And so, "...received the mark of the beast in their hand or forehead" may be interpreted "predisposed to evil in everything they think, and everything they do".
"My journey's end revealed to me a father who was evil incarnate, everything I had spent my entire career trying to remove from society," writes Hodel.
That's because the restrictions have little to do with concerns about public health or containing a potential social evil and everything to do with politics — the government simply wants to throw a bone to placate its conservative base.
Only the good (in other words, us) and the evil (meaning everything that stands in our way, that opposes us, and which we force wholesale into the sinister category of the enemy).
Thrillers are supposed to be high-stakes stories, an emotional rollercoaster where the protagonist is pitted against the wily forces of evil, losing everything that matters before ultimate triumph.
The overturning of these values was the work of a brilliant people enslaved: a people who had lost all worldly power and had managed to convince the world — astonishing feat! — that power itself and the desire for power were evil, that everything a slave could not attain was not worth attaining, that the meek would inherit the earth.
There is a moment when Jay, at the height of her fear, just gazes down at some strands of grass that she has placed over her skin, and there is a something dumbstruck in the way Mitchell's camera captures this simple image: it looks weird, alien, almost evil, like everything else around her. Mitchell brings off some sensational setpieces of fear and suspense.
We must fight against that evil with everything we have.
Especially with its philosophical inquiries into good, evil, and everything justifiable in between.
