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 from 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.
And… we’re back! Season two of the Exorcist television series exploded onto television sets in 201. The premiere episode was carefully calibrated to Girl Internet’s tastes as a heat-seeking missile. Father Tomas (Alfonso Herrera) sported some fresh, carefully-maintained scruff. Father-No-Longer Marcus (Ben Daniels) was butched up in leather jacket and work boots. Brianna Hildebrand arrived as troubled teen Verity, fresh off a popular stint in the Deadpool film franchise. Andy Kim, one of season two’s protagonists, was played by John Cho, who’d won the Internet’s Boyfriend crown through beloved TV series like Selfie and Sleepy Hollow. Yet even beyond the return of the eponymous priests and new characters lab-designed to tug heartstrings, “Janus” comes out of the gate swinging.
Its title is a clue to the episode’s preoccupations and perhaps the season’s overall theme. Janus is a Roman god of doorways and transitions, duality and binaries, beginnings and endings. Typically depicted in sculpture as a two-headed man, it’s easy enough to see Fathers Tomas and Marcus as two halves of a greater, borderline-divine whole. Marcus’s weathered experience and Tomas’s green apprenticeship sharpen this resemblance. January is named for Janus, and vintage cartoons show the new year as a baby and an old man.
Marcus’s mentoring style will surprise no one. Within six months, he’s led Tomas far afield to Montana and lassoed them with a grieving, demonically-possessed young mother. He proceeds to undertake her exorcism in the bed of a pick-up driven by Tomas while her family fires shotguns at them in hot pursuit. Oh, Marcus! Never change. However, change is on the horizon as the exorcists debate tactics. Already, Tomas is champing at the bit. Already, he’s developing his own ideas about how to wield God’s power.
For one thing, Tomas has something Marcus doesn’t: visions.
Throughout “Janus,” the younger clergyman is willing to step into Marcus’s experience and authority, a new and confident position bolstered by–of all entities–the demon possessing Cindy (Zibby Allen). This demon, not the most powerful we’ve seen by far, claims to have seen inside Tomas’s mind, perhaps even his soul… a claim he doesn’t deny. He’s permeable to the demonic in a way Marcus isn’t; does this also make him more susceptible to the divine? If you’re closing the door to the demon, he challenges, aren’t you closing the door to God? Tomas is concerned with being a vessel, but the recurring Janus theme suggests that he’s more of a doorway, able to see past either threshold and permit the passage of angels and devils alike.
This theme is carried out in fine dual form by the episode’s second plotline, which features John Cho. Andy Kim, a foster parent in Washington State, seems far away from last season’s bloodbath in Chicago and the exorcists’ current mission in Montana. His house plays host to awkward big kid Truck (Cyrus Arnold), softspoken religious kid Shelby (Alex Barima), aforementioned troubled kid Verity (Hildebrand), blind kid Caleb (Hunter Dillon), and shy kid Grace (Amelie Eve).
Grace is so shy that when she has to see people who aren’t Andy, she wears a pillowcase over her head: two eyeholes, a bow, and a lipstick kiss. Her ultra-girly room calls to the Rance sisters of season one, teasing audiences with an obvious possession case on the horizon. This sort of demon catnip is dangled at the episode’s outset, but soon enough, it becomes clear that any of the kids in Andy’s house could be targets.
They hang out in the woods. They relay ghost stories of an island witch (that might stem from Andy’s curiously absent wife) and dare one another to stand atop a rickety well-cap. They’ve got few people looking out for them and a DSM-V’s worth of emotional troubles. Most crucially, a social worker played by Li Jun Li threatens to disrupt the fragile family Andy has gathered, in no small part due to her and Andy’s past history. There’s no question that Andy’s story will converge with Marcus and Tomas’s–
–especially after a series of small handprints move along a church wall in Tomas’s visions and are echoed along the wall of Andy’s house.
After the critical success of season one, The Exorcist returned with ambition to spare, building up Marcus and Tomas’s mentor-apprentice relationship and introducing a big new ensemble cast. “Janus” positions the new season on sure footing, doling out tried-and-true demon shit (Cindy’s back-breaking contortions are nothing compared to the scene when an arm emerges from her mouth to choke Tomas) and emotive turmoil in equal measure. Marcus was always rough-and-ready and borderline arrogant, but a warmth now underlines his gallows humor as he jokes with Cindy about being married to the man upstairs. Tomas has never tried to hide his vulnerability, but now he might learn to wield it as a weapon if it permits him to do things with an exorcist’s power that Marcus can’t (or won’t). Andy and his foster kids are tailor-made for audiences seeking heartbreak and human feeling amid the demonic drama.
And with no obvious connection to the Rances–to Regan McNeil–how demons make their way to Andy’s island will be dramatic indeed. It’s this double-edged story, two faces with one soul, that begins to emerge in “Janus.” Marcus and Tomas are two parts of one greater whole, the church. Any possessed person is a Janus figure, two beings in one body. But what season two of The Exorcist promises is two stories converging, or one story beginning in two places: a collision of histories and personalities, beliefs and actions, that will surely unite some characters and divide others. With a flourish of “Tubular Bells,” as the climax of Andy’s storyline subsides, we’re reminded of just how many faces the Devil wears in this universe… and just how familiar those faces can be.
