Posted in: Movies, TV | Tagged: Angelica Celaya, charles halford, Constantine 1.12, entertainment, Hrold Perinneau, matt ryan, tv

Self-Loathing But Never Self-Pitying – Recapping Constantine 1.12: 'Angels And Ministers Of Grace'

By Rich Epstein

We open with a woman, Taylor, walking down the street, alone, in a neighborhood where she definitely should not be walking down the street alone. She stops at a drug den, tells the dealer that her brother's funeral is the next day, and buys two syringes full of a yellow liquid before she leaves. She doesn't make it out of the neighborhood before she stops to inject herself. As she rolls up her sleeve and prepares herself, the streetlights explode and suddenly there is a large man next to her. He tosses her around like a rag doll before plunging both syringes into her heart. Cut to the police, looking at the body. There are black veins forming all over her face when suddenly she gasps and her (now) black eyes open.

Hey, Chas Chandler (Charles Halford) is back this week. He is looking for signs of trouble, but the Skry map is dry and the radio is nothing but static. Zed Martin (Angélica Celaya) is meditating in a room that is outdoors where she wants to be alone, but of course John Constantine (Matt Ryan) doesn't care about that. Wow, Zed and Chas in the same episode. Zed is trying to escape the visions after getting ill while helping Chas' daughter, but John tells her that "the best cure for a hangover is another drink." She says she isn't ready, but he reminds her there is a war going on. Is he trying to help her, or himself? Does he care more about her health or her visions? I have a feeling we will find out later.

As John leaves the room, Manny (Harold Perrineau) appears and reminds John that the Brujeria is amassing power. Manny points John to the hospital where Taylor will soon be taken, but John doesn't want help from the angel, he knows that Manny is a master of manipulation. Instead, he goes to look at the Skry map which Manny lights on fire, telling John that it was a crutch. John needs to use his instincts and the signs around him and Zed's visions. I'm glad the Skry map is gone, it was played out. They should get their information in different ways, not by always looking at the map Liv left in the first episode. John tells Chas to get Zed and his biggest screwdriver.

The three show up at the hospital, where John helps get Chas in; Chas needs the help because he "fell on his screwdriver." Boy does Chas get abused in the name of helping John. In the hospital, John sees Taylor and needs to get closer, so Chas pulls out the screwdriver and blood splatters everywhere. John and Zed go over to Taylor. Zed touches Taylor's arm and has a vision; the room goes dark, Taylor awakens and an angel that looks like it may be Manny appears. Zed tells John that it hurt, it felt like the vision was trying to kill her. Taylor begins to go into respiratory arrest and as the doctors try to revive her, Zed begins to have a seizure. Did a demon just pass from Taylor to Zed?

Zed goes in for a CAT scan as John stays with Chas. As John is waiting for Chas to get dressed, a large man with a scarred face comes into the emergency room. The man is getting a series of skin grafts to fix the scar, but he got into a barfight. The man is beligerant to the nurse. John and Chas head to the morgue to look at Taylor. John does a spell and the room turns white, other than Taylor who is pure darkness. John tells Chas that it was dark matter, not a demon that killed her. John tells Chas to go back to the millhouse and look through Jasper's papers while he tries to figure out where the dark matter came from. Chas is pissed that John won't go see Zed first.

Zed wakes up in her hospital room and the doctor immediately appears. Gotta love television, no three hour wait to see a doctor. John appears, and immediately tries to leave Zed and the doctor alone but Zed tells him to stay. The scan shows a mass in her brain, which the doctor says could be the cause of Zed's visions. The doctor leaves Zed and John to talk. Zed immediately believes that the mass is causing the visions, but John isn't so sure. Or at least that isn't what he wants to believe.

A janitor enters the room where skin-graft man is to fix a light. He goes to get a bulb from the supply room, and the man that killed Taylor attacks him, causing the black veins to appear. I guess nothing was passed to Zed after all. Just a massive coincidence that Taylor died at the same time that Zed went into a seizure.

John heads up to the roof for a smoke when a doctor appears asking for a smoke. The doctor becomes Manny and John is pissed. He told Zed to push through her visions, and now she is sick. He wants Manny to heal her, but the angel says he can't. He tells John to focus on what he can control. John takes the advice to heart and breaks a bottle of some kind of red liquid. The liquid instantly vaporizes causing Manny to pass out. John paints a symbol in blood onto the angel's chest and does an incantation. When Manny comes to, John tells him that it was a vial of air from Hades and that Manny will be trapped until the spell wears off. Manny tells John that when he is inside of a body, he loses contact with the heavenly host and all of his angelic powers. Man, John can certainly be a prick sometimes. But Manny deserved it, he has basically manipulated John in the exact same way in order to get his help.

John and Manny find the dead body in the supply closet, and the smell makes Manny vomit. The body is in a lot worse shape than Taylor's. John reaches inside it and says that the man has a heart of darkness. Manny says it was caused by the Black Diamond, a sorcerer of tremendous power that John thought was just a legend. The sorcerer was destroyed by a shaft of heavenly light, and the power transformed into a diamond that was shattered into a thousand pieces so that no one man could ever wield such power again. Obviously one of the shards has been found. John tells Manny to use a computer to determine whether Taylor and the orderly had anything in common while he heads back to the millhouse.

John is looking for something in the millhouse and really doesn't want to talk to Chas about Zed. Finally, Chas forces him to, just as John finds Jasper's fragment of the Black Diamond.

Meanwhile, Manny finds out that the doctor whose body he is borrowing is having an affair with a nurse when the nurse traps him in a supply closet. I wonder if Manny will have a little more sympathy for how hard it is for humans to control their urges now that he has experienced them.

John needs a test subject, luckily Chas is close at hand. He has Chas hold the diamond shard and suddenly the black veins appear. John trells him to drop the stone, but he can't and Chas tosses John away like a rag doll. Luckily, John kept a cattle prod nearby.

John goes to see Manny, and he can smell the woman's perfume on him. Manny is feeling all kinds of guilt, and you can just tell how much John loves this. John tells Manny his thoughts on sex: "You made two poor sods feel pleasure, momentary relief from the tragedy of everyday living. That doesn't sound like a sin to me mate, but then again, you know, I wasn't around when they made those rules. Do what thou willst." I love the interplay between John and the angel. John clearly believes that the almighty exists, he just disagrees with him. This is so much more interesting than the standard theological debate of whether God exists. It isn't often that a show is willing to entertain the question of whether God is right.

Anyway, it turns out that Taylor and the orderly both received treatment for substance abuse at a nearby church. John asks if anyone around the hospital had seemed particularly rageful, and Manny thinks of skin-graft man. It turns out that he burned his face passing out drunk with a cigarette in his mouth. John goes to talk to skin-graft and sends Manny to talk to Zed.

Zed finally gets to meet an angel as Manny, in doctor guise, comes to pay a visit. Zed isn't sure if she will want to remove the tumor, but her doctor is adament, saying it is a blessing they found it so early. He tells Zed about his time as a soldier in Baghdad, how he took shrapenal close to his heart and how lucky he was. As her doctor leaves, Zed knows right away that Manny is not really a doctor. She is afraid that Manny is there to take her. He tells her that John sent him, that John has a hard time communicating, which Zed is acutely aware of. Zed asks whether her powers are a gift from God, or something evil. It seems that since she met John, she has been able to use her gift for good rather than just as a source of pain. Manny can't give her the answer, but tells her that it sounds like she already has all of the answers she needs.

John goes to check on Morris, skin-graft man, but he is already on his way out for a smoke. Bad move, as he isn't the killer but the next victim. John gets there just in time to see the killer strangling Manny, when he tries to help the killer swats him like a fly. He comes to with Manny there. John still has no idea who the killer is as all that he saw was a manifestation of the evil of the Black Diamond. John feels that he is missing something obvious, Manny tells him it's Zed. Not just her visions but her support. John says something sarcastic, and Manny calls him out for using sarcasm to cover his feelings. John finally opens up, says that he was using Zed and now she has a tumor. Manny reminds John that he is fighting a war, casualties are inevitable. He tells John about Zed's doctor, including the fact that he was in Baghdad. Ding ding. Jaspers piece of the Black Diamond came from Baghdad as well.

Zed tells her doctor that she is withdrawing consent for surgery, and he is upset that she is giving up a second chance. John and Manny appears, and John pulls a piece of the Black Diamond to confirm that it's the doctor. As the doctor recoils fromt he Black Diamond, he attacks Manny and runs. John and and Manny go after him. Zed gets a vision of Manny bathed in red, and now she knows what her vision means. She finds John and Manny, and tells John about the vision. He releases Manny from the spell. The doctor-monster comes towards John and Zed and John raises the black diamond shard in defense. The doctor-monster swats it away and shoves John against the wall. Under his breath, John begs for help. "I've never asked before but I'm asking you now. Please. Please." Manny appears and calls the doctor's name. Manny tells him it is time to come home, his work is finished and peace is here. The two of them disappear, leaving another shard of the Black Diamond behind. Who knew? All John had to do to get help from Manny was to stop being a beligerent ass and ask.

John walks into a chapel where Zed is praying. He tells her he wants to tell her something about himself that nobody knows. "I wake up and the first five minutes of the day I imagine that everyone I care about is dead. I lie there and I meditate on that so that when the inevitable happens it lessens the blow." He then has a smoke and some breakfast. Manny appears, and now Zed can see him. Zed says she isn't having the surgery because "John taught me that magic has its cost. If that cost is pain I'll take it." John leaves them, and Zed asks again where her visions come from. Manny says "I'm here aren't I?"

This was a really fun episode. John Constantine is probably one of the most interesting characters on television. He is sarcastic, obnoxious, and uses everyone around him, but he is harder on himself than anyone else is. He is full of self-loathing, but never self-pitying. John takes actions that he can only take because he hates himself. He is willing to put his friends in danger when necessary because he believes that he is an asshole. Because he believes that he is the type of person that would treat his friends like that he does it. It's why he has so much trouble admitting his feelings about them. He is a character that not only believes he is damned, but believes that he deserves it. The inherent contradiction of someone who not only believes in God but actually knows for a fact that God exists and regularly communicates with angels but at the same time does not in any way attempt to live a godly life is fascinating.

It would be great to see more of Manny, to see whether or not being trapped as a human has given him any more empathy to the plight of the people that he looks down his nose at. The fact that the angel himself was unable to resist his urges should make him more understanding to mortals. I would like to learn more about what motivates the angel, as he doesn't seem to actually care about the people he is supposed to save. He acts like it is nothing more than his job, which it very well may be.

Likewise, I wonder if Zed's visions come from the tumor or caused the tumor. Or, could it have been something done to her in the cult growing up? I would really love to see more of the cult since we never really got into it. We learned that her father was the leader of a cult, and was looking for her, but never anything more.

Unfortunately, it is looking pretty unlikely that we ever find out more, or that we get a resolution as to the Rising Darkness as there is only one week left unless the show gets renewed. At this point, I hope we don't get any resolution to the Brujeria because if we do, it's likely to be something slapped together and completely unsatisfying.

Rich Epstein writes for Bleeding Cool.  He can be found on twitter at @kaspe_r11. 

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