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.
In season two, episode five of The Exorcist, “the Nikki thing” comes home to roost.
“There But for the Grace of God, Go I” is an hour of extremely high highs and wrenchingly low lows. With one hand, it delivers the canonically gay Marcus that Girl Internet had been waiting for, by way of a moonlit kiss on Ranger Peter’s (Christopher Cousins) boat. With the other hand, it gives Andy a terrible horrible no-good very bad day indeed. The Exorcist as a franchise is most famous for its depictions of and concern with familial love, particularly that between mothers and daughters. The Exorcist as a TV show expands its amorous eye to romantic and sexual love.
Throughout both seasons, the writing has displayed an awareness of how love differs between participants, and an interest in why love–a godly emotion, right?–is a portal for demonic activity. Season one refrained from any open-and-shut moral declarations where Father Tomas’s extra-clerical fling was concerned; it also suggested that Angela’s familial love brought her back from demonic integration. Season two portrays Andy, a man with love to spare, on the brink of healing from past trauma… so naturally, it’s time for that trauma to reassert itself in the harshest terms possible.
Is this like, a Nikki thing? Verity asks after discovering the bedroom we the audience believe belongs to Grace. Earlier in the season, Rose observed that Andy’s house is “a shrine to Nikki.” Andy’s overpowering love for his deceased wife has been twisted, it seems, into visions: a cozy, pristine bedroom overlaying the rotting wreckage of a life and a love. A little girl he wants to help as he’s helped other children, who calls him Daddy. It would be kinder if episode five brought these visions crashing down.
Instead, they overlay Andy’s material and emotional world; they intrude as violent thoughts intrude, loosening his grip on what’s real. Grace doesn’t go poof when her irreality is discovered–she persists in Andy’s vision, now haunting the frames of his interactions with other characters. She becomes a persistent jump scare, her blurry little form in the background of a scene splintering Andy’s attention, and with him, the audience’s. It’s an effective device, a heartbreaking one.
All this, we learn, on the anniversary of Andy asking Nicole (Alicia Witt) to marry him.
Throughout season two, the landscape around Andy’s house and the island itself have been positioned as possible sites–even sources–of menace. Even this episode opens with a lingering shot of a strange, worm-like insect infestation in trees near Andy’s property. Yet as it becomes clear that this is a haunted house tale, Andy chooses the relative unknown of wilderness over a place rapidly losing familiarity and comfort. He takes the kids and Rose on a spur-of-the-moment camping trip, removing them from the house and its demons for a time. It’s crucial that Father Tomas, the conduit between humanity and demonkind, enters Andy’s house while it’s empty… of people, at any rate.
Similarly crucial is the romance that blossoms between Marcus and Peter in the wild. Marcus is, we observe with fondness, a city mouse. A street priest, he’s rough and ready, at home with urban denizens, well-traveled among major cities of the world. But it’s only in the middle of a lake, under a sky with more stars than he’s yet seen, that he can unburden himself to a handsome near-stranger.
In survival horror, the wild, in the form of predator or natural disaster, is a foe; in folk horror, nature is often the locus for a revanchist cult mentality, of older and more violent ways being hewed to. The locating of horror in civilization, and especially hubs of Western civilization like cities and one-family homes, displayed by The Exorcist means that–for this episode, anyway–the great outdoors is safer than our beds.
In fact, according to Peter, beds inside family homes might be the least safe place for miles around. Over the course of their conversation, Peter relates the local boogeyman tale to Marcus, and the hints we’ve seen so far of “the island witch” appear to be knitting together. Some years past, a local man embarked on a killing spree, beginning with his own family. A daughter being elsewhere, he sought her out, killing everyone at a slumber party she was attending except her.
Still alive and now quite aged, daughter Alice (Christina Jastrzembska) relates her own understanding of what happened that night, with details that jibe for Marcus as evidence of demonic possession. Something that looked like him, she says. Wearing him like a cheap suit. It’s possible that Andy’s island… and now his house… have been host to a demon for many years. Tomas’s investigations confirm this as he searches Andy’s house for signs that Harper (Beatrice Kitsos) might not be as demon-free as the priests believed. The house itself turns on him in grand Exorcist style, with furniture hovering and paintings rattling. After examining Grace’s bedroom and picking up a strange chunk of rock, he’s gripped by visions of violence, past murders by gunshot and drowning that manifest physically in him. It’s a masterfully grotesque and troubling scene.
It seems that Andy’s kids were right, in part, about the well where they test their nerve. A boy drowned there after his mother pushed him in.
There’s a fine line that The Exorcist has to walk in its depictions of violence, one lampshaded by Rose this episode when she tells Father Tomas that “people don’t need the devil’s help to be horrible to each other.” It’s a motif revisited by other characters throughout “There But for the Grace of God, Go I”: Verity tells Shelby about her experiences at a Christian conversion camp. Marcus tells Peter about his earliest memories, paternal abuse heaped on him and his mother.
The intercuts between the camping and boat scenes are particularly poignant for the viewers’ awareness that, if Verity can move beyond her completely valid distaste for priests, she and Marcus would find much common ground. Even Glen Powell’s story, haunted as it is by demonic possibility, is also the story of every family annihilator in our violent country’s history. US culture is casually violent to the point that there are now certain media tropes for male mass murders: the family portrait accompanying a news report, the quotes from neighbors about how normal these men seem. Their loved ones, no doubt, would like to believe that there was something inhabiting these men, something puppeting their bodies, something that wasn’t them committing heinous acts.
It would be comforting indeed if we could blame all our pain at the hands of others on demonic possession–even Shelby falls prey to the moderate Christian stance that Christians enacting abuse aren’t real Christians but are instead evil. Yet as “Unclean” showed us, sometimes people just fucking suck. It’s the exorcists’ duty and burden to determine when people suck and when something is sucking at their souls.
It’s not as Rose says (and probably wants to believe), that she and the priests just got done convincing Harper that demons don’t exist. Demons do exist. They simply weren’t preying on Harper.
Andy is juicy prey, one must admit. A man teeming with goodness, his own brave face masks another haunted well of grief and longing. These are rich fields for demons to cultivate–but a different emotion is both more promising and also more foreboding. Andy’s romantic relationship with Rose has yet to coalesce, and there have been intimations that their past relationship was complicated. It’s possible that embarking on a new venture with Rose would close the book on Andy’s torment… and that the local demon doesn’t want to stop reading just yet. Now that we know Grace for the face of a devil, her purpose seems clear: to drive a wedge between Andy and his foster family, to bind him only to his demon.
Her child’s form has been a useful ruse in masking her among the human children in the house; her ploys are children’s ploys, too. She calls him Daddy, wants only to play with him, trusts only him with her human face. In the episode’s most horrible moment, she brings her power to bear on Andy’s real children through a childish device made devilish. It had to be a doll, of course! Through some kind of sympathetic magic, she maneuvers Truck into attacking Verity–at the forlorn cabin all the kids avoid. Slamming her doll against a wall in her bedroom, Grace controls his movements and we watch Truck slam Verity against the wall too. As Truck is a known sleepwalker, Rose at least seems invested in writing this off as a terrible accident. Verity defends her foster brother, unwilling to name any portion of her life as supernatural (a reasonable response to Christian trauma).
But the priests finally have all the puzzle pieces to hand. Andy has spent the episode dogged by visions–of an innocent little girl, of yellow-jackets hiving beneath his skin–and even his practical, applied fatherliness has its limits. If there’s one sin that can never be applied to any Exorcist character, it’s the sin of avoidance. Across the ocean, Father Bennett and Mouse are charging toward Chicago’s nest of demons full throttle. On Peter’s boat, Marcus is rolling the dice on his own demons, and winning big. Instead of shying away from his newfound connection to the demonic realm, Tomas is opening himself to its possibilities. And in his house, Andy is tearing down a false edifice built of real pain in an attempt to exorcise his child demon. For a moment, it seems that tearing apart Grace’s room might work as her doll worked on Truck, an act of sympathetic magic with a tangible result.
But she rises again behind a torn painting of an owl. Rising and rising, taller than any child could be, still wearing her brave face. Beneath it, of course, a face more beloved, and one whose appearance we don’t yet know how to interpret. The Nikki thing is here.
