Constantine season 1, episode 6, “Rage of Caliban,” aired last night. Read our recap to find out what happened when John came up against the spirit of a child.
Child’s play
The opening scene explores a beautiful home, but all is not well inside. As we travel deeper into the house, we see a horrific scene filled with carnage. A man is floating against the ceiling, bloody and beaten. As soon as he says, “Please. No more,” he falls to the ground, dead. A little girl is huddled in the corner, watching.
The police arrive on the scene, and one of them is comforting the child. Another officer tells her to return to her post and they begin fighting. A mug of coffee between them explodes, and we see the little girl’s eyes go black. Is she the one that killed her parents?
Back to bed
The next morning, Constantine gets a rough awakening by woman telling him to get out of her bed. “It’s time to go,” she urges him. Seems her boyfriend is on his way home.
Back at his own house, and sexual innuendos aside, Constantine spots his next mission, and he and Chas are headed to Birmingham, Alabama.
John breaks into the house and begins using his very scientific and advanced methods of deduction (like licking the wall), but he’s quickly interrupted by Manny. “You know, I’ve never punched an angel, but you are begging for it, mate,” he says. “I could’ve announced my arrival with trumpets,” Manny replies wistfully. “Used to have an entire horn section back in the day.” And the innuendos continue.
Manny wants John to draw up battle plans against the rising darkness. But he tells him he’s not special. “You’re more of a…desperation move,” Manny says. He also explains that angels can’t directly influence events on earth, so Manny can’t help with this case.
John doesn’t need his help, though. He does a spell to show what happened to the coffee cup and realizes the kid was possessed by the spirit of a child, and now that spirit is looking for a new child to possess.
Nothing there
We meet the spirit’s next victim, Henry. He screams because he thinks someone is in his room. But his parents assure him he’s alone. After they leave, however, the spirit comes in and possesses him.
John meets with a lawyer in a bar. She owes him a favor from when he sent the spirit of her husband packing, and so she stole a file from child services in order to help with the case. There’s a pattern where an only child is the surviving member of a family that was brutally murdered, and it all started 35 years ago.
John goes to meet with the first surviving kid, Marcello, to find out name of spirit. If he can do that, then just naming the spirit can release it. Unfortunately, Marcello is practically comatose. And it’s no wonder. It seems his father chopped his fingers off when he was a kid. That kind of trauma isn’t easy to work through.
Speak the truth
Back home again, John plots the murders and figures out they’re all on the same ley line, which contains electromagnetic energy the spirit can follow. If they just follow the lines, they’ll be able to find the next victim.
This episode also gave us something we’ve been desperately wanting: more information about Chas. He picks up the Sword of Night, which compels him to speak the truth, and after being brutally honest with John, Chas also talks about his wife Renee and the fact that he couldn’t stop her from leaving.
Memories of Astra
While all this is happening, Henry continues to be a creepy little git, harming his father, killing some pumpkins, and sending a crow straight into the window and to its death.
But John is close. He walks down the street carrying a thurible, filled with frankincense, which flees from malevolent spirits. They find Henry’s house, but realize that waiting for an attack to happen will yield them more results than knocking on the door and looking like crazy people.
So Constantine just follows Henry around. He sees him at school, getting into a fight and fracturing the skull of a bully. Chas convinces John to tell Henry’s parents their kid is possessed, but that just gets him a punch in the face and a jail cell.
“I’m cursed when it comes to kids,” John laments, and we’re all thinking about Astra. Manny shows up, saying he can offer guidance, but John ain’t havin’ none of that. John says he made it through his life without any help from the angel, but Manny asks how he knows he wasn’t there when his father burned him with cigarettes or saved him from suicide when his sister left him alone with his dad.
John is visibly upset, and that’s the moment Manny decides to disappear (as per usual). Luckily, Henry’s mother shows up and bails him out.
To exorcise or not to exorcise
“Not all souls go gently into the night,” John tells the mother, warning her against a forceful exorcism, and this time we actually see a flashback of Astra being dragged to hell. John decides they need to hold a séance.
Henry is busy drawing a beautiful picture of a man holding an ax, and if the mother wasn’t convinced before, she’s convinced now — especially when she gives him a sedative and sees Henry’s eyes turn black. She puts him to bed on the sofa and meets John and Chas at the house of the first victim, Marcello. If they can’t send the spirit from their world, they can bind it to one place so it stops killing.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t work. It turns out that Marcello just killed his parents of his own volition. The mother says she wants an exorcism.
Back home
When John and the mother return home, Henry attacks his dad and flees into a haunted house. It’s only when Henry shows up wielding an ax that John puts everything together: “Marcello, as the one who named you, I bind you to your rightful place.”
Marcello really did act on his own when he killed his parents, but it was so traumatic that his soul fled his body. The spirit can’t cross over because Marcello is still alive, so John sent the spirit back to his body, where he’ll spend the rest of his time in the mental facility where he was already housed.