Saturday, December 13, 2014

Constantine 1.08: "The Saint of Last Resorts Part 1"

“Just because I’m not hiding in a nunnery don’t mean I’m ignoring my debts.”
- Constantine

Welcome to the fall finale, gang. From what I understand it’s supposed to be the first half of a two-parter which is kind of exciting. We begin in a convent in Mexico City where a woman has just given birth to a little boy. A nun named Ann Marie shows up with some candy that the mother requested and then goes on her rounds. She starts hearing noises and runs into another sister before hearing screams. She finds the baby gone and the mother’s throat ripped out. Back in Atlanta Zed is back to drawing stuff and it looks like she’s drawing monsters from way back from when she touched Imogen’s heart. She is just about to take a break when Ann Marie appears in sort of spirit form and begs Constantine for help. He agrees but only because he apparently owes her. See, she hates him for some reason and as we cut to our first commercial break we see Ann Marie in Mexico holding an old photo of her and John from back in their wild youth.

Chaz is going to accompany Constantine on his trip south of the border, while Zed is to remain at home and recuperate some more. OF course, both she and Chaz needle Constantine about leaving the fluent Spanish speaker at home. But while the boys are off to the convent (which is quite the shock) Zed has her own drama to deal with. The house is kind of creepy and she ends up following noises to a door that leads nowhere. So of course, she decides to hit the art supply store for some more paint and runs into the male model. She agrees to a drink with him and then sees him in a white coat with a big door locked behind him (like she saw with the guy in New Orleans…but not the same vision). So she invites him back to her place. I want to believe she’s got a plan or something but right now she’s acting pretty stupid. I was only partly right. She did have a plan and she ties the guy up after he is spouting off about her father wanting her home and he calls her Mary. But before she can interrogate him much (it seems like her family has sort of a creepy crusader cult following), two more people show up. See if she hadn’t left the house they couldn’t have gotten in! She gets the model shot and she ends up losing one of the other baddies through the door to nowhere. But she’s still got the big guy with the gun to contend with. Unfortunately, he one ups her and drugs her.

Not only do they have to find out what the nasty beast is that nabbed the baby but it looks like Ann Marie and Constantine have some things to work out from their past. While Constantine voluntarily committed himself to an asylum, Ann Marie took her vows to try and repent for what happened at the séance in Newcastle. Interestingly, Constantine makes no mention of his commitment or Gary being dead. I suppose it probably doesn’t help the situation. Oh and apparently Ann Marie and Constantine had a one night stand before he snuck out to troll for other chicks. Not the best move Johnny boy. When their rune reading goes awry, Constantine and Ann Marie go to find the baby’s placenta so they can determine if the baby is alive. Just as they dig up the placenta (which let’s be honest is kind of creepy that you’d keep it), the tree it’s buried under starts bearing human fruit which is super gross. But it is enough to clue Constantine into the murderer/kidnapper’s identity.

So apparently Adam and Eve weren’t the only first humans. Eve had several sisters and they turned down Adam’s marriage proposal and went to be goddesses of Hell. And one of them took the baby. And it seems another one has gone missing. The couple whose baby was first taken have a teenage son who got a girl pregnant and now the little girl is missing, too. Constantine is going to use a spell to figure out which sister they’re dealing with and Ann Marie just yells at him that his spells and his ego are too dangerous. But she does get some comfort from Chaz who explains that Constantine hurts people’s feelings instead of getting them killed as his way of coping with the pain. So as Constantine is trying to do his spell one of the other nuns shows up and she tries to stop him from completing the spell. She’s the one who took the babies and after a little fighting and dunking into a fountain, Constantine manages to stab her and she runs off.

They need to figure out how Eve’s sister is running about and apparently curbing her hunger for eating babies. So they pay a visit to the grandmother of the man whose family is being affected and we learn about this very old evil that Constantine believes was wiped out a very long time ago. But it seems that the Rising Darkness is the design of these guys (the brujaria). Constantine lets slip that he was in an asylum as he and Ann Marie talk and while he says he’s not scared, he most definitely is. But they have a plan to lure Eve’s sister in so they can find the babies. They inject a dead chicken with the father’s blood and Constantine casts a glamor to make it look like a baby. Constantine, Ann Marie and Chaz chase it down into the sewers and find the babies but it is not going to be easy to get them out of there. Sure they manage to beat Eve’s sister by threatening to drown one of the babies until she told them the plan of the Rising Darkness (your pretty typical merge Hell and Earth and let the baddies take over) and then sending her off to be with the demon she loved and now hates. But their troubles don’t end there. The demon Zed was drawing at the beginning of the episode is real and in the tunnels. To get away with the babies Ann Marie shoots Constantine and leaves him there to die.

So both of our heroes are in mortal peril. It’s going to be a long month before the show returns and we find out what becomes of Constantine and Zed. I know this show is on borrowed time since the network didn’t give it a back 9 order, but I’m still holding onto a sliver of hope that it somehow makes it to a second season.

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