Saturday, January 17, 2015

Constantine 1.09: "The Saint of Last Resorts Part 2"

“That makes this a crucible. And for the sake of the mortal realm, I hope you find what you need.”
- Manny

When last we saw our titular hero, he’d been shot in the gut by an old flame and was waiting for a really nasty demon to kill him. And Zed had been nabbed by some crazy people working for her father. Things go a little better for Zed than Constantine, though. She manages to escape the loonies without too much trouble. Constantine, however, ends up casting an ancient and super powerful demon into himself to keep himself alive. Manny is pretty damn pissed about the whole thing, seeing as Constantine didn’t even ask the good guys for help. He just cast off his protections and let the evil in. So it looks like for the time being our angel is out of the game. Chas finds Constantine in the sewer and things get ugly. Constantine thinks he’s got a couple days before the demon takes full possession and he wants to do a self-exorcism (with the backup plan of Chas killing him) but the demon takes over and Constantine goes running off. Unfortunately when the demon’s consciousness subsides, he finds himself in the middle of a bunch of dead bodies. Oops!

Zed makes it to Mexico City and is determined to make Anne Marie cooperate and help them find Constantine. After assaulting a British Consulate representative, Constantine is hauled off to jail where he’s got some nasty fellow prisoners, namely some members of the gang he murdered and they are out for blood. Too bad for them he’s got the king of demons riding around in his noggin. Constantine buddies up to a guy peddling cigarettes and heads to a chapel to try and start the whole self-exorcism but the guy lets the gangsters in. And not surprising, the demon takes over and slaughters them all. Now, it’s interesting to note that Manny hasn’t actually given up on Constantine and he warns that the Brujaria have other agents working on earth (we see one who ends up killing the Consulate guy) and he’s a little miffed they couldn’t take out the Rising Darkness. Around this time, Zed is reading Ann Marie the riot act, revealing that Constantine has a link to the heavenly host via Manny so she needs to get her butt on board and help out.

Constantine wakes up the next morning and everyone’s staring at him terrified. Constantine bellows that he runs the prison now and right before he rips into the guy who betrayed him, Ann Marie’s spirit appears. So at least she’s holding up her end of things and letting Chas and Zed know where he is. She promises to pray for Constantine but I doubt he much cares whether she does or not given that she shot him and is pretty much the whole reason he’s in this mess now. Anyway, Zed sneaks in with a couple of items (posing as a hooker) and Chas ends up getting beat up and dragged in. Zed finds Constantine and the demon starts to get excited (not in a killing way of course). Ann Marie shows up, too. She’s going to help with the exorcism but she urges Zed to leave Constantine behind when this is all done. Yeah, that might have been the advice Ann Marie wanted back in the day but Zed’s far stronger than that.

The team gathers in the chapel area and ties Constantine down but the holy water Ann Marie uses doesn’t do anything. And our creepy snake friend shows up. He’s the actual serpent from the Garden of Eden. Ann Marie ends up killing him but that means they are running out of options to save Constantine. The demon is getting stronger and so they end up using the guy who betrayed him to get as much heroin as possible. As Constantine puts it, it will either knock him and the demon out long enough to get him to protected ground that might weaken the demon’s hold, or he’ll die on the greatest high of his life. Chas and Ann Marie wheel Constantine out in a body bag and Ann Marie has to do a little magic to distract the guards so they can get away. Interesting that the projection is mostly naked and speaking with an American accent. It was pretty amusing I have to say.

They get Constantine to relative safety but now it’s up to Ann Marie to cast the demon out of him. She’s terrified that she can’t do it and things quickly go pear-shaped as the demon takes control and starts in on everyone. It taunts Ann Marie that she’s weak and crawled off to her convent and that Chas was made the way he was by Constantine and that he lost his family because of it and that Zed’s running away from her father. Of the three, Zed is the most clear-headed about the whole thing. I guess since she hasn’t known Constantine as long as the other two the words don’t cut as deep. But Zed finally talks some sense into Ann Marie, saying that the nun needs to forgive herself for the guilt and rage she’s felt over basically creating Constantine when they were younger. Ann Marie gets her act together and kicks the demon’s ass straight back to hell. It seems to have bonded Zed and Ann Marie anyway. And Zed promises to tell Constantine everything about her past so at least they can face what’s coming together. Unfortunately I don’t think that’s going to be all they have to worry about. It looked like the demon got booted out of Constantine but at the very end of the episode, right before it cuts to black we see this absolutely sinister, evil look in his eye. He’s been truly touched by ancient evil and I can’t imagine he’s come away just as he was before the whole thing happened. With only four more episodes to go until the finale (it’s still up in the air as to whether that’s season or series) we are rapidly running out of time before an even bigger showdown happens.

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