Saturday, January 31, 2015

Constantine 1.11: "A Whole World Out There"

“You don’t fool me. Not anymore. I know your secret I know what you pretend not to feel. You know why? Because I’m feeling it right now.”
- Ritchie

In the scheme of creepy, this week’s episode kicks it off in spades. Four college kids are messing about with a magical book which was apparently owned by a man named Jacob Shaw. According to some source, Shaw could create other worlds. They do the incantation and they all end up this weird house. It seems they are all in different versions of it and some of them see a creepy guy in a hat. One of the girls, Miranda, sees a man who begs her to help him escape but they are all pulled back to this world. Like I said, creepy.

At the house in Atlanta, Constantine is wallowing a bit in his own bad mood when Manny pops by. Chas is still with his family in New York and Zed is recovering from her psychic coma thing. But Manny implores Constantine to lend a helping hand to a local friend, Ritchie (aka he was formerly known as Daniel Faraday). It seems that the students involved in the spell go to the university where he is teaching. Ritchie is not pleased to have his old mate back in the picture and things get even more dower when one of the guys, Carter, ends up suffocated in another world and then dies in this one. The other guy involved, Adam, is Ritchie’s teaching assistant and he’s not handling things very well. But with a little interrogating the memorial, Constantine figures out where the spell went down and Manny shows up again (though his landing was a little rough) and suggests that Constantine guide Ritchie back into the fight against the Rising Darkness. I can’t see that going so well. Constantine does a chant and some weird symbols show up on the floor where the kids were doing the spell. Elsewhere, Miranda is doing some ballet when Shaw appears and drags her back to another world. The guy who begged her to help him escape shows up again and we see that he’s got no hands. That’s very unfortunate for him.

It turns out that most of this is Ritchie fault. He was using Shaw’s journal to research a theory about merging human consciousness with machines. Yeah, I’m pretty sure there was a movie this summer about that exact thing that didn’t pan out so well. Adam stole the journal and he’s going to use the spell again because he worries that Miranda was dragged back there. Ritchie and Constantine head to the cemetery and find Adam in a trance. In the other dimension, he’s found Miranda but Shaw finds him and starts slashing him up with a knife. As Ritchie previously posited, whatever happens to you in the other dimension, happens to your body here. Which seems to be very true for Miranda and Adam. It looks like Constantine can’t save the kid when his throat is cut. It would be one thing if it was only the four kids involved in opening the portal that they had to worry about being dragged through. But the portal could drag in anyone thanks to the Rising Darkness.

In short order, we see that Miranda’s body has been found. Ritchie is not happy that Constantine is not letting him feel responsible for all the death. He likens himself to Gary a bit but Constantine shuts him down. They need to try and focus on saving the last girl, Lily. They find her in her dorm room freaking out about Miranda and she doesn’t take Adam’s death well, either. So they take Lily back to the house where there are no reflective surfaces for Shaw to pull her in, except her phone. She gets pulled in and finds Adam. But before she got there we see the other three reunited. Shaw is keeping them around for fun. Well his fun anyway. He’s basically hunting them and killing them repeatedly. Not surprising, Constantine decides that he and Ritchie need to go into the other dimension to save Lily without dying. They agree to find each other when they come to on the other side. Ritchie’s worried that something could happen to their bodies but Manny appears to stand guard. It’s kind of fun to have all these Lost actors reuniting, even if the characters they are playing aren’t exactly sharing scenes.

Ritchie and Constantine find each other (though Ritchie nearly takes Constantine’s head off with a candle stick) before they seek out Lily. They come to a dead end and Shaw is watching them but they don’t see him. It looks like it’s going to be a Shaw vs. Ritchie showdown because it appears Ritchie can manipulate the place to bend to his own will and reality. He creates a doorway and they head upstairs but they find the guy with no hands. And I can’t quite tell but he might turn into Shaw (just a way to lure people in). But he’s found our boys and the showdown is definitely imminent. Shaw flaunts his power pretty quickly, nailing Constantine to a wall (interesting imagery there) and slashes Ritchie’s wrists (after Ritchie calls him a psychopath). But with a little pep talk from Constantine, Ritchie manages to exert control over the world and builds it up beyond the house. He destroys Shaw completely and with him gone, the house begins to collapse. They manage to get Lily to safety and she reluctantly returns to our world. But Constantine has a harder time. Ritchie plans to stay in this reality to create and invent and just generally hide from the scariness awaiting them back in our world. Ultimately, Ritchie returns to our world and he ends up lecturing his class himself instead of using a recording. As he talks about certain truths that need to be accepted in order to reach Nirvana, we find Constantine back to wallowing in his self-pity and his booze.

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