This week Constantine had by far its strongest episode yet. It introduced a great villain with Felix Faust, played by Breaking Bad‘s Mark Margolis in a wonderful performance. The show’s stakes were high and personal. They revealed that Chas has a wife and daughter, then put the daughter’s soul in danger because of Faust. This made tensions run high between Chas and Constantine, making a really interesting episode.
Chas’s daughter Geraldine, played by Alexa Nisenson in her debut role, is an interesting addition tot he show. She provides a look into how much Chas is sacrificing to help Constantine. This episode opens with a scene of Constantine and Chas in a bar that’s lighthearted and funny, but the meaning of that scene changes when you find out Chas has a family and hasn’t been spending time with them. He’s being heroic in wanting to save people but also being neglectful towards his family and I like how they acknowledge both sides. Aside from the backstory, it was just nice to see Chas at his most active. I’m very glad we got so much of Chas this week. In the future he should be much more interesting to watch, even in episodes that are less focused on him, simply because we have background now.
I find the sexual tension between Zed and Constantine to be very forced. His comment about how easy on the eyes she is just felt cheesy. That said, she’s fantastic in her scenes without Constantine. This week she had very strong scenes with Chas’s wife.
The one annoying thing about the episode is that it was specifically announced that Constantine would kiss a man in this episode, then that turned out to be a friendly, drunken kiss on the cheek to his friend right before he went off to sleep with a woman. Honestly, I don’t know how they could not see how misrepresentative that is.