Evil season 2 episode 7: How did the silent episode happen?

This weekend’s Evil season 2 episode 7 is unlike any that we’ve seen so far — as a matter of fact, it’s an outlier for almost all TV! Almost the entire episode, save for a few instances, was completely devoid of dialogue. This is a huge risk to take with any episode, especially for a show that was meant to air on CBS before moving over to Paramount+ after the fact.

So what there any pushback to doing this episode back when the show was at CBS? After all, that is a place where programming heads like to be more mainstream. Speaking in a new interview with Entertainment Weekly show executive producer Michelle King noted that executives “embraced” the idea if they could pull it off. She also explained how they were able to figure this episode out, once of course they had a justifiable reason for doing it:

I think it was that [justification], and it’s also having engines for the silence so the silence didn’t seem irrelevant. It seemed essential to the nature of it. It was, I think, a two-step process. One was [co-executive producer Davita Scarlett’s] idea and I don’t know where the other idea came from. It could have come from us or from [writer-producer Aurin Squire], but the first idea is a silent retreat, or a silent monastery where our people have to be quiet. But the other is if any word is spoken, that this demon will escape. Suddenly that became the engine, because then suddenly the silence made sense and wasn’t just an affectation.

Was all of this successful? In a word, yes — we’d argue that this is one of the coolest episodes of the entire season and the silence made it so that the entire cast and crew upped the visual aesthetic. You had to pay attention to the surroundings, to emotional tics, and also the eeriness that emerged from this monastery environment.

Related – Get some more news when it comes to Evil

What did you think about Evil season 2 episode 7 — the “silent” episode?

Be sure to share right now in the attached comments! Once you do that, stick around for some other updates on the series. (Photo: Paramount+.)

This article was written by Jess Carter. Be sure to follow her on Twitter.