This week’s Constantine was an improvement, but I’m still waiting for them to really suck me in. The plot was a bit stronger than the previous episodes. This was the first episode with a plot lifted somewhat directly from a Hellblazer comic and the overall story and pacing basically worked.
The episode opens with Gary Lester going through an airport customs, sweaty and extremely conspicuous.
Later, Gary Lester tires to visit Constantine but gets caught in his “zero gravity trap”, which provides a cool little moment. They talk about how Constantine hasn’t seen him since Newcastle. Throughout this episode, these guys have a serious ex-lovers vibe, which is weird since NBC has explicitly said they wouldn’t be incorporating Constnatine’s bisexuality into the show. Since Gary Lester has arrived, the apartment has been crawling with insects. He tells Constantine a story about how tried to perform a banishment on someone possessed by a demon in Sudan, but it was above his pay grade and went wrong.
Whatever Gary Lester brought with him is spreading, a woman goes to a sink and a huge swarm of cockroaches crawl out of it. After this encounter, she has the symptoms we saw earlier– a need to eat everything in sight and violent tendencies. Constantine watches the news report on this woman and says that it sounds like a Hunger Demon. Gary Lester wants to help Constantine fight it, but he won’t let him. He insists to Zed that people never change, saying, “We are who we are. Eventually.” Yeah, that’s Constantine‘s level of dialogue.
After trying to fight it, Constantine discovers that its stronger than any Hunger Demon he’s ever encountered. They also discover that when Zed touches Gary Lester, she picks up his withdrawal symptoms.
The show got really nasty this episode, with Constantine performing a ceremony that involved letting someone take out his eyeball. It was weird and unnecessary and felt like the show just wanted to prove how dark it could be without actually being interesting.
Gary Lester talks to Constantine about how things went wrong with Astrid in Newcastle. After an emotional speech, Constantine tells him that he doesn’t blame him and it wasn’t his fault. It’s a pretty good emotional scene. He says, “We’ve got a demon to catch…together.”
They have to break into a museum and Constantine puts the guard under mind control and makes him dance around for a bit. It doesn’t really work with the overall tone.
In the end, Gary Lester and Constantine both know that Gary Lester has to sacrifice himself. It’s a sad ending and the first time a Constantine episode has really had a big pay off.
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