TV Review: Constantine “The Saint of Last Resorts”

Read on to find out what John Constantine has gotten himself into THIS time

Constantine - “The Saint of Last Resorts”
Review by Brandon Wolfe

All the ominous “Rising Darkness” chatter that has been strung throughout Constantine like so much tinsel is finally starting to amount to something more than simply a lot of talk. From the pilot onward, the show has incessantly mentioned this mysterious, impending event without ever seeming to get at anything with any specificity, making it feel more like a buzzword than something concrete. “The Saint of Last Resorts,” the first chapter in the show’s two-part midseason finale, finally starts to fill in some of the blanks on what the Rising Darkness is, and in turn, bolsters the mythology of Constantine. This is the first episode of the series that aims to break free of the procedural mode in which the show has operated thus far.

The episode is also significant in its attempt to put both sidekicks in the game for once. In each episode so far, it was as if the show had pitted Zed and Chas against each other in a preshow game of rock-paper-scissors to see which of the two got to be onscreen that week while the other was written out with a flimsy excuse. And at first, the episode seems to be continuing to play that game as we start out watching Zed receive a vision and instantly presume that this is going to be a Zed episode. Then John tells Zed that she is to stay at home base while he and Chas head down to Mexico to investigate the abduction of an infant, this in spite of Zed’s fluency in Spanish. Just when we think we’ve received our flimsy excuse of the week, however, the show continues to track Zed back at home, crosscutting between her storyline and John’s. It’s the first time the show has not only treated Zed as something more than an appendage, but has put both utility players into play (although given how little Chas is used in the episode, I’m still not sure if this quite counts).

John heads south of the border at the spectral urging of a former flame, Anne Marie, who was present in Newcastle when John failed to save the soul of the young girl, Astra, from damnation. Due to the crippling guilt of the event, Anne has turned to the convent, much to John’s surprise, and it is with deep reluctance that she turns to her former lover for assistance with the demonic kidnapping. When a second child is taken from the same family, John is convinced that a curse has been levied against the patriarch of this brood, and uses his investigative magic tricks to surmise that the demon behind it all is Lamashtu, a sister of Eve (of “Adam and” fame). In his pursuit of the demon, John learns that the Rising Darkness is a plot to break down the walls separating Hell and Earth, bleeding the realm of evil into the mortal coil.

Zed has her own problems on the homefront. She meets up with the flirty male model from last week for a drink and deduces through her psychic touch that the man means to do her harm. This leads to a raid of Constantine’s lair by agents of the shadowy forces who are pursuing Zed for reasons presently left unknown to both she and the audience. Though Zed capably fends off the model and one of the other pursuers, she still ends up being felled by a syringe full of knock-out juice and carted away to parts unknown. As the episode also ends with John left gutshot in a sewer by Anne in an attempt to flee the clutches of an advancing demon, “The Saint of Last Resorts” closes up shop with the fates of both characters dangling precariously in the balance, leaving the eight people watching this show appropriate cliff-hung.

“The Saint of Last Resorts” is not the most entertaining episode of Constantine we’ve received thus far, but it is perhaps the most essential. It deepens the world of the show in a substantial way not attempted by the demon-of-the-week outings previously aired. The show worked more or less fine as a supernatural procedural, but this is the first evidence that it intends to dabble in something a bit more complexly serialized. There are real stakes here, and the perils our heroes face down feel resolutely dangerous. On top of that, the show’s stealth strength is in the macabre little glimpses into the particulars of the supernatural world John Constantine inhabits, such as a tree filled with fruit made of bleeding human flesh and a chicken carcass filled with human blood used as demon bait. These little touches go a long way toward carving out the show’s world.

Where Constantine still falters is with characters who aren’t John Constantine. Anne is hopelessly blah and all of her righteous anger toward John doesn’t make anything to do with her any more interesting. Likewise, while it’s nice to see the show actually attempt to do something with Zed independently of John, the show is still hampered by the fact that we know nothing about her and barely even have a sense of who she might be. If a character isn’t pissy and British, the show doesn’t have a clue what to do with it.

However, it is commendable that Constantine begins its path toward the midseason break starting to come together as something more than a serviceable detective show with monsters. The series has shown some promise thus far, but for it to survive (theoretically; it is, of course, basically a dead show airing), it would need to expand its focus beyond weekly stand-alone cases, which would only carry it so far. It now is beginning the sow the seeds for a larger mythology, and its frequent flashes of weirdness prop up its more routine elements. For a show in the first half of its first season, that’s nothing to sneeze at.

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