Note: The recap and review will contain spoilers for this episode
Recap
On this week's episode of Constantine, a woman approaches a seedly looking building and buys some drugs. She says her brother's funeral is tomorrow. She starts to inject, but all the lights go out, outside. Some sort of monster beats er down and injects her with the drugs. She seems dead, but wakes up when the police find her.
Manny pays John a visit. Manny sets the scrye map on fire to prove a point. Manny says it's a crutch. Chas "falls" on a screwdriver to head to the hospital. Zed and John spot the woman who O.D.d. Zed grabs her hand and gets some spooky visions. Zed has a seizure. She goes and gets an MRI. Chas and John go around the hospital. John checks out the ODd woman, who is now dead. John does some magic and says the body has no spark and even dead bodies usually have it.
Zed wakes up and meets Doctor Gaylan. The doctor tells her she has a tumor on her frontal lobe. Zed thinks it's causing her visions.
A man lays in bed reading and a janitor comes in and the man tells him to fix the light. The janitor makes his way to the supply closet and has a drink of some secret alcohol. The monster from earlier comes in and takes him out.
Manny appears to Constantine on the roof of the hospital as he's having a smoke. Constantine smashes a vile on the ground and Manny faints. John carves a symbol into his chest. Manny is trapped until the spell wears off. Manny tells John he loses all of powers while bound to a human body like this. John and Manny find the dead body and Manny is grossed out and starts puking. John finds a heart of darkness and Manny explains it all to John. John asks Manny to look up the people who died to see if there was a connection between them.
John heads back to the Mill to look for something. Chas gets the rundown on Zed and the tumor. John finds a fragment of the black diamond stored away. Chas holds the stone and it gives Chas black veins like the people who were touched by the monster. John has to shock Chas in order to get him to drop them.
John heads back to the hospital and catches Manny up on the black diamonds, while Manny deals with human emotion. Manny pushes John to talk to Zed. John is distant. Manny, in Dr Bob's body goes to visit Zed. She can tell that Dr Bob is not who he says he is. Zed has questions about her abilities.
Morris, the jerky guy, is told he can't smoke in his room. He leaves. John rushes in to find him. Meanwhile, Morris goes somewhere else to smoke and the monster comes after him. John rushes in and the monster knocks him out.
After John wakes up, he talks to Manny and finds that Gaylan is actually the killer. Gaylan goes into Zed's office and Zed says she's not going through with getting rid of the tumor. John enters in and confronts Gaylan. The black diamond is inside his body, a piece of shrapnel. Gaylan runs off. John is going to reverse the spell on Manny. Just as he does it, Gaylan, as a monster, appears. Manny shows up in his glory, with his wings, and tells Galyan it's time to go home. John says the heavenly light is the only thing that can fight dark matter. Gaylan disappears and the diamond inside him, goes into John's black diamond box.
Zed and John have a conversation and Manny shows up. Zed can see Manny. The two talk about Zed not getting the surgery.
Thoughts
The scene with Manny getting frisky with the nurse was a bit ridiculous. It's this weird attempt at bringing humor to the show. It's not needed and it's a moment that really took me out of the episode.
This was a bit of a tricky episode. I'm not too keen on episodes that are really stuck in a singular location like a room or a building. With last week's episode, it really worked, but moment to moment, I was only half in here. However, as a whole, the story is simple but works incredibly well.
There's not a lot that stands out as amazing, but it was a solid story, with solid interaction between characters, but I feel like sometimes, the writers have trouble writing four characters. Chas disappears towards the beginning and Manny takes his place.
This episode is more about developing Manny as a character more than anything else. We've seen him come down from the heavens and be a bit pompous. Here, he's, pun intended, really grounded here and finally gets to know what it feels like to do the ground level work. He gets to walk a mile in someone else's shoes.
The show does a great job at bringing in the mystical side of John's world. We get magical items, symbols, and spells in foreign languages throughout this episode. This episode was really a great entry-level episode that anyone could jump in and enjoy. It speaks to more new viewers than anything else as it gives them a taste of what this show is like, without delving too deep into the show's mythos.
It's not a huge stand out episode or something that delivers some jaw dropping moments, but this episode of Constantine was incredibly solid. We get some great development from Zed, who started out this season as clueless and many times nothing more than a wall for John to climb over each episode. She's come into her own and while she wasn't a huge part of this episode, her story was still very compelling. In addition, adding Manny to the episode created some cheap and not so funny laughs, but all-in-all, it was great to see him here the entire time. However, a decent episode of Constantine is better than a good episode of a few other shows that got picked up for another season... Am I bitter this hasn't been picked up for a second season? Very much so. Overall, this was a good and entertaining episode.
Next week, Papa Midnight returns! In the season (and seemingly series, but not 100% yet) finale.
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