By Dee Holloway 
This serial column revisits The Exorcist television series. Conceived by Jeremy Slater for FOX and starring Ben Daniels, Alfonso Herrera, Geena Davis, Alan Ruck, and John Cho, the show ran 2016-17 and was generally well-received by critics and audiences. DIS/MEMBER returns to the show in the context of new Exorcist franchise films, seeking insight on what made the show work and why it’s lesser-known than its film counterparts. All screencaps sourced from Kiss Them Goodbye.
Ah, the innocence of youth.
This round of The Exorcist is shaping up to attack that holiest of American totems, and the most easily profaned: childhood. Not content with the comparatively safer ground of season one’s teen girls gone demonic, the sophomore season reminds us that in its source material, Regan was quite young indeed. The foster children populating Andy’s (John Cho) house are younger than Casey and Kat Rance… and, unmoored from their families of origin, coded as more at risk.
Of course, season one extensively interrogated whether nuclear families are safe at all, and whether church families don’t mimic and magnify the troubles of the individuals who compose the parochial body and clergy. Likewise, the raw young Father Tomas of season one is desperate to shred his salad days and move fully into his power as an exorcist. Of course, mentor Marcus isn’t so sure. Stretching from Chicago straight to Rome, the show’s ambition expands with a third plotline, that of Father Bennett (Kurt Egyiawan) pitted against a Vatican tribunal. Our favorite established players and new rag-tag family form an odd, appealing lineup of youth versus experience, children versus adults, and mission-field foot soldiers versus Roman brass.
It’s a tension that’s crafted through the travails of demon-possessed Cindy (Zibby Allen), whose devilish spirit coos that all Cindy ever wanted was a child. The visual metaphor follows Cindy from cradling (ok, and chewing on) a man she’s taken hostage to a hospital’s neonatal ward, where she in turn cuddles an infant. At Andy’s place, overtly Christian teen Shelby (Alex Barima) is invited to witness a lambing at a neighbor’s farm. Naturally, when the ewe gives birth, something is deeply wrong with the lamb.
There’s an interesting connection between the scenes, beyond their shared theme of birth; they both nod to the Alien series, a funny maneuver for a TV show with its own rich lexicon. After abandoning her human snack, Cindy skitters into the hospital’s ceiling duct system a la the Xenomorph. Meanwhile, Shelby’s lamb has a predator’s teeth, gnashing straight from the womb in a gross Chestburster contortion.
But then, which horror franchise has had more to say about birth, pregnancy, and deranged embodiment than Alien?
In “Safe As Houses,” the episode title is immediately and extensively put to lie, as Andy’s house comes under attack from all sides. The continued presence of caseworker Rose (Li Jun Li) threatens the house’s fragile equilibrium, as well as uncovering old dirt and drama between her, Andy, and Andy’s deceased wife Nicole.
The term “grief horror” was not as in-vogue during this show’s airing as it is now, but its themes encapsulate the surrounding avalanche of horror-media-as-mourning-vehicle cresting in the 2010s. Despite Andy’s good cheer, handsome face, and understanding nature, despite his attempts to make childhood as good and sweet as these kids deserve–his house, as Rose points out, is a shrine to a dead woman. Rose wonders how this milieu is affecting the foster kids who live there. She’s prompted to file a report on Caleb’s trip to the old well, fearing that he might be moving toward actual self-harm.
But Andy feels the call might be coming from inside the house… from Verity (Brianna Hildebrand). Her charmingly Internet-era goth-girl bedroom is bait some might take, but we’re not horror newbs: in The Exorcist‘s world, traditional femininity is more dangerous than alt flavors. Only two episodes in, the show is still playing coy about which kid will end up possessed. From what was established in Chicago last season, it’s always possible the answer might be “more than one.”
After all, as Father Bennett’s Vatican troubles show, where there’s one demon, there’s many. Despite all Bennett’s evidence–including being choked by papal guards in season one’s finale–the Vatican tribunal isn’t convinced. Cardinal Guillot (Torrey Hanson) is trotted in to put on a disturbing show: he enacts a purification ritual, swigging holy water with no ill effects. It’s tantalizingly unclear whether Bennett’s superiors don’t care about the Church’s demon problem because they’re long-time bureaucrats grown lazy in their power and embarrassed by modern-day exorcists, or because they too carry demons.
All the pageantry, as Bennett’s direct superior puts it, is both a narrative question (“has the Catholic Church been infiltrated by demons?”) and a metaphor for Bennett’s relative outsider status. He’s been adversarial toward Marcus in previous appearances, but now the true villains are beginning to shake out. Egyiawan is always a delight to watch–catch him in Showtime’s The Agency if you haven’t already–and fans who wanted more screentime from Father Bennett are primed to get it during season two.
(The cardinal’s show of purity rings especially hollow set alongside a scene where Cindy recites words of consecration. Throughout the episode, Christian symbols gone wrong pop out: an apple filled with maggots, a malformed lamb killed in the manger with a pitchfork. It remains to be seen which of these possible narrative pathways are red herrings. As all Christians know, the Devil can recite scripture, too.)
Fathers Marcus and Tomas, ultimately, are the connective tissue between the three-pronged season plot fully laid out in “Safe As Houses.” Cindy isn’t the most forceful feature of the priests’ current relationship; indeed, the Cindy story feels curiously like throat-clearing (despite a guest appearance from a young-looking David Harbour), the show’s pump priming to really embrace its core dilemmas.
Cindy’s possession serves as a crucible for the bad blood boiling between Marcus and Tomas. Along with his new beard, Tomas has grown an ego–and uses it to strike at Marcus’s ego, accusing him of jealousy over Tomas’s newfound ability to connect with demons. This isn’t something Marcus thinks anyone should be proud of, but Tomas seems determined to pursue it. Their exorcism of Cindy functions something like a trust exercise, as Marcus maintains control over the rite in reality and Tomas follows Cindy inside herself, seeking the source of her pain.
My Girl Internet recollections feature histrionics over this new deepening of the priests’ relationship. The more exorcisms they complete, the more these aftermaths feel like the morning after a hook-up. In the truck, after leaving a healed Cindy with her husband, the two men are awkward with each other, tender in the sense of pounded meat. As with sexual intimacy, expressions of faith reveal much about us, and about the people witnessing us.
Marcus is officially on the run, which makes Tomas a fugitive as well, and Bennett calls to warn them that the Vatican hounds have been loosed. With no hint as to what awaits them, Marcus points the car toward Washington State… and Andy’s island.
