Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed Constantine’s Episode 2, The Darkness Beneath. But after last week’s premiere, I was ready for John Constantine against Hell’s forces, against the source of all evil. Unfortunately, we got John Constantine against one woman’s Gypsy revenge on a husband she no longer had any use for, with a little bit of man-made darkness disaster thrown in. No Manny, no Chas (who apparently had a run-in with a succubus and a train sometime in his past, resulting in an outstanding warrant – what, they’re not afraid of the combined strength of demons, but the Pennsylvania State Troopers are too much?).
We did get introduced to Zed, John’s new helpmeet, sidekick, not-completely-wanted partner. Direct from the Hellblazer comics (see our transcript of actress Angelica Celaya’s Twitter Q&A from Friday), Zed has visions she can’t control, and can pick up the feelings of others. She obviously has had run-ins with the supernatural before – nothing seemed to throw her into a panic, like it did for last week’s Liv, and she hints at something she is running from. Bumping into Constantine on the street in demon-beset Heddwich, PA,, she realizes that this is the man she’s been obsessively drawing, over and over. “It’s you. You’re you,” she gasps at him. “That observation always ends in the same way, and it’s never in my favor,” he responds. She’s persistent – she wants to know how this man is who has been filling her visions. But John wants nothing to do with her: “You want answers. From one artist to another, in light, I always find mine,” he tells her. She turns around and he’s gone, but not before she’s lifted his wallet.
The mining town is suffering from the deaths of several miners and mining bosses in highly mysterious circumstances. One mining boss is flash-fried in his shower; another is drowned and choked to death in his car (with John right next to him, until Zed is able to pry open the car door). But other miners report a frightening knocking in the tunnels just before they collapse – and John believes that they’ve dug too far into the earth, letting loose spirits he’s familiar with from his Liverpool upbringing. (Actor Matt Ryan is actually Welsh, and the spirits he’s talking about are Welsh legends, called Coblynau, or “knockers”. Other bits of Welsh lore show up – the town’s abandoned church is St. Asaph, which is both the name of a town in Wales and a 6th century Welsh saint.)
http://youtu.be/AF1twDJkYW0
I love the little witty moments in this show – John goes to the dead man’s home, and following everybody bringing food for the wake, he carries a frozen dinner. While there, he sneaks into the bathroom where the man died, pulls the showerhead off, and pours out sludge from the showerhead into a pill bottle he empties into the sink. When the grieving widow finds him there, he tells her he’s a Philadelphia reporter. “If you help me, I might write a story that celebrates his life,” John says. “Because our life is one … big celebration,” she snarks back. When she makes a pass at him, he tries to back out, and is nearly beaten up by miners, directed by the mine owner. There’s definitely something they’re afraid of.
Zed pushes her way into accompanying John in his investigation. She tells him, “You’ve been in my head for months. And then all of a sudden you’re here? I have visions I can’t control. Sometimes feelings.” He grabs her arm, and all of a sudden she can feel who is is and what he feels. “All I know is pain. Desperation. These things motivate you? What kind of person is motivated by these things?” You know he won’t give in easily to having someone (besides the missing Chas, of course) working with him, and we’re not surprised when he’s gone out the window after saying he was going to change his clothes. But – how did he get his shirt and trench coat when he went out the bathroom window? Much of this episode felt thrown together, not well thought out – particularly the mine owner’s conversation with his remaining son, calling him “boy” over and over, and never referring to the son who drowned in the truck.
But Zed refuses to be put aside. She finds the former priest from the now-shuttered – except for the naughty teens – church (they refer to him as a priest, but he talks about his son, who died in the mine) in a bar. The priest has lost more than his church – he’s lost his faith. Faith, he tells her, “is an unshakeable acceptance with no room for doubt. I’ll never have that now.”
And John has little faith in Zed, and her motives for trying to get involved with his investigation. “What’s a chica bonita in her mid-20s doing slumming it in a one-horse Welsh mining town in the middle of Pennsylvania?” he asks her, his cynical side showing. “I travel a lot,” she tells him. If she stays, he tells her, “You’re stepping on my world. You’ll be staring around devils, demons and the like. Those things in your paintings, they’re real. They won’t be bad memories nipping at your heels, but the scourge of hell gunning for your soul. And when the bell rings, you best be ready, willing and able to answer with something far more deadly than a charcoal pencil.” But she’s not put off by his warnings – there’s something in her background that pushes her to his world. I’m sure we’ll learn more about Zed in future episodes (please remember that I have not read any of Hellblazer, a defect I may have to remedy).
John figures that the solution is two-fold – he has to convince the spirits that they can rest again, and keep them from killing anyone else; and to do that, he’ll have to close the mine permanently. After the mine boss and his son are attacked, and the boss is killed by the spirits, John and Zed go into the tunnel, John “reminds” the demons that their role is protective, and they leave, moving back into the earth. He, Zed and the priest blow up the mine. But there’s something that’s been pulling these usually protective spirits to the surface, and John thinks he’s found it. He returns to widow’s house, remembering she told him a story about a “Romany” woman seduced by a man’s romantic letters. The Romany people are more commonly known as Gypsies, and she’s been using her family’s magical powers to summon the demons, and is responsible for the deaths of her husband and the other mine bosses. She orders the demons to kill John, but he summons her husband’s spirit to seek revenge on her.
John briefly refers to the growing darkness, the evil that is coming, but in this episode, it’s more a local nasty spirit that’s causing trouble. Where is the threat to all mankind that was so serious last week? I hope Constantine doesn’t become a “monster of the week” show – the most interesting things about this premise are John’s personal struggles and the rising demonic invasion – both treated in a very low-key manner this week.
I suppose it could be liberating, to take a leap of faith. To shrug off the burden on proof for the promise of hope. It takes trust to turn darkness to light. And those that trust risk putting their faith in the wrong hands.For there are those who pray for you, and those that prey on you. And no matter how careful you are, sometimes, you just can’t tell the difference.
There are some fun extras on the Constantine website. Be sure to check out “The Devils You Know” section of the website, featuring the population of John Constantine’s world. And here, from John’s stay at the Ravenscar Institute, is his psychiatrist’s video report:
http://youtu.be/N6EZ9joJEpA
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