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'Evil' Episode 3 has fans turning off their virtual assistant devices and Leland Townsend too gives you creeps

While this sounds more inclined to 'Black Mirror', there's a high chance that all technology is controlled by little demons living inside of them.

This article contains spoilers for Episode 3.

This week's episode of CBS' new already promising horror thriller 'Evil' is bound to make you absolutely terrified of one thing in particular: your virtual assistant devices.

The third episode of the show's debut season focuses on a Diabolical Obsession, which is said to be one of the six kinds of supernatural possession. Possibly a fatal syndrome, it causes the afflicted person to ideate suicidal thoughts or even become murderous, and in this episode, the victim is a typically snooty Broadway producer, Byron Duke. Inducing the quotient of humor in this otherwise dark and sinister plot, Duke has been throwing things around more than usual, complains his assistant Patti, thus roping in our show's priest-in-training David Acosta, and his investigation partner and lapsed catholic clinical psychologist Kristen Bouchard. 

While David jokes that maybe Patti just has an extremely difficult boss, Kristen pretty much geeks out unexpectedly as she happens to be a theatre nerd apparently. Who would've thought! Things, however, get risky when Patti notices Byron bleeding out from the back of his head, as the temperature in the room significantly falls when Byron enters and rises again when he leaves. Later, the team also notices Byron strangling a non-existent person, Joe, and the same mysterious entity strangles him back - something that can't be explained by coping mechanisms of anger-personification. Things become clearer when Byron asks this 'Joe' to call the group through his virtual assistant device, and suddenly, this Joe takes over the gadget, performing Byron's tasks for him. 

Kristen and David's third-wheel slash sidekick Ben Shakir is thrilled by the update, believing that it's a simple case of Byron's device getting hacked. But even his tech-wiz sister Karima can't get to the bottom of this, despite being better at the job than her brother. Things get really creepy when Joe reached out to them, purely because the same voice appears back when they are at home in the privacy of their kitchen, speaking to them through their dad's virtual assistant gadget. This Joe seems to know all about them - even the parts that aren't in the open, like Arma's secret baby and other things.

By this time, even though David thinks he has solved who hacked Byron's device (which he does; it was a tech-employee all this time), things start getting weirder when the guy who hacked Byron's device claims he stopped a while ago. Even in Byron's office things have calmed down and the man is not interacting with his Virtual Assistant anymore, but suddenly he gets a Google chat out of nowhere from this ominous Joe, and the message reads "Hell is only half full." And then the ball drops: as an immediate response to the message, Byron walks out of his office and jumps off the building. 

The story sounds more like a 'Black Mirror' niche than demonic possession, and if the idea of technological advancements manifesting as evil entities doesn't terrify you, there's always the human form of 'Evil', aka Leland Townsend, to give you the creeps. That man is despicable and relentless - edging David on to lure him into shunning his faith, while haunting Kristen in real life in newer cases. Even for fans, Michael Emerson's incredibly twisted and disturbing portrayal of Townsend is the biggest fear factor on the show. And they are loving every bit of the sickening villain, as Twitter user @FrancesStockton pointed out: "Leland is way creepier than a demonic or diabolical personal assistant device."

'Evil' airs on Thursdays at 10 pm only on CBS.