Paramount+'s 96% on Rotten Tomatoes Supernatural Series Failed Its Best Character
Michael John Petty is a Senior Author for Collider who spends his days writing, in fellowship with his local church, and enjoying each new day with his wife and daughters. At Collider, he writes features, reviews, recaps, and conducts interviews. In addition to writing about stories, Michael has told a few of his own. His novella, The Beast of Bear-tooth Mountain, was released in 2023. His Western short story, The Devil's Left Hand, received the Spur Award for "Best Western Short Fiction" from the Western Writers of America in 2025. Michael currently resides in North Idaho with his growing family.
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It's hard to end a show with a lot of loose threads when you've only got four episodes to make something happen. This is exactly the predicament that Evil found itself in during its fourth and final season. Though series creators Robert and Michelle King have considered the last episodes the show's "fifth" season, it didn't give our favorite characters much time to process the impending End of Days. But there was one character who was hurt the most because of this shortened narrative, one whose entire character arc was thrown out the window... If your first thought was also Patrick Brammall's Andy Bouchard, then you would be right on the money, and we're still mad about it.
'Evil' Wrecked Andy's Life in the End, and It Still Doesn't Make Sense
There's no denying that Andy Bouchard got a raw deal on Evil. The show — taking a cue from his mother-in-law, Sheryl (played fabulously by Christine Lahti) — was always pretty hostile towards Andy. New ways were invented each season to write him off, likely due to Brammall's availability, which separated him from his family and often hurt Kristen (Katja Herbers) in the process. So when Sheryl and Leland (the chilling Michael Emerson) demonically fractured his psyche, we wondered if this guy would ever catch a break. Spoiler alert: he wouldn't. Though the Bouchard girls (easily the best part of the show) caught onto Leland's schemes, Andy was never the same. Because of demonic mind control, he very nearly killed his daughter Laura (Dalya Knapp), only to thrust Leland's poison into his own veins instead.
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes What Fantasy World Do You Belong To? Middle-earth · Grand Line · The Continent · Camp Half-Blood
Pick your magic, your crew, where you want to wake up and who you would rather be fighting, and we will tell you which world you actually belong in. Four are open to you: an ancient kingdom living through its last good age, an endless sea full of pirates, a continent that pays people to kill monsters, and a summer camp where the Greek gods are extremely real and mostly a nuisance.
💍Middle-earth(Rings of Power)
👒Grand Line(One Piece)
🐺The Continent(The Witcher)
🔱Camp Half-Blood(Percy Jackson)
01
What kind of power do you want? Every one of these worlds runs on a completely different sort of magic.
02
Who is travelling with you? Nobody gets through any of these stories entirely on their own.
03
Where do you want to wake up tomorrow? The best fantasy is usually just somewhere you would genuinely like to live.
04
How are you making a living out there? Even in fantasy somebody has to pay for the horse.
05
There is something in the woods. What do you do about it? All four of these worlds keep something unpleasant out there in the dark.
06
Who is the villain of your story? The enemy tells you far more about a world than the hero ever does.
07
What do you actually believe in out there? Every world hands its heroes one rule and asks them to hold onto it.
08
A thousand years from now, how are you remembered? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides your world.
The Map Is Drawn Your World Is…
Four worlds and four completely different ideas of what a good life looks like. This is where you belong, what it would ask of you, and what you would get back in return.
Middle-earth
You belong somewhere old enough that the mountains have names and somebody can still tell you who gave them. Middle-earth is for people who think the right thing is worth doing even when it will not be finished in their lifetime.
- This is the only world on the list where doing good is understood as a very long defeat, fought anyway, by people who will never see how it ends.
- You are drawn to grandeur, to white cities and deep forges and the sense that almost everything you touch is older than your entire family line.
- The Rings of Power is set in the last good age before it all goes wrong, which gives every quiet scene in it a slightly unbearable weight.
- You would take the hard road, and you would take it on foot.
The Grand Line
You want the sea, a crew, and absolutely nobody telling you where you are allowed to go. The Grand Line is the world for people whose main ambition in life is finding out what is over there.
- One Piece has run for decades on one very simple engine, which is a group of people who each want something impossible and have decided to go and get it together.
- You collect people. Your ideal crew is a set of misfits who were each written off somewhere else before you turned up and offered them a better idea.
- The world is enormous and deliberately ridiculous, and the emotional gut punches land harder because of that rather than in spite of it.
- You would set sail knowing the map runs out, which is more or less the entire point of it.
The Continent
You would rather be feared and useful than liked and useless. The Continent is a world where the monsters are the straightforward part of the job and the people are where it all gets complicated.
- Witchers get paid to do what nobody else will and resented for existing at all, which is a trade most people would refuse and you would probably accept.
- You have no real illusions about which side is the good one, largely because on the Continent that question tends to have a disappointing answer.
- The best of these stories are not about the fighting. They are about somebody with a rigid code being repeatedly cornered into caring about people.
- You would take the coin, finish the job properly, and be out of town before the story got told wrong.
Camp Half-Blood
You want the myths to be real and loose in the actual world, and you want to find out at about thirteen that you were never anywhere near as ordinary as everybody kept telling you.
- Percy Jackson takes the oldest stories we have and drops them into car parks and diners, which makes the gods considerably funnier and a great deal worse.
- You would be the kid every school gave up on, who turns out to have been built for something nobody thought to test for.
- The series is genuinely about friendship rather than destiny, and it says so out loud every time a prophecy tries to get in the way.
- Camp Half-Blood is the real fantasy here: a place where the thing that made you difficult everywhere else is the thing that makes you belong.
This is all preamble for Evil's final four episodes, which take things a horrid step further. In "The Fear of the Future," the first of the show's "final four," Andy was written off for the last time as an adulterer who threw away his family for a new sexual escapade. It came out of nowhere, and fans certainly didn't expect the series to wrap up this way. To say that this is out of character is an understatement. Sure, Andy wasn't always there for his family the way he probably should've been, but when he recognized how difficult being away was for Kristen and their girls, it was his idea to sell their business and get a job closer to him.
Andy was the one who always wanted to initiate healthy changes in the Bouchard home to connect better with his girls and save his marriage. Not only that, it was Andy who nearly gave his life to save his daughter from Leland's vile plots. Had he not fought the mind control, Laura would be dead. Had he not checked into a psychiatric facility, he could have been used further by Leland to harm his family. The way the beginning of Season 4 frames Andy is entirely consistent with his character. He is the type of guy willing to lay it all on the line for those he loves most. Yes, he has his flaws, but unlike some, he is willing to admit them. If only the writers remembered that in the end...
Andy Was Never the Cheater in the Bouchard Home — Unlike Kristen
"The Fear of the Future" presents an Andy that the audience doesn't recognize. Up until this point, we'd had no indication that Andy had been unfaithful to Kristen in any way. If anything, Andy's been more worried about Kristen keeping their vows, and rightly so. Twice, Kristen has cheated on Andy. The first time was in Season 2's "I Is for IRS" with self-proclaimed Satanist, Graham Lucian (Gus Halper), and later she attempts to sleep with David (Mike Colter) at the season's end. She makes no apology for this nor does she acknowledge that the former has even happened.
And here lies the real reason that the writers of Evil decided to turn Andy into an immoral cheater: the Kristen/David love connection. From the moment this pair met, it was clear that an attraction existed there. It starts "innocent" enough initially, but future episodes note that the other is all they can think about. When Andy confronts Kristen about her feelings for David, she dismisses him without hesitation, gaslighting him with "How dare you?" statements that ring hollow. She refuses to acknowledge her emotional infidelity, and Evil frames it almost as virtuous — or, at the very least, permissible. The fact that David and Kristen can openly tell the other they "love" each other (knowing that love goes deeper) while she is still married is enough of a red flag.
More than that, Kristen never gives poor Andy the benefit of the doubt. Cheating is never acceptable; there was still a choice involved in what Andy did, but the whole situation feels extremely hypocritical — especially since Kristen's cheating doesn't catch up to her. If anything, her choices throughout the remainder of the series only prove she wishes things had gone further with David, which is also confusing since we know she really does love her husband. When the show ends in "The Fear of the End," Kristen and her children have moved with David to Rome. The Bouchards mention that they miss Ben (Aasif Mandvi), but Andy has disappeared. It just doesn't seem right, considering all the hell the writers put him through.
Andy Could've Gone Out as a Hero, but 'Evil' Lived Up to Its Name
Again, this isn't to say that Andy's actions are justified. They aren't, especially if his mental state wasn't a factor. But, unlike Kristen's infidelity, there may be more of an explanation that Evil just swept under the rug. In her confession video to Andy that we see in the same episode, Sheryl tells him that, "Your mind isn't always your own now. You are highly suggestible." This means that Andy can be brainwashed and manipulated seemingly by anyone with sinister motives. So when Ellie (Anna Chlumsky) watches the video over and over, it's possible that she tricked Andy into a relationship. Only on a show like Evil would that make any sense.
You would think, or at least hope, that Kristen would work with Andy through some of this, but no. With no time left to develop the plotline further, the show just moves on with Andy deemed the absolute worst. Even Sheryl is missed more than he is. But writing off Andy as a villain to justify a Kristen/David romance isn't just weak — it's boring. For a show that prides itself on excellent writing, complicated character arcs, and delightfully demonic creatures, you'd think that it would be possible to find a more creative reason to wrap this whole thing up. Instead, we got was a ham-fisted exit that one could argue is kind of, well, evil.
Evil is available for streaming on Paramount+.
- Release Date
- 2019 - 2023
- Network
- CBS, Paramount
- Showrunner
- Michelle King
- Directors
- Michelle King
- Writers
- Michelle King
-
Kristen Bouchard
-
David Acosta
"Evil," the 2019 TV series from creators Robert and Michelle King, is a gripping exploration of the intersection between science and the supernatural. The series stars Katja Herbers as Dr. Kristen Bouchard, a forensic psychologist drawn into a world of dark mysteries and unexplained phenomena. Alongside priest-in-training David Acosta (Mike Colter) and tech expert Ben Shakir (Aasif Mandvi), Kristen is tasked with investigating a series of bizarre cases for the Catholic Church, including demonic possessions, hauntings, and miracles.
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