Tonight on Constantine, we follow Liv into a world of angels and demons — a world John Constantine knows all too well.
The Constantine pilot did not disappoint tonight as we were thrown right into the story and came face to face with some iconic characters, watched Constantine fight a nasty demon, and saw a young woman learn about her family’s past and decide whether or not she could handle this dangerous new world.
Petty dabbler
“Make them nice and tight, love.” Those are the first words out of John Constantine as he’s being strapped to a table, right before he introduces himself as an exorcist that voluntarily admitted himself to an insane asylum. But just because he’s there of his own free will doesn’t mean he’s going to make it easy on his doctor.
He’s there because he feels guilty about the death of a young girl named Astra. Or, more specifically, of her damnation. She was dragged to hell by a demon. And not the internal kind you can fix with a rom-com and a pint of Cherry Garcia. It’s been three months since John admitted himself, and all he wants to do is be convinced demons aren’t real.
But that’s kind of hard when one shows up at the asylum. During group therapy, John spots some cockroaches all scuttling off in the same direction. Knowing what’s probably at the other end of that creepy-crawly rainbow, John follows them and finds a woman possessed. “I’m addressing the entity inside,” he says before he exorcises her. She’s fine, but the message written on the wall (“Liv Die”) points to someone else being in trouble.
Dead by morning
We meet Liv in the next scene. She’s at a soul-sucking job — the metaphorical kind — wasting her college degree and getting blank fortune cookies. If that wasn’t enough, her car malfunctions and she decides to walk home. That is, until the lights go out, the Earth opens up, and a giant fireball nearly singes the hair off her head.
Constantine shows up, getting right to the point: “If you don’t listen to me, you’ll be dead by morning.”
Liv unwisely runs away, and John ventures down into the crater. There, he meets “Manny,” an angel that unnecessarily reminds Constantine he damned a girl to hell, which also damned his soul to hell. Manny promises to ease his suffering, but John isn’t taking the bait.
Liv makes it home safe and sound, and when she opens another fortune cookie, it simply says, “Trust him.”
An unseen person carves a symbol into her door while across the hall her friend is having some computer troubles. As her electricity flickers, we see a giant eyeball on her screen and that definitely won’t be haunting our dreams for the next week. Not at all.
Daddy issues
The following morning, we find out Liv’s friend is dead. The symbol, the Eye of Horus, carved on Liv’s door and the salt poured around her threshold actually protected her from the demon. Constantine tells her all of this and introduces her to his “oldest friend” Chas. Turns out, they both knew her father, Jasper Winters, who hadn’t died 20 years ago like Liv thought, but just last year.
Constantine hands over a necklace Jasper wanted Liv to have, but before they can talk about it further, the police van holding her friend’s body crashes through the entrance to her workplace and hits her desk — the place she should have been. John is confused by the horrifying corpse of Liv’s friend, which is moaning and groaning and trying to get to Liv. Demons aren’t supposed to operate in the open like this. Liv doesn’t stick around to learn more.
Instead, she asks her mom about her dad, yelling at her for keeping him a secret. Her mom says he was no one special and that he didn’t want anything to do with her. When Liv shows her mom the necklace, she looks up to see her nana standing behind her mom, brushing her hair. Then Nana’s eyes and mouth sink in and black goo drips from the openings.
Liv hightails it out of there.
Don’t touch that
“You’re waking up,” John tells her when she tracks him down. “You’re seeing the world for what it really is. Just like your father could.” John shows her the spirit world, complete with a ghost train, and says, “There are worlds beyond ours, parallel planes of existence.”
As they head out of there, an 18-wheeler hits the taxi and John flashes back to Astra begging for her life. He can’t save her though, and he wakes up to find he’s been thrown from the car. As Chas gets Liv to safety, he’s pierced through the heart by a live wire.
“Things aren’t always what they appear to be,” Constantine says, and brings Liv to a house once owned by her father. He used it for divination, and it’s filled to the brim with interesting and dangerous artifacts. Fans of the Hellblazer comics surely recognized Dr. Fate’s helmet when Liv picked it up off a shelf. Constantine searches for the demon while Liv tries her hand at scrying — a way to track demon activity on a map.
As Constantine’s on his way to an old friend’s place, Manny shows up in the body of an old security guard. “You know, it’s a fine line between watching over and stalking,” John quips, saying he’s short on time. Manny then freezes time (because why not), and mysteriously suggests it might not be too late for John to save his soul.
Infuriatingly, Manny disappears and John visits Ritchie, someone who was with him in Newcastle when the whole thing with Astra went down. Ritchie does not want to help John, but being the asshole he is, Constantine says the police are still looking for who killed Astra and that it wouldn’t be hard to point them in Ritchie’s direction.
Things aren’t always what they appear to be
Back at the house, Liv sees her father from the past in a mirror, and John tells her there’s all sorts of helpful (and creepy) things lying around that place. Then Chas walks in, much to Liv’s surprise. When she asks how he’s alive, he says, “It’s complicated.” Yeah, no kidding. John just says he has “survival skills.”
The gang eats some food and drinks some beer to get ready to send this demon that’s stalking Liv back to hell. John draws a large symbol on the rooftop of a building in order to trap the demon and places Liv right in the middle as bait.
While they wait for the demon to show up and try to kill them, Liv asks John about his life. He doesn’t want to share, but when she presses the subject, he says he killed his mother when she gave birth to him. His father called him “Killer,” blaming him for her death. John then says he started learning the occult in his teens and has been searching for her — unsuccessfully — ever since.
Before the pity party can continue, though, the lights start flickering and a guard shows up possessed by the demon. He transforms into John, albeit a much creepier version, and the real John snidely says it’s not his best look. Then promptly asks him why he’s so interested in his soul. He’s no one special, after all.
He is, though, the demon says: “We rely on you to provide us with a fresh supply. Everyone who stands at your side dies.”
Oh, that was a low blow, demon dude.
Power of intention
Constantine is clearly pissed, but he’s got a job to do, and dammit, he’s not going to let his feelings get in the way. He signals Ritchie, who turns off the power to the entire city, essentially cutting off the demon’s food supply. John is about to finish the spell to send the monster back to hell, but the demon has one more trick up his sleeve.
In a last ditch effort, he pulls forth Astra, promising to set her free if John lets him go. John agrees and is about to reverse the spell when Liv touches her necklace and tells Constantine that’s not really the little girl. Wrong move, buddy. Constantine sends him straight back to hell.
Liv runs down to Ritchie, who’s waiting to take her home. She asks about Astra, and Ritchie tells her she was the daughter of a friend. She was possessed by a demon, and John conjured a more powerful demon to defeat the lesser demon. Instead, however, the stronger demon tore Astra apart right in front of them and took her soul to hell. “John’s dangerous,” Ritchie warns.
On their way home, they drive by one of the places Liv located on the map as being a demon hot spot. She sees a young boy who was brutally killed, and you can tell it has affected her.
Trench coat and arrogance
Constantine is hanging out in a bar when Chas shows up and tells him Liv left town, talking about family she has in California. Chas returns the necklace to John and gives him a map full of scryed locations. There’s demon activity all over the United States.
As Chas leaves, Manny takes over the body of the barkeep, and we learn that Constantine had Ritchie take Liv by the house with the murdered boy in order to scare her off. Manny is upset with John because Liv’s power is worth a lot, but Constantine thinks her life is worth more.
John walks out of the bar and down an alleyway with severed animal heads hanging on the walls. He describes himself as “all trench coat and arrogance,” and we can’t help but agree and love him anyway — or maybe we love him because of it.
John is glad he scared Liv off, saying this path isn’t for everyone. “Who’d be crazy enough to walk it with me?” he asks.
John lights his hands on fire, bringing his arms out to the side. The frame freezes and turns blue, transforming into a sketch. A woman is furiously drawing Constantine walking down that alley, surrounded by other pictures she’s drawn of the same man.
And even though we don’t see her face, we know that’s Zed, who will be an integral part of the story of John Constantine going forward.
