring institutionalized police racism in this episode, Evil is able to continue touching upon modern American evils and acknowledge the procedural framework that helps it work so well.

This week, the trio are horrified to hear that Bishop Marx (Peter Scolari) is forcing them to evaluate Officer Turley (Corey Cott) a white cop who just shot an unarmed Black mother in her car. He’s coming to them for help because in his mind, he truly believes he saw a gun when the woman reached for her cellphone. They’re disgusted that Marx took a meeting with the police union as a favor, but as it turns out, Kristen has a connection with Turley, too — his daughters attend the same Catholic school as hers. 

For her part, Mira is convinced that Turley is one of the good ones — after all, 70% of her arrests are African American. Anyway, she has other pressing matters. The police were looking at LeRoux’s wife Emily’s new boyfriend as a potential murder suspect, especially since he has a criminal background (Mira’s disbelief that someone with a criminal background could enjoy poetry and joke about Emily having a “type” in violent men are casually chilling touches). But this guy also has an alibi, so Mira needs to vet Kristen as a precaution.

She says Lexis was awake when she got home that night, and not so subtly persuades Lexis to lie and say Kristen tucked her in at the time of the murder. The poor kid is even more confused when her grandmother Sheryl encourages her to tell the truth, and leads her to an altar she’s set up to a frankly terrifying doll named Eddie. I have a million questions! Poor Lexis may have been created from kinda demonic embryos, but honestly? It’s her family who’s doing the corruption here.

Meanwhile, Ben is getting tired of his night terrors. His she-demon is here to externalize another insecurity: A controversial gene editing project he was recruited to work on right out of college. Kristen helps him get these encounters under control with a new lucid dreaming technique, but then a new dream figure shows up: David. So a shaky Ben asks David how to seek forgiveness if you don’t believe in God, and David brings up a tip from his 12-step program days. Seek out something bigger than yourself, like the ocean or a post office, and verbally own up to what you did while knowing that you’re part of something bigger. As David struggles with his impending ordination and Kristen deals with the fallout of killing LeRoux, I’m excited to see where Ben’s residual guilt about this genetics experiment ties into the rest of the season.

For now, the team continues dealing with some very tangible horrors within the NYPD itself. After reviewing Turley’s body cam footage, David pulls up recordings of the five times he was pulled over this year. One of the cops who stopped him has the same tattoo as Turley, which just so happens to correspond with a sigil on the big Vatican map of evil. Mira suggests they check out a cop thread on 4Chan for answers, which reveals that the police bearing this symbol dub themselves “the Protectors.” The trio assume it’s a police gang not unlike one in the LAPD, but Marx has another explanation — that’s what the characters in the popular police procedural Justice Served call themselves.

Police chief Louie (Wayne Duvall) happens to be buddies with its showrunner, Mick Carr, who scoffs at the trio’s concerns that the show could be influencing real-life cops. After all, the main character is painted as a hero but isn’t afraid to torture a witness or three. Mick insists that the show’s first season led to a 30% increase in POC applicants to the NYPD. To him, the characters are heroes, but the general public don’t want to hear about diversity and social justice. “You can go out there screaming ‘Black Lives Matter’ and a whole bunch of people will be with ya. You go and write a drama [about it], see how fast people switch you off,” he says.

Still, it’s more than a little suspicious when the jury clears Turley barely a day later Marx is ready for them to brush the case off and head to upstate New York in hopes of getting a priest being considered for sainthood to perform a second miracle. For now, the gang have bigger problems — Ben and David were stopped and frisked by the police right after Louie warned David about digging deeper into Turley’s case, and Kristen calls Mira after seeing a shadowy figure in her backyard.

Only it’s not a cop — it’s Leroux himself, who doesn’t buy Kristen’s insistence that he’s a manifestation of her guilt or a bad pill side effect. She wrestles him to the ground, only for Mira and fellow cop Anya to show up while Kristen is clutching the very same ice axe she used to kill LeRoux. It’s the same kind of weapon that killed him, and Lexis admitted she wasn’t sure if Kristen tucked her in that night. But Mira tells Kristen to say nothing, because she’s a “good person” — aka a white suburban mom with kids in Catholic school who’s friends with a cop. And LeRoux had it coming. “Some people deserve to die,” she tells Kristen. “Cops know that better than anyone.” 

It’s eerily similar to a 4Chan comment the trio found about cops being able to inherently tell the good guys from the bad — of course, the bad guys tend to be people who look like Ben and David, and the good ones look a whole lot like Kristen. Evil Season 2 has been bolder than ever in its critiques of modern American terrors, but by unfurling its own procedural DNA in an era where “copaganda” shows are going through a reckoning could make this its most explicit, timely hour yet.

Abby Monteil is a New York-based writer. Her work has also appeared in The Daily Beast, Insider, Elite Daily, Thrillist, and others.

Watch Evil Season 2 Episode 6 ("C Is For Cop") on Paramount+