Constantine season 1, episode 11 aired tonight and showed us a whole new world.
The episode begins with a group of friends inside a tomb reading words from a book that is supposed to transport them to a different world — just like Jacob Shaw used to do. They repeat the words and everyone wakes up somewhere different. Each explores their surroundings — some of them running into other people — and when one of the girls screams, they all return to their bodies.
At the Millhouse, Constantine toasts to his past in the form of Gary Lester hanging out in the magic mirror on his wall. Manny shows up and for once is cheerful and — gasp — helpful. John says Zed is on bed rest and Chas is with his family, so he plans on taking it easy. Manny has other ideas. He tells John to help one of his local friends.
John shows up to Ritchie’s classroom, who also happens to be teaching that same group of friends from earlier. When class is let out, one of the friends, Carter, sees a man in a hat in the window and is attacked by a man in his dream state. Carter dies in the real world.
Ritchie, meanwhile, lays into John about how he promised never to bother him again. But John tells Ritchie that Gary is dead, and that he doesn’t want the same thing to happen to him. They’re interrupted by a call from Adam, his assistant, who tells him about Carter.
Lily sees the man in the hat, too, but when she brings her concerns to Miranda at Carter’s vigil, the other girl doesn’t believe anything is going on. John tracks Lily down and questions her, and that’s when he learns they were at the cemetery.
At the cemetery, Manny literally drops in, giving John hints that he should convince Ritchie to help against the Rising Darkness. John scoffs at the idea, but Manny has already left. He turns back to the floor, where he unveils symbols on the ground. At the gym, Miranda sees the man in the hat.
Ritchie tells John he had the private journal of Jacob Shaw, who used the Egyptian dream temple technique to travel to different worlds. Some time after he started travelling, he killed his assistant, and while he was awaiting trial, he went into a coma. He later died, but many believe he was stuck in one of the other worlds.
Adam goes back to the house to find Miranda, and he does — but she has a pole through her abdomen. At the same time, Lily finds Miranda in the gym, dead. John and Ritchie show up at the cemetery, but not in time to save Adam.
Ritchie is feeling guilty, and though John tries to shake it off, Ritchie says he knows how John is really feeling — Constantine carries a lot of guilt with him, too. But they both decide to buck up and keeping going.
In the other dimension, Carter, Miranda, and Adam are still alive — so to speak. Shaw greets them cordially and explains the rules of the game to them. He’ll choose a weapon, and they’ll run. Oh, and they can definitely still feel pain in this world.
John and Ritchie take Lily to the Millhouse. John says she’ll be safe because Shaw uses mirrors to trap them in the other world, but Winters protected all of the reflective surfaces in the house to keep that from happening. All that goes out the window, though, when she takes out her phone and Shaw steals her away.
John convinces Ritchie to go into Shaw’s world in order to save Lily. Manny even shows up to help keep their bodies safe in the real world.
When they wake up in the house, they find each other, and Ritchie says he knows how to change Shaw’s world. After he builds a doorway in a blank wall, they come face to face with Shaw.
Shaw slices Ritchie’s wrists and nails John’s hands to the wall. All seems lost for a minute, but John turns to Ritchie and says, “I believe in you, old son. Now bloody do it!”
Ritchie turns to the window and says to Shaw, “Some god you turned out to be, Shaw. You forgot the sun.” Ritchie brings up the sun, completely transforming the dark and terrifying world, and destroys Shaw in the process.
The pair save Lily, but the others are lost since their bodies in the real world are dead. The house is destroyed, and Ritchie sends Lily back home. But we sense a hesitation in him, and John picks up on it too. Ritchie wants to stay, to build a new world, to stop living in the humdrum that is his mediocre life back home.
“Here happens to be an elaborate figment of your confused imagination,” John says. He tells him all he’s doing is running away, and while John returns to his body, we wait with baited breath to see if Ritchie will do the same.
It’s starting to look like Ritchie decided to stay in Shaw’s world, but then he comes to, giving John a look that’s at once exasperated and, maybe, a little grateful. Back in his classroom, he decides to start living in the present. Perhaps he’ll turn over a new leaf, and we’ll see more of him and John teaming up in the future.