Constantine season 1, episode 4, “A Feast of Friends,” just finished airing, and we got to meet a new member of the Newcastle crew.

‘U Can’t Touch This’

The episode opens with a man named Gary Lester walking through an airport, looking nervous as he goes through U.S. customs. The customs officer doesn’t seem to trust his shift demeanor and pulls him aside.

We learn that Gary was just in Sudan and has an antique bottle in his possession. The officer interrogating him realizes he’s a junkie and cracks open the bottle, thinking there are drugs inside.

Unfortunately, what’s inside is much worse. A swarm of beetles erupts from the bottle and crawl down the officer’s throat.

‘Genie in a Bottle’

Meanwhile, Zed and John are enjoying a nice day in the park. Zed’s senses are heightened and she sees a beautiful shower of coins falling from the sky. When everyone but John freezes, we know Manny is on his way down. “Pennies from heaven,” John says. “Subtle as a serpent.” Manny says the manifestation of Zed’s vision was of her own design, and then ponders her assistance. Will she turn out to be better than Liv? Maybe, but only if John doesn’t scare her off.

When Zed and John head back to Jasper Winter’s house, they notice it’s been broken into. Beetles are scuttling around and Gary is caught in one of the booby traps. We learn he’s one of John’s Newcastle buddies and that he fled when the situation with Astra went sideways.

Gary also explains that when he was in Sudan, he found a man with containment markings carved into his skin. A demon was trapped inside, and Gary felt an intense need to exorcise it. He trapped the demon in a bottle…the same bottle the officer at the airport smashed.

‘Maneater’

Speaking of that officer, he’s now terrorizing the people of the airport, eating everything in sight — including fries still cooking in hot oil. The man then falls over and dies, and the demon escapes from his mouth in the form of a swarm of beetles.

John fiddles with a containment spell with the intention of putting the demon back in a jar. At the same time, he explains to Zed that Gary used to have a lot of money and that’s what John and his friends used him for. But in a way, he used John, too, because he loved hanging around with that crew and playing with the occult. John also tells Zed that Gary was a junkie.

The demon has now switched bodies and is inside a woman who’s doing her grocery shopping. She stumbles around eating everything she can, including part of the face of a guard who tried to stop her.

‘Addicted’

John tells Zed that this is a hunger demon they’re dealing with, and also explains that Gary has always been the way he is now — kind of a tosser. When she tries to say he can change, John just counters, “We are who we are…eventually,” and you get a sense that he’s now talking about himself and his own fate.

When John leaves to hunt the demon down, Gary tells Zed about Newcastle and Astra. We know most of this information already, but it’s intriguing to see it coming from a different perspective. When Zed touches Gary, she gets an intense vision of his drug addiction.

Meanwhile, John tracks the demon down to a meat packing plant and finds that it has already run its course through several human bodies. At the moment, it’s inside a girl, who does a spot-on Exorcist impersonation by doing a backbend and walking toward John. He tries to trap the demon in the bottle, but it’s too strong. The bottle breaks and John manages to escape, but only just.

Back at the house, John realizes that Zed experienced more than just a vision when she saw Gary’s addiction to drugs. “You got all of the lows and none of the highs,” he says. Zed brushes it off and hands him some sketches of the man Gary had exorcised. “I have to see a man about a dog. Or, rather, a shaman about a demon,” John says.

‘Apologize’

John visits a shaman who says he can give him some pretty good drugs in order to share a vision to get the answers he needs. After some eyeball swapping, John sees another shaman who dealt with this demon before. He used a boy to trap the demon forever using a containment spell carved into his skin with a kusa knife. That same boy was the one Gary had released of the demon in Sudan.

Gary wants to help John fight the demon, but Zed is adamant that John can handle it. Gary touches her again in order to escape, and when John gets back, he’s pissed. He thinks Gary went out to get drugs instead. “Are you always one to see the worst in people?” Zed asks. “I see the truth,” Constantine replies.

Turns out John was right. He saves Gary from a group of drug dealers that were beating him up, and in a bar down the road, Gary admits to John that he betrayed Astra. He says he was high during the entire seance, and that when things went bad, he hid instead of staying to fight. John says they all knew he was high and that he doesn’t blame him. Then John invites him to catch the demon together.

‘One Is the Loneliest Number

The boys find a museum housing a kusa knife and decide to break in. Before John can smash the window, though, Manny shows up and asks if John is sure about his plan. That’s when we get our first inkling that John is planning a lot more than what he’s saying. John is always the one to do what he must, and so he and Gary go ahead with stealing the knife.

When they find the hunger demon in a nearby theatre, John tells Gary his plan is to trap the demon in a live body. Gary is at first mad — knowing John intends to use him as the host — and then seems acceptable: “My chance to finally make my life mean something,” he says. “There’s no better way to go out.” John does the ritual and places the demon inside of Gary.

When he brings Gary back to the house, Zed is beside herself with anger. She doesn’t understand how John could do that to his friend, to someone who clearly loved him. It’s only when John snaps back at her that we truly realize this wasn’t an easy task for him. He tells her that if she can’t handle what needs to be done, she should leave, but Zed just agrees to carry Gary down to the cellar of the house. John holds Gary’s hand as he screams and is eaten from the inside out by the demon within.