Things started out typically enough with Constantine and Zed being drawn to a Southern Baptist Church where a faith healer had developed miraculous healing powers. Because every episode of this series has to write out one of the co-leads, Chas is conveniently pushed out of the episode as Zed and John investigate this snake handling man of God. Zed and John question the nature of religion and divinity and the whole thing is rather interesting if mundane. The preacher heals his congregation of myriad ailments and Constantine can’t quite believe all this magic will come without a price. It turned out that when the preacher was bitten by a snake and died, he managed to pull off an angel’s feather as he was being taken to Heaven. I apologize for the heavy recap, but you need to understand the fragility of the plot before you see how the episode masterfully turned a typical McGuffin hunt into a masterful plot twist. Ok, so we’ve had a few looks at the nature of heaven through Manny, John’s angel pal, but not a whole heck of a lot, just glimpses or fragmented ideas of the place of angels and Heaven in the shared mythology of Constantine. So Imogen was a wilting little angel and our heroes had to get their hands on the feather. This is when things followed the grand Hellblazer tradition of sacrilegious daring as the always street smart Zed faked a desire to be baptized and picked the preachers pocket as she was being dunked. Now, here’s that ingenious turn. While Zed ran to return the feather to the wilting Imogen, Constantine discovered that the preacher once was guilty of killing a man in a hit and run. Imogen wasn’t an angel charged with taking him to Heaven, but a demon who was going to drag him to Hell. Well I’ll be knackered. So now we have seen that there are Fallen Angels in the world of Constantine and that they are filled with hatred for the celestial host and for humanity. All of a sudden, the world of the series has opened up and the overarching plot has been made evident. Constantine and Zed operate in a world where Hell is trying to pour into the world of the living and wreck havoc on God’s favorite children, humanity. All of a sudden, with that one reveal of the preacher’s sin, the series has expanded into a very fascinating and high stakes holy war with Constantine caught in the middle. We have a keener understanding of angels and demons now but the series still hasn’t revealed much about Zed’s past. This episode, her visions were important to kick off the action of the episode and she also was the one who deceived her way into retrieving the feather, so after her trivial contributions to the past few episodes, Zed had a big role to play this week. The only issue was that by not revealing much about her past, by playing coy and keeping Constantine, and by extension the audience, in the dark, the series is making it very difficult to care about the character. The series can try and make her a mystery, but making her a complete cipher will endanger the integrity of the emotional resonance of the character. But this week we cared, and the world of Constantine became a whole lot grander in scope.
Those Magic Moments
When Constantine brought Imogen’s heart back to his lair and placed it on a shelf, it sure was put next to the Psycho Pirate’s Medusa Mask. In DC lore, the Medusa Mask allows its wearer to effect the emotions of anyone who gazes upon it. Between all the Crisis on Infinite Earths allusions in The Flash and the weapon of the Psycho Pirate, a villain who played a huge role in the Crisis, appearing on Constantine, I’m ready for the skies to turn red any day now. Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for all news updates related to the world of geek. And Google+, if that’s your thing!
