Your Constant(ine) Companion: Part 8
Eps 8 and 9 — The Saint of Last Resort
Not been here before? Welcome, but you should probably start with Part 1.
Ha ha! You all thought I was mad to give this blog series part numbers while also numbering the episodes, but it was all part of the plan! Not a happy co-incidence covering for my incompetence at all…
Anyway, time for Constantine’s one and only two-parter, so we can expect to finally find out what the “rising darkness” is and Zed’s hastily cobbled-together backstory. Let’s dive in…
The art of the tease
A Mexican church at night. Bells ring and new parents cradle their baby. The husband goes to get a glass of water. Suddenly, a cloaked figure with monster hands appears over the baby and the mother screams. The husband comes running to find the baby gone and the mother with her throat cut.
They’re clearly getting better at these.
…roll credits…
What’s that coming over the hill?
Finally, we’re going there. It’s vampire time!
A sister of Eve, this ancient vamp has disguised itself as a nun in order to take all the babies of a particular family, but it isn’t eating them. Rather, it’s saving them up for an ancient sect of super-wizards who turn out to be the eponymous “rising darkness”. They want to merge Earth and hell and let the demons have free reign, and heaven is powerless to stop them. Bit of an anti-climax really…
Constantine Cave
After the credits, we open on Zed in the Cave, drawing pictures of an unstoppable demon that John says is thankfully extinct, but she’s interrupted by an apparition of a girl named Ann Marie who’s astral projecting to beg John for help finding the baby. John says she hates his guts, so must be desperate.
Constantine’s tale of woe
Ann Marie is John’s old flame from his punk days. She’s a witch who got John into black magic in the first place, but saw Astra die and was so freaked out that she joined a convent in Mexico. She’s sure John’s an unrepentant thrill-seeker, merrily putting people’s lives in danger for his own amusement. While John can’t disagree, he correctly points out that she still asked him for help.
Eventually, they snog and Annie admits she’s more annoyed that John cheated on her than about Astra. She only became a nun as penance for having introduced John to the supernatural in the first place, leading to his damnation.
Worst… detective… ever
Anyway, down Mexico way, John tries a spell to determine who took the child, but it explodes as the vampire covered her tracks. This tells John that the vampire has more in mind than just gobbling the kid up, so he goes to look for the mother’s placenta to do another spell. It was buried in her garden, as per the tradition, but the tree above it is now growing pears made of skin and blood, which is deliciously gruesome.
John pulls out the big guns and casts a spell to identify the vampire. As he does, a nun interrupts him and we appear to see her reflection instead of the identity of the vampire. Just when we think John’s fooled, he confronts the nun and uses a spell to remove her disguise before driving her off.
I don’t know if it’s an intentional double-bluff, but it works well, impressing you just when you were groaning about how stupid John was being. Seems all the best episodes have John at his best too.
Dick move, John
This, of course, is when John pulls another “Gary”, and asks Annie to bait the vampire by posing as a mother offering up a chicken carcass filled with blood disguised as a baby. This is dodgy enough without putting the love of his life in danger too.
It works, though, and John manages to banish the vampire by summoning the actual demon from The Exorcist to take her out. For no reason I can discern, however, the unbeatable demon from Zed’s dreams turns up out of the blue. It would be a nice effect if it didn’t look exactly like the Licker from Resident Evil.
In a slightly-forced twist, Annie decides to shoot John, leaving him as bait for the demon while she escapes to save the babies. John admires her moxy, but it makes what John did to Gary look like Marquis of Queensbury rules.
We end part one on a cliffhanger as John lays dying…
Episode one obligatory underwear shot
While all of this is going on, Zed is inadvisably exploring the Constantine Cave and finds a ridiculous door to nowhere as an excuse for her to lean over and show off her whale tail, though it will become relevant later…
…the door, not the thong…
Liv die
Despite John’s advice to stay at the Cave, Zed heads out to an art store, runs into the life model from the last episode, takes him to a bar and then heads back to her place. Well, she has already seen him naked…
Thankfully, Zed’s being competent this episode too and sees right through the guy, thanks to her visions. She gets the drop on him, knocking him out with a right cross. Nice work Zed, or Mary, as the model explains is her real name.
Turns out he’s just a pawn though, as two heavies turn up, kill him and try to take Zed back to her father, who apparently kept her locked up for her entire childhood in order to use her visions for eeeevil. Zed uses the door to nowhere to dispatch one of the henchmen, but gets grabbed by the other, who throws her in a van and tries to take her back to her father.
Zed tricks the guy and beats the shit out of him, stealing the van and heading home. Bit of an anti-climax… again…
Exposition Manny
John, meanwhile, has a plan up his sleeve — his wrist, which he burns with the magic medallion he used to banish the vamp, allowing the demon to possess and heal him, driving off the Resident Evil thing. Manny pops up to tell John off for turning to the dark side for help, then stomps off...
…Manny is a twat…
John blacks out and wakes up in the middle of a pile of mauled gangbangers he’s apparently butchered with his demon powers, surrounded by riot police, who haul him off to jail. That escalated quickly…
Episode two obligatory underwear shot
Chas calls Zed, who is more than happy to peg it to Mexico away from her dad’s thugs. The duo decide to guilt trip Annie into helping them exorcise John and the three break John out of prison by casting an astral projection of a topless Annie to distract the guards. As you do…
They take John all the way back to the Cave to save money on sets and start up the exorcism. Exorcist Demon taunts Annie into screwing up the ritual before Zed convinces her that she shouldn’t blame herself for turning John into a dick and she manages to finish the demon off.
John tells Annie he’s sorry for everything and asks her to stay. She essentially tells him to get fucked in a truly unpleasant way. Seriously, Constantine, take Chas, ditch the both of them and go find Liv, mate. You’d be better off.
Chas gets fragged
In the prison, a random snake monster hired by the “rising darkness” shows up to kill John and frags Chas before getting killed by Annie. It’s not really relevant to the plot, but not much is in episode two.
Just use a pin, love!
As a side point, thankfully, this episode still spares us the stupid map. Once again, I find myself hoping they’ve dropped the trope and the plots are now starting to develop from the characters, rather than as an anthology of map quests. This ain’t Skyrim…
Constantine’s bag of tricks
Relatedly, we haven’t seen anything from John’s utility belt for episodes now, so that trope also went the distance then…
WTF lines
Annie starts out accusing John of being unaffected by Astra’s death and asking if he’s heard from Gary, but later he casually mentions the asylum and she accuses him of using her the way he used Gary. When exactly was all that information imparted?
Damnation
Why is this show so insistent on using up all its best ideas in quick throwaways and clinging onto the worst ones? Instead of the wonderfully-threatening fallen angel from last episode, the “rising darkness” turns out to be a bunch of old wizards who we have still yet to meet. Maybe they were just scared to tread familiar ground with all the angel movies and TV shows that have popped up recently.
On the other hand, this two-parter suffers from the curse of so many second parts failing to live up to the first. This kind of TV isn’t written to span more than one episode and normally two-parters end up feeling like a single episode stretched to twice the length with an arbitrary cliffhanger inserted at the midway mark.
Constantine’s, however, feels like a complete, independent episode with an arbitrary cliffhanger added, then a second episode of filler tagged on the end. Taken alone, the first part is actually a really good episode, with plenty of character stuff and a great atmosphere. Then a second villain shows up for no reason, Annie betrays John for no reason and John gets possessed for no reason. Then the second part immediately wraps up Zed’s plot, meanders around John’s possession, then resets the whole thing so it becomes entirely meaningless.
Other than Annie holding her own boobs, there is genuinely nothing to see in part two. You’re better off skipping the last five minutes of part one and the next episode entirely.
Let’s hope part two doesn’t break the show’s current run of watchable episodes. We’ll find out next time…