Constantine season 1, episode 8, “The Saint of Last Resorts Part 1,” just finished airing, and it put John in a tight spot.
Meanwhile, in Mexico…
Blast from the past
The show opens on a couple and their newborn child. Sister Anne Marie pays them a quick visit before going on her rounds. She keeps hearing noises in the church, but Sister Louisa assures her it’s just mice. Unfortunately for the new-found mother, there’s definitely something else in the convent. Anne Marie runs back after hearing the woman’s screams, but she’s too late — the mother is dead and the baby is gone.
Zed is back to drawing furiously, and she shows John her latest masterpiece. She’s drawn an invunche, a twisted monster that John says went extinct after the last flood.
That’s when Anne Marie decides to show up in spectral form. She tells John what happened at the church, showing the scarred area beneath her cross necklace as proof that something supernatural had occurred there. She’s reluctant to ask for John’s help, but she says he owes her. When she returns to her body back in the church, she’s looking at a picture of her and John back in his punk-rock days.
A cloaked figures hides the baby in a cage underground.
Sins of days gone by
John decides to leave Zed behind so she can continue recovering from the events of the last episode. He also reluctantly tells her that Anne Marie used to hook him up in the occult scene — and that she was part of the Newcastle gang. He and Chas head to the convent.
John is more than a little surprised “Annie” is a nun now, but she did it to repent for the sins she committed when Astra was taken to Hell. When John can’t figure out what sort of demon took the baby, they decide to head on over to the parents’ house and dig up the infant’s placenta, which was buried there per tradition.
John looks up and picks a piece of fruit off the tree under which the placenta was buried. When he slices it open, it and all the other fruit start bleeding. It’s human fruit. And John knows what kind of demon took the baby — one of Eve’s sisters. The question now is which one.
Sister from Hell
Before he can do anything, though, word gets out that another baby was taken. Unbeknownst to the first child’s father, Hugo, his elder son also just had a baby with his girlfriend. Someone is targeting Hugo’s whole family.
Just as John is about to perform a spell to figure out which sister it is, Sister Louisa tries to bring him back inside. He quickly figures out she’s actually Lamashtu, Eve’s younger sister. She attack him, but he injures her and she flees.
The only problem? Lamashtu doesn’t kidnap babies. She feeds on them. So why is she keeping the two she has alive? John, Anne Marie, and Hugo visit Grandma Lopez to find out what happened in the family’s past.
La Brujería
Grandma Lopez says La Brujería, a group of ancient witches, are coming after them, but John says it’s impossible — they’re extinct. But Mrs. Lopez is adamant. They were just in hiding. John doesn’t want to believe her, but he finally puts it together. La Brujería are the ones behind the Rising Darkness.
The plan is fairly simple: they take a whole chicken and some of Hugo’s blood and use a cloaking spell to make the poultry look like a baby. Anne Marie agrees to be the one to present it to Lamashtu. Before she does, however, she and John talk about their past. Anne Marie was the one who introduced John to the occult in the first place. “You are my failure, John,” she says.
Protect the innocent
Lamashtu takes the bait and the gang follow her into the sewers. They find the babies, and John threatens to kill one of them unless Lamashtu tells him who she’s working for. He finds out the Brujería want to bring Hell to earth. When he’s heard enough, John uses the Amulet of Pazuzu, Lamashtu’s former lover and another powerful demon, to send her back from whence she came.
The group nearly escapes when they see an invunche take form in the tunnel. John has no idea what to do, and that’s when Anne Marie pulls out a gun and shoots him. She’d do anything to protect the innocent, even if it meant causing the invunche to attack John so she could escape with the baby.
Back at the house…
Left behind, Zed explores the house and finds some pretty strange rooms. Later that night, she goes out to get art supplies and runs into Eddie. They go to a bar, and when she touches his arm, she sees a vision of him in a white room. She’s immediately suspicious, but doesn’t let on.
Zed brings Eddie home, and after a quick kiss, she attacks him and forces him to reveal why he’s there. Eddie says her father wants to talk to her, calling her Mary.
Eddie calls Zed’s dad “our father,” and we also learn that she was locked up for most of her childhood. Her family believes she is their salvation.
As she’s distracted interrogating them, two more people enter the house. Zed tries to use Eddie as leverage but they shoot him. She runs, using the house to get rid of her pursuers, but one of them sneaks up behind her and injects her with a sedative. Looks like she’ll be confronting her father whether she wants to or not.